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 The Petrified Forests - Province of Santa Cruz - Argentina

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NATURAL MONUMENT OF ARGENTINA

It was created with the purpose of protecting and conserving one of the biggest petrified araucaria forests existent in the world, next to a small sample of typical landscapes of the actual Patagonian steppe . Declared Natural Monument in the year 1954 by National Ordinance , it possesses an area of 15.000 hectares located in the northeast of the Province of Santa Cruz , south of Argentina .

GENERAL DESCRIPTION: The aspect of the Natural Monument is an inhospitable landscape. The vegetation, typical of the Patagonian steppe , hardly covers the soil. In a small sector, neighboring the Sectional of the Forester , is found the biggest concentration of petrified trunks, some of which measure up to 35 meters long and 3 meters of diameter. This deposit , the biggest in Argentina , was formed 150 million years ago, during a period in which the volcanic action buried under a dense layer of ashes the extensive forests of coniferous trees that covered the Patagonia , where on the contrary of the actual weather conditions reigned a warm and humid climate. Along the millennia , the minerals gradually replaced the organic matter that maintained their external aspect . This process is known as " petrification " .Its good to point out that this grouping of fossilized trees are denominated " forest " because, on the contrary to what happened with other similar petrified forests situated in different parts of the world that were dragged by rivers and the glaciers, the petrified trunks of the Province of Santa Cruz , Argentina remained conserved in their original places , this fact is considered almost a single phenomenon in the world. The area of the petrified forest is so poor in vegetation that it acquires the characteristics of a deserted region scarcely covered , only bushes of up to three meters high grow in the most humid ravines . In the steppe the scarce humidity and the strong winds determine the existence of a flora adapted to these climatic conditions.

ARCHEOLOGICAL / PALEONTOLOGICAL LOCATIONS : It is appropriate to underline that the Petrified Forests Natural Monument is almost the only one in the world that conserves and protects forests of Coniferous, mainly fossilized Araucarias, dating more than 150 million years of antiquity. At the end of the Jurassic an intense volcanic activity took place, coincident with the formation of the Andes range . The whole south of the Patagonia was then occupied by an exuberant vegetation and by dense forests formed by gigantic trees. This atmosphere proliferated thanks to the warm and humid climate that reigned in that part of the continent.

The Araucarias forest succumbed buried by successive rains of volcanic ash and violent winds. As much the trees as other alive organisms were suddenly covered by the ashes, allowing their preservation along several millennia . Later the rain water, loaded with silicon salts when crossing the ashes , penetrated the vegetable tissue and substituted them . This way, the organic matter was replaced by mineral inorganic matter, process that is known as mineralization or petrification. The most outstanding in this place, is that the trees lie in the same place where all their lives lapsed, its even possible to observe their roots; this fact implied the denomination of "petrified forest". The age of some of these trees has been calculated around 1000 years until the process of petrifying. From the petrification until our times, 150 million years elapsed.