I saw something that said all the petrified wood on earth was created in a time before the evolution of the fungi that rot wood. I don’t know if this is actually true but if it is, does that mean there will be no new petrified wood ever?
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It is far from all, but there is still some truth to it. There are still a lot of places without microbes that can break down wood. Places like bogs or the bottom of lakes have little oxygen and becomes very acidic so these microbes that have specialised in things like wood can not thrive there. A lot of the petrified wood we find are from after fungi and other microbes could break down wood. However they were not as good at it as modern microbes and there were large areas of land without these microbes.
There is now very little wood getting petrified. Just the last few million years have not seen much petrified wood and currently the rates are down to almost zero. Not only have the microbes become much more efficient at breaking down wood but humans have cut down most of the forests and are harvesting most of the remaining forests. We even drain the bogs and swamps.
On the other hand we now have huge mountains of plastic that we just put into landfills. Just like wood a hundred million years ago there are no microbes that can break down this plastic. Even the few microbes that can break down some plastic is not very good at this. So just like how we can dig up coal made from wood today we might be able to dig up coal made from plastic in a few million years.
What you’re thinking of is coal. Coal beds all across the world were laid down some 400 million years ago when trees were a new thing, so they just weren’t decomposed. So yes, that won’t happen again. It’s still possible for the process to occur in theory, but not on the same scale, because now you need very specific circumstances to avoid the bacteria and fungi.
But coal isn’t petrified wood, it’s just compressed and transformed. It’s still carbon.
Petrified wood is something else. It’s when the organic material is replaced by minerals. It’s a fossil, like dinosaur bones. There’s not much carbon left.
Petrification was never a common process, because it always requires very specific circumstances, but that hasn’t changed, so it can still happen just the same. So there will be new petrified wood.
Petrified wood can still be created, but you are right that since fungi and bacteria have gotten so much better at decomposing wood that the petrification process, and the process that makes coal are much less likely to happen now.
This is what makes fossil fuels a truly finite resource because the replenishment will never catch up to where it was.
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