Are These Giant Prehistoric Trees?

Old trees are a rarity today — accounted for, fenced, and protected as natural monuments. But why do researchers say the forests of the world, even in Siberia, are not older than roughly 200 years?

Where Are the Giants?

Let's approach this question from an unexpected direction — the Earth's poles. Soviet biologists once noted something strange: an unnatural quantity of water locked at the poles as ice and snow, and an unnatural quantity of carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans. Since living cells are composed mainly of water, one line of reasoning holds that the polar caps represent the released water of a vanished biosphere — organisms whose moisture migrated to the poles in a gaseous state and condensed as precipitation.

Follow that calculation and a startling figure emerges: the living biomass of the Earth today may be a tiny fraction of what once grew, crawled, flew, swam, and walked upon it.

But then came a discrepancy. When biologists divided that ancient biomass across the area of the continents, there wasn't enough land to hold it. The stereotype of the 30-meter forest was the obstacle. If the plants of the old world could not fit in breadth, they must have grown upward — and the hypothesis of a forest of unimaginable height was born.

The Fall of the Redwoods

Between roughly 1880 and 1920 the great California Redwoods were felled on an industrial scale. Consider the proportions preserved in the old logging photographs: the diameter of a stump roughly three times the height of a lumberjack. That implies trees on the order of 100 meters — forests three times taller than anything we call a forest today. These are the fabled woods described in folk tales, irretrievably lost.

And if you think the forests were cut merely for timber, consider another possibility: old trees function as information storage — living databases. Everything that happens on the planet is recorded in their rings and fibers. A sensitive person entering an ancient forest could, by touching a trunk, access impressions of the deep past. A handful of giants, like General Sherman, were deliberately left standing — fenced, and renamed a "reserve."

The Petrified Question

Many myths and legends tell of the transformation of people, animals, and plants into stone. Paleontologists dig up fossils across the globe — petrified frogs, turtles, clover, entire tree trunks. Which raises a child's question worth a million dollars:

How can a frog become petrified, instead of simply rotting, as any organic body should?

Wikipedia offers that fossilization occurs underground when a body is buried under sediment and deprived of oxygen. But the scale and perfection of the world's petrified remains suggest something is not being told.

The Silicon Era

The California Redwoods, magnificent as they are, are carbon-based — they cut and saw with ordinary tools, and their growth rings mark the change of seasons. They belong to our era. But where are the remains of the silicon trees of the elder world?

They have been found — in Arizona.

At Petrified Forest National Park, ancient trees lie scattered across the desert — and they have not turned to gray stone. They have turned into semi-precious stone: agate, jasper, amethyst hues running through perfect annual rings.

Summing Up

• Our present forests are young, rarely exceeding 30 meters.
• The last carbon giants survive as the American Redwoods.
• Fossils of a silicon era exist — including entire trees of gemstone.

Whether you read this as suppressed history or as a magnificent thought experiment, the stones themselves remain — lying in the Arizona desert, ringed like trees, glittering like jewels, and asking to be explained.