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.
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