PART 2

For Earth’s current atmospheric pressure and gravity, that limit is somewhere around 400 to 450 ft. Anything taller would require a fundamentally different biological system or a fundamentally different environment. But here’s where the theory gets creative. Believers point out that Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t always been the same. During the Carboniferous period roughly 300 million years ago, oxygen levels were as high as 35% compared to 21% today.

 This allowed insects to grow to enormous sizes. Dragonflies with twoft wingspans millipedes the size of cars. If higher oxygen levels allowed arthropods to grow larger, why couldn’t they allow trees to grow taller? The problem with this argument is that it misunderstands how oxygen levels affect organism size. For arthropods, higher oxygen is critical because they don’t have lungs.

 They breathe through a network of tubes called trachea that deliver oxygen directly to their tissues. The efficiency of this system is limited by the diffusion rate of oxygen through the tubes. Higher atmospheric oxygen means oxygen can diffuse deeper into the body, allowing for larger body sizes. But this effect has hard limits.

 Even at 35% oxygen, you’re not going to get a millipede the size of a bus. For trees, the limiting factor isn’t oxygen at all. It’s water. Trees don’t actively pump water up their trunks. They rely on passive capillary action and transpiration. The evaporation of water from the leaves creates negative pressure that pulls more water up from the roots.

 This system works beautifully up to a certain height, but physics puts a hard cap on it. At sea level, with current atmospheric pressure, you can’t lift a column of water higher than about 400 ft through capillary action alone. The weight of the water column becomes too great and the system fails. Now, believers in the tree theory argue that if atmospheric pressure was higher in the past, the water column could be taller, and they’re technically correct.

Higher atmospheric pressure would increase the efficiency of capillary action. But the effect is small. You’d need atmospheric pressure significantly higher than what we see today, maybe twice as high to support a mile tall tree. And there’s no evidence in the geological record for atmospheric pressures that high in the time frame we’re talking about.

 They also point to theories about Earth’s gravity. Some fringe models suggest that Earth’s mass has increased over time due to cosmic dust accumulation or expansion of the planet’s core. If gravity was lower in the past, then the height limit for trees would have been much higher. A tree growing under half of Earth’s current gravity could theoretically reach twice the height before hitting the water transport limit.

 But this is where the theory runs into serious problems. The expanding Earth hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked. GPS measurements show that Earth’s radius is not increasing. tidal patterns, orbital mechanics, and the behavior of the moon all constrain Earth’s mass to within very narrow bounds that haven’t changed significantly in billions of years.

 If Earth’s gravity was dramatically different just a few million years ago, we’d see evidence of it everywhere. Fossil bones would have different structural properties. Impact craters would have different shapes. The moon’s orbit would be measurably different. None of these things are observed. What we do observe is a fossil record that’s remarkably consistent with current gravitational and atmospheric conditions.

 The largest land animals ever, the sorapod dinosaurs, push the limits of what’s biologically possible under Earth’s current gravity. Their bones show adaptations to support immense weight, air sacks to lighten their bodies, massive leg bones with internal structures optimized for compression loading. And even with all these adaptations, the larger soraods were probably right at the edge of what’s physically possible.

 They didn’t exceed it because they couldn’t. The same constraints apply to trees. The tallest trees that ever existed were probably not much taller than the tallest trees alive today. The fossil record supports this. We found fossilized trees from the Carboniferous period. And while they were impressive, they weren’t miles tall.

 The tallest were maybe 150 to 200 ft, which is well within the range of modern conifers and eucalyptus trees. So if the biology doesn’t support mile tall trees and the physics doesn’t support mile tall trees and the fossil record doesn’t show evidence of mile tall trees, what are we left with? We’re left with mountains that look like they could be stumps if you ignore everything we know about how mountains form and how trees grow.

Mainstream science rejects both of these ideas. The oxygen levels during the Carboniferous were higher, but not high enough to support multi-mile tall trees. And there’s no credible evidence that Earth’s gravity has changed significantly in the last few hundred million years. The fossil record shows a consistent relationship between organism size and environmental conditions.

 And nothing suggests the kind of radical gigantism required for mile tall trees. But the tree theory believers aren’t done. They point to myths and legends from cultures around the world that describe massive trees connecting earth to the heavens. The Norse haddrasil, the world tree.

 Hindu cosmology describes a cosmic tree that supports the universe. Then Native American legends speak of a great tree that was cut down by gods or giants. These stories exist on every continent in cultures that had no contact with each other. Coincidence or cultural memory of something that actually existed. Anthropologists would say these are archetypal myths.

 The tree is a universal symbol of life, growth, and connection between earth and sky. It makes sense that cultures would independently develop stories about cosmic trees. It doesn’t mean those trees actually existed. It means the human brain is wired to think in symbols and metaphors. And the tree is one of the most powerful metaphors we have.

 But the believers push back. They point out that many of these myths aren’t vague. They’re specific. They describe the trees being cut down, the stumps left behind, a world radically different before the trees fell. and they ask, “If these are just myths, why are they so consistent across unconnected cultures?” Now, let’s address the elephant in the room.

 If these mountains are stumps, where are the tools that cut them down? Where are the remains of the trunks and branches? Where is the evidence of a civilization or force capable of felling trees that size? The tree theory has an answer for this, and it’s where the theory splits into different camps. One camp says the trees were brought down by a natural cataclysm, a meteor impact, a massive solar flare, a shift in Earth’s magnetic field, something that caused catastrophic environmental collapse killed the trees and erased most of the evidence.

Over millions of years, the trunks and branches decomposed or were buried, leaving only the stumps that were large enough and dense enough to petrify and survive. Another camp says the trees were cut down intentionally. By whom? This is where it gets wild. Some say an advanced prehuman civilization.

 Some say extraterrestrials. Some say giants, pointing to myths and legends about giant beings that once walked the earth. The stumps, they argue, are the evidence. The fact that the tops are flat isn’t erosion. It’s proof of deliberate cutting. Mainstream geology has a much simpler explanation. These formations aren’t stumps.

 They’re the natural result of well understood geological processes. Volcanic intrusions, erosion, tectonic uplift. The patterns we see, hexagonal columns, flat tops, vertical cliffs, all of these have documented explanations that don’t require rewriting the laws of physics or biology. But here’s the thing. Mainstream geology has been wrong before.

 Continental drift was considered fringe pseudocience until the 1960s when plate tectonics became the accepted model. Meteorite impacts were dismissed as impossible until the chicksub crater was discovered and confirmed as the cause of the dinosaur extinction. Science progresses by questioning assumptions and following evidence even when that evidence challenges the consensus.

 So what’s the evidence here? E could the tree theory believers point to the formations themselves, the symmetry, the scale, the mineral composition that they claim doesn’t match the volcanic model as cleanly as geologists say it does. They point to the myths and legends. They point to the biological plausibility under different atmospheric and gravitational conditions.

 They point to the fact that science doesn’t have perfect answers for everything. And maybe this is one of those gaps where the consensus is wrong. But here’s the problem. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the evidence for ancient mile tall trees isn’t extraordinary. It’s speculative. It relies on reinterpreting data through a lens that requires assuming multiple unproven things, higher oxygen levels, lower gravity, unknown petrification processes, advanced civilizations, or cataclysmic events that left no other trace. That’s

a lot of assumptions. And when you stack assumptions like that, the burden of proof gets heavier with each one. You’re not just asking people to believe one thing. You’re asking them to believe an entire alternate history of Earth that contradicts multiple fields of established science. Geology, biology, physics, chemistry, all of them would need to be revised to make this theory work.

 That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it does mean the evidence needs to be ironclad. And right now, it’s not. The formations that look like stumps can be explained by conventional geology. The myths and legends can be explained by universal human symbolism. The biological challenges can’t be overcome without invoking environmental conditions we have no evidence for.

 But let’s entertain the theory for a moment. Let’s say it’s true. Let’s say Earth once had forests of mile tall trees. What would that world have looked like? The canopy would have been in the stratosphere. Weather patterns would have been completely different. Rainfall would have been trapped in the upper layers of the forest, creating rivers that flowed through the branches before ever reaching the ground.

 The ground level would have been in perpetual twilight, lit only by filtered light from miles above. Ecosystems would have evolved around these trees. Birds, insects, mammals, all adapted to life at different altitudes within the forest. The trunks themselves would have been entire ecosystems with species that lived their entire lives moving up and down the bark, never touching the ground or the canopy.

 The roots would have been networks the size of cities, anchoring the trees and pulling nutrients from deep within the earth’s crust. Think about what it would mean to live in a world like that. The lower levels of the forest would be a dark, humid environment where decomposition happens slowly and fungi dominate.

 The middle levels would be where most of the animal life concentrated, where there’s enough light for understory plants, but still protection from the harsh conditions at the canopy. And the upper levels, the canopy itself, would be a world of constant wind, intense sunlight, and temperature extremes species would have stratified by altitude.

 You’d have ground dwelling creatures adapted to low light and high humidity. Mid-level creatures that could climb but rarely ventured to the extremes and canopy specialists that never descended, living their entire lives in the sunlight miles above the forest floor. The evolutionary pressures in each zone would be completely different, creating biodiversity on a scale we can barely imagine.

 And the trees themselves, if they were biological organisms and not just geological formations, would have needed adaptations we don’t see in any living tree. Their trunks would need to be incredibly strong to support their own weight. They’d need vascular systems capable of moving water and nutrients over vertical distances of miles.

 They’d need root systems that could anchor against wind strong enough to topple structures that tall. They’d need bark thick enough to protect against temperature fluctuations between ground level and the stratosphere. Some believers point to siliconbased biology as a solution. They argue that these weren’t carbon-based trees like we have today, but siliconebased organisms that could incorporate minerals directly into their structure as they grew, making them stronger and more resistant to the physical stresses of extreme

height. This would explain why they petrified so completely. They were already partially mineralized when they were alive. But siliconbased life is purely hypothetical. We’ve never found any evidence of it on Earth or anywhere else. Silicon can form some of the same types of bonds as carbon, but it doesn’t have the same versatility.

 Silicon silicon bonds are weaker than carbonarbon bonds, and silicon doesn’t form stable long chains the way carbon does. Every model of silicumbbased biochemistry runs into fundamental problems that make it unlikely to work in practice. And if something brought that forest down, the ecological collapse would have been total.

 The sudden exposure to direct sunlight, the loss of the canopy rainfall system, the decomposition of billions of tons of organic material releasing carbon and methane into the atmosphere. It would have been an extinction event on a scale that makes the dinosaur extinction look small by comparison. You’d expect to see a boundary layer in the geological record.

 A distinct line where suddenly everything changes. Below the line, evidence of the old ecosystem, above the line, evidence of the new. We see exactly this kind of boundary at the end of the Cretaceous period, the KT boundary, where a thin layer of aridiumrich clay marks the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. If mile tall trees collapsed all at once, there should be a similar boundary layer showing massive carbon deposits, sudden changes in sedimentation patterns, and evidence of catastrophic ecological disruption. But we don’t see

that. The geological record from the periods when these formations were created shows normal gradual changes, slow shifts in climate, predictable patterns of erosion and deposition, no sudden catastrophic boundaries that would indicate the collapse of a global forest system. This is the central problem with the theory.

 It requires rewriting not just one thing but everything. And when a theory requires that much revision of established knowledge, the evidence needs to be overwhelmingly convincing. So far, it’s not. But that doesn’t stop people from believing it. Because there’s something deeply appealing about the idea of a lost world.

 A world that was bigger, stranger, more magnificent than anything we can imagine today. A world where the landscape itself was alive in ways we can barely comprehend. And maybe that’s what this theory is really about. Not geology or biology or physics, but a longing for mystery in a world that feels increasingly explained and mapped and understood.

Because here’s the truth. We do live on a planet that was once radically different. The Carboniferous forests were alien. Oxygen levels were higher. Insects were massive. The continents were arranged differently. The climate was warmer. And yes, there were trees larger than anything alive today. Not miles tall, but large enough that their fossilized remains still astonish.

 And maybe that’s enough. Maybe we don’t need mile tall trees to feel wonder at the Earth’s history. Maybe the actual story, the real story of how this planet evolved and changed and created the world we see today is strange enough and beautiful enough without needing to invent ancient forests that reach the stars.

 But if you still believe that Devil’s Tower is a stump, if you look at Mount Rimer and see a sword off trunk, if you think there’s something geologists are missing, then ask yourself this. What evidence would convince you otherwise? What would it take for you to accept the conventional explanation? Because if the answer is nothing, if no amount of geological data or biological analysis could change your mind, then you’re not investigating a theory. You’re holding on to a belief.

And beliefs don’t need evidence. They just need to feel true. So where does that leave us? With mountains that look like stumps? With myths that describe cosmic trees? With a theory that’s compelling in its imagination but lacking hard evidence. And with a reminder that the world is full of mysteries, even if this particular mystery has a more mundane explanation.

If you made it this far, you’re the kind of person who questions things, who wants to dig deeper, who isn’t satisfied with surface answers. Subscribe if you want more deep dives into theories that challenge what we think we know. The world is stranger than we imagine.