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Petrified Wood In Days, Not Millions Of Years
prostoalex writes "Any petrified wood enthusiast would tell you that a quality product takes millions of years to mature, following Mother Nature's course, which, of course, is very frustrating for anyone experimenting. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory now managed to get the process in few days, USA Today says. The scientific achievement will be beneficial for "separating industrial chemicals, filtering pollutants and soaking up contamination"."
There is a small problem with your question. Actually you cannot carbon date petrified wood as it is not wood, rather it is stone. The organic material of the wood has been slowly replaced by minerals which creates a stone with the appearance of wood. C-14 dating itself only works for organic remains up to around 60,000 years, after that, the amount of C-14 is too small to give an accurate measurement of the age of the material. As petrified wood is usually aged in the millions of years, then you would not be able to date it using C-14 anyway. So if they have replicated the natural methed, but found a way to increase the speed at which it has occured, then there would be no C-14 to measure.