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I assume there are climate conditions that cause trees to be preserved, since there are fossilized trees, however, it may be extremely rare to find a tree in a nascent state of fossilization.

Is it possible to easily find trees that have been preserved for 200-300 years? By a tree, I actually just mean a preserved stump.

Imprisoned Rhesus
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  • Full trees will be hard to find, but a search for "petrified forest" might help you out. – skymningen Nov 10 '16 at 09:15
  • Are you looking specifically for those in the wild? I'm sure there are museums and natural history collections that have specimens. There aren't going to be petrified/fossilized trees only a few hundred years old. Those processes take far longer. – kmm Nov 10 '16 at 14:08
  • swamps and bogs are a good place, anywhere the log will be perpetually submerged in oxygen poor water. – John Apr 18 '20 at 03:46

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Yes, this occurs fairly regularly in Alaska and British Columbia (and probably other places with low-elevation glaciers that interact with forested zones) where climactic oscillations have led to rapid advance and recession of glacial extent.

In Glacier Bay, Alaska, for instance, there are a number of interglacial stumps (you can see a few sites marked on this map). These stumps represent a forest that was established in the ice-free interim period between the Last Glacial Maximum (10,000-15,000 ya) and the "Little Ice-Age" (~500 ya). Thus, these trees have been preserved under the ice for a few hundred years and have only been uncovered recently (<100 ya). Many of the glaciers in Southeast Alaska are receding, so new stumps are being exposed every day.

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