wrote:
In article .com,
Farooq W wrote:

Dan wrote:

Soil and Dirt particles?! Is that a scientific analysis? Contaminated?
Do you see many pure celulose trees?

Ideally, you should get CO2 and H2O, but nothing's ideal. You don't get
enough Oxygen to get such efficient burning, so, you get a lot of
charcoal (near pure carbon), as well as lots of other stuff like
nitrates and salts that are absorbed from the soil.

We know this because ash used to be the main source of nitrates

I strongly doubt that. Nitrates would not survive high temperatues (of
burning wood) especially in the presence of organic matter. Wood ash is
indeed rich in what we call as
pot-ash and hence the name potassium.


Yeah. The potassium nitrate for gunpowder came from under old
manure piles. Potash was used for making soap, historically, since
wood ash was more accessible than lye before industrial chmistry.


An analysis of Oak/Beech/Bracken tree ash was published Archaeometry
Volume 47 Page 781 - November 2005. The results for Oak tree ash:
%
SiO2- 14.62
TiO2 - 0.06
Al2O3 - 0.76
Fe2O3- 0.65
MnO 6.35
MgO 6.87
CaO 31.06
Na2O 0.40
K2O 18.80
P2O5 12.87
SO3 1.09


This much is reasonable -- I'd expect high K and Ca, but the P and Si
are a bit of a surprise. I suspect the Si came from the bracken, since
some ferns (and notably the non-fern horsetail (Equisetum) concentrate
silica, or perhaps it's from dirt. Maybe that explains the high P, too.
While wood ash is an excellent source of K, it usually regarded as only
a moderate source of P, for fertilizer. Non-woody material is higher
in P, Mg and other elements important to plant nutrition.

Not sure what Archaeometry is, but if it's analysis of ancient materials,
the high silica may be due to infiltration from the soil, an early stage
in fossilization. If these numbers come from the residue from an ancient
forest fire, it would explain the higher levels of plant nutrients, since
a lot of live green material would have been included.


Co 15.5
Ni 75.7
Cu 178.5
Zn 2112.4
Ge 3.0
As 1.9
Se 1.3
Br 3.4
Rb 107.9
Sr 533.6
Y 3.0
Zr 41.6
Nb 1.6
Mo 6.5
Ag 1.0
Sn 7.5
Ba 3560.3
Pb 46.1
Th 0.4
U 4.7


I suspect these are in ppt or more likely ppm, rather than %, or we'd be
giving up mining in favor of forestry. The amounts of these trace
elements probably vary a lot with the composition of the soil in which
the plants grew.

As for Mr. Plutonium, I can say from personal experience that yes, bark
gives more ash than wood, because it contains more minerals than wood.
Apparently trees don't pull as much good stuff out of bark cells as they
die as they do from the cells that become wood. Note also that hardwood
generally produces far more ash than softwood, at least for the North
American temperate species I'm familiar with. "Tree" is a descriptive
term, unrelated to phylogeny. Trees have evolved many times from different
lineages, and conifer trees are unrelated to angiosperm trees.


I am surprized at all of the uranium, thorium and lead. A likely
inference that we intake uranium, thorium and lead in various plant
tissue we eat. I did not see mercury on that list and since coal power
stations are notorious for emitting mercury into the air, I wonder how
much mercury is in bark of trees.

But I know some tree species evolved into a fire resistant bark in order
to live in fire prone regions, so I wonder what chemical it is that
gives them the best fire resistance. Is it potassium and salts?

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies