Travel Back To The Past To Widen Your Perspective


Travel to Thiruvakkarai To Widen Your Perspective

(How would you like to travel to a place that will widen your perspective by 20 million years?!
Take a break, pack a camera, and travel to Thiruvakkarai. A drive down ECR with a lunch stop-over at Pondicherry is the best that you can do on a Sunday.)

Traveling to new places and seeing new things widen one’s perspective. This is an adage that’s surely worn-out and thin from excess usage. The truth is that only some places and some things do and some places and some things don’t. And in this particular place and the particular thing the adage proves its truth, and proves it by a very wide margin- and by the Geological Survey of India’s estimate, by no less than 20 million years!!
The place I am talking about is Thiruvakkarai and the phenomenon I am talking about is the fossil trees of Thiruvakkarai.













Thiruvakkarai is a quaint little village of South Arcot District. It lies about 20 to 25 kms south west of Pondicherry, between Pondicherry and Tindivanam(?)
And in one remote corner of this quaint village lie the 20 million years old ‘fossil-trees’. They may have been trees 20 million years ago, but what one sees now are rock formations that somehow very oddly look like trees. It is hard to believe that these are actually trees that have fossilized and turned into rock ie. silica. It has supposedly taken 20 million years for these tree trunks to fossilize and turn into rock. The Geological Survey of India has classified them as the ‘Cuddalore Series’ of fossil trees.

Fossilization of trees is supposed to happen by a process of rapid sedimentation. This rapid sedimentation around and over the tree petrifies it before it can decay, turning it into rock, i.e. silica. This sedimentation can happen due to heavy and fast wind that deposits sand and buries the trees or volcanic eruption or swamp deposition. On enquiry with the GSI office, Chennai, mammoth floods that happened about 20 million years ago submerged these trees under sand, and this lead to the sedimentation of the trees into the fossils that we see today.














Travel does widen one’s perspective! But not all of them would widen the perspective by 20 million years. So take a break, travel to Thiruvakkarai and widen your perspective of nature and of our earth by 20 million years.

(For more photos on fossilized trees found around the world visit http://www.aegean.gr/petrified_forest/Frames/HTML/English/photos.htm )

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