I remember another case of moving rocks, I think in the southwest somewhere. People found strange mud trails behind large rocks and of course the first thought was “UFOs.” At least until someone figured out the combination of wind, rain and mud that was moving the rocks.
So what’s up with these? Same source as crop circles, i.e. human?:dubious:
Given the size of the boulders, I can’t think of any explanation other than human involvement. AThey couldn’t have grown there with the tree, but not for the reason given. Trees grow at the tips of branches, therefore nothing can be carried upwards by a growing tree. And no animal is capable of carrying rocks that large up into a tree.
Is it possible it grew from the ground up? Look at the branch (of the three cradling branches) pointing at us - it looks like it grew funnily - shaped by the boulder.
The very young tree sent branches out three different ways from underneath a kinda big rock (but not as big as the photo makes it look - 1 foot thick, 200 pounds).
From then, the boulder just got carried up as it grew.
No, this isn’t possible. I’ll expand a bit on my earlier post. Trees and other plants grow upwards from the tips of branches and shoots. In the case of trees, they also grow outwards from a growth layer just below the bark. Since only cells at the tips or branches are dividing, any given point on the tree will remain at the same height above the ground for the rest of the tree’s life. Therefore, even if a tree did sprout beneath a rock, it would never be carried upwards from the ground. This only happens in cartoons.
From personal experience I don’t think this is correct.
There is a fir tree directly opposite my parents’ house, where I grew up. I moved out years ago, but I still visit. Over the last 35 years I have seen the tree grow taller. When I was 6 the branches of the tree resembled (in my imagination) a dog’s head. There were two branches 40 feet up and 5 feet apart that made the dog’s nose. Now, those branches are 50 feet up and 10 feet apart. The shape of the tree has changed. I can still see the same branches, but the proportions are different.
Then you’re remembering wrong. Drive a nail into a young tree at any location you desire, or hanf an ornament from a branch and measure the distance to the ground, then measure again in five or ten years. If you allow for soil erosion, there won’t be any difference. I’ll see if I can find a cite, but this is proving to be a difficult thing to Google.
Besides, a 400 lbs rock is too heavy for the growing tip of a tree to push up, even for trees that initate branching right under the growth tips of the leader, like Araucaria araucana.
The only trees that have a continually changing “branch” height, are palms, but of course the “branches” are leaves. True branching palms, like Hyphaene thebaica branch like other trees, but as with other trees the branches are always the same height they started at.
I have less and less repsect for these extraterrestrials every day; they have the technology to cross the galaxy and all they do when they get here is mutilate cattle, ruin crops, play stupid pranks with rocks and anally probe semi-literate idiots.
Why when the tree was younger? - as others have already said, the forked crown of the tree doesn’t get any higher up with age.
The most likely explanation (at least in my opinion) is human tomfoolery, and most likely perpetrated by the person who first ‘discovered’ the phenomenon.
Following up on this branch of the OP, this is the “Racetrack Playa” in Death Valley. The most commonly accepted explanation is that the occasional rains turn the perfectly flat dry lakebed that the boulders sit on into a very slick surface, and the wind blows the rocks around. Not universally accepted, though, although everybody agrees it’s a natural, as opposed to manmade, phenomenon (for one thing, it’s not a very accessible location):
