These are mountains and rock formations, not tree stumps
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on December 23, 2021 at 16:08
- 3 min read
- By Mary KULUNDU, AFP Kenya
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On December 13, a Facebook post (archived here) shared four images of “stumps” with the caption: “Thousands of years ago there were giant trees of Silicon whose remains are found in different parts of the planet. Looking at the trunk of these large petrified trees, we can imagine how large these mother trees were.”
The post was shared more than 700 times before it was deleted.
The same posts were shared on Facebook here, here, here and here.
We conducted a reverse image search on each picture and located them in different parts of the world.
The claim that these photos show tree stumps is false.
Mountains, not trees
The first aerial image of what appears to be a brown stump with roots leading into the ground is in fact a guyot, an underwater mountain in Ethiopia’s Afar depression. The picture is available on the stock photo site, Alamy.
“Guyot. Aerial photograph of a guyot in the Afar Depression, Ethiopia, Africa. The Awash River is seen across top left. Guyots are underwater volcanoes that have flat tops due to wave erosion. The presence of a guyot in the Afar Depression shows that the area was once beneath the Red Sea,” reads the picture’s description.
The second and fourth images – displaying side and aerial views respectively – show a flat-topped mountain in Venezuela called Cerro Autana (see here and here). According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), it is made of quartz and sandstone.
In 1978, Cerro Autana was declared a natural monument in Venezuela.
The final image is an aerial view of a rock formation located in the US state of Wyoming named Devils Tower, which was declared the first-ever US National Monument in 1906.
The US National Park Service explains the geological origins of this natural monument on its web page for Devils Tower, stating that it is composed of intrusive igneous rock that is volcanic in origin.
“Geologists agree that Devils Tower began as magma, or molten rock buried beneath the Earth’s surface. What they cannot agree upon are the processes by which the magma cooled to form the Tower, or its relationship to the surrounding geology of the area,” reads an article on the NPS website.
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