Petrified wood - Formosahut forum

I found what I believe is a small piece of petrified wood today on the Donghe beach, near where they were recently doing construction of some sort. (What the heck were they doing?) I assume this was unearthed during the construction/destruction on the beach.

According to the information on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_wood), the colors suggest that the piece is largely made up of iron. Indeed it looks like it has specks of rust on it. It smells metallic, with a hint of sulfur.

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nice find! wonder what kind of wood it is/was? ji mu? wood have to pretty hard to survive.

It's impossible to tell what kind of wood it is by my untrained eye, particularly as it's not wood at all. It's entirely mineral. Fascinating stuff but not particularly pretty or valuable. I'm guessing it's not valuable, but it may be geologically important. I went back the next morning and found four more pieces in the same general area. It's pretty clear that it was dredged up by the construction. One one of them I found had some extremely fine silt in a crevice, and it looked exactly like volcanic ash I encountered while planting trees in the Mt. St. Helens area after its eruption, so I'm wondering if it could be volcanic ash. When did the last volcano erupt on Taiwan anyway?

Regardless, they are kind of cool in a geeky way. Definitely keepers.