Post: #1

What are the largest trees you know of or had the opportunity to be around? Were there bigger trees in the past? How big were they? This video may shock you:

Post: #2

20 minutes in and the information in this is refuted by the example of the city of Pompeii which was essentially fossilized by a volcano. This entire theory is about as quacky as the theory that Finland doesn't exist. I'll keep watching, but odds are this is psuedoscience at best.

Post: #3

"There weren't any stones 7500 years ago"

"Creating this marble sculpture would be impossible without CNC machines"

No.

Why do people fall for this quackery. Play soft music and tell the viewer to "open their mind" is all it seems to take.

She's saying mountains in Tibet, Grand Canyon etc look they way they do because they have been excavated.

This is just an offshoot of the recent re-emergence of the diabolically retarded flat earth stuff.

Post: #4

I couldn't get past the 45 minute mark. Usually conspiracy and alternate reality theories are fascinating, but this is more than likely one of the most poorly done ones I've seen.

I couldn't stop laughing when the narrator kept saying "Slavic Aryans" .


Anyways. I give it a 2/10.

Definitely atleast creative.

Post: #5

Dear lord, this is totally incoherent. I can barely stand it not because they're basically making shit up with all the scientific knowledge of a fourth grader, but because they just jump from one idea to the next with no attempt to connect them.

Edit - Alright, I had to quit at 14:22. Since I'm a fricking geologist it's just too silly to endure.

Post: #6

Good work, OP.

You've done the unthinkable and brought the entire forum together into total agreement on an issue.

Well done.

Post: #7

Not even worth of putting on my tin hat.

2/10 babble

Post: #8

The sheer chutzpah of this insane video is evident in the fact that it begins with the claim that "There are no forests on Earth" while presenting a photo of a... *drumroll* forest.

Fuck, I could walk 15 minutes and get to a forest right now. 1/10, would not share.

Post: #9

5 minutes of this was all I could endure.

5 minutes of:

You think I'm crazy, but by the end of this video you might not think I'm crazy after all.
Irrelevant fact about the fallibility of human perception.
Incorrect conjecture, "but we'll get back to the details on that later."

All strung around what, the definition of the word "forest?" The fuck if I'm going to suffer the full dose just to find out.

I seriously considered making a damn google account just to downvote it.

Post: #10

(08-18-2016 02:56 AM)weambulance Wrote:  Edit - Alright, I had to quit at 14:22. Since I'm a fricking geologist it's just too silly to endure.

I'm not a geologist so maybe you can shed some light on this. One of the main premise used throughout the video was how hexagonal formations were a natural structure found in trees and plant life. I never knew that fact occurred in mountains and possibly volcanoes. Under what conditions, or how does this occur in nature particularly a mesa or what is known as a "tabletop mountain"? If it's too much to explain here you can provide a good reference here I'll make sure to take a look at it.

Post: #11

(08-18-2016 08:26 AM)Jackreacher Wrote:  

(08-18-2016 02:56 AM)weambulance Wrote:  Edit - Alright, I had to quit at 14:22. Since I'm a fricking geologist it's just too silly to endure.

I'm not a geologist so maybe you can shed some light on this. One of the main premise used throughout the video was how hexagonal formations were a natural structure found in trees and plant life. I never knew that fact occurred in mountains and possibly volcanoes. Under what conditions, or how does this occur in nature particularly a mesa or what is known as a "tabletop mountain"? If it's too much to explain here you can provide a good reference here I'll make sure to take a look at it.

Can you point me to a specific spot in the video to start watching, or tell me a little more about what specific claims they're making?

I can think of three common geologic scenarios that involve polygon structures immediately: drying mud, basalt columns, and ice wedges. They're not perfectly understood but the simple explanation is a crack forms at the surface of the material because the material is contracting in a constrained manner--it has to cover the same surface area it did before, but it has gotten physically smaller, and can't contract as one big unit, so it cracks--and the cracks propagate down through the material as the rest of the mass contracts, leaving three dimensional polygonal units.

Why the material cracks depends on the material in question, but mud for example is dehydrating in the sun, so it is simply shrinking as water leaves. Basalt magma is just cooling and shrinking due to thermal contraction; the faster it cools, the smaller the columns, and vice versa.

Ice wedge polygons are the least well understood but the basic theory is the ground permafrost material has tiny cracks due to rapid cooling in winter, and those cracks fill with water, which turns to ice, and each year the cycle repeats until you end up with thick, meters-long ice wedges and what looks like discrete polygons of land between them.

I should point out that these are all polygon-ish structures that humans see as polygons because we're wired for pattern recognition. They're not polygons in the mathematical sense, except by accident.

I don't know of any macrostructures that are commonly polygonal. Can't think of any mechanism why they would be other than chance, and if they formed that way they would rapidly erode to not be polygonal anymore anyway.

Post: #12

At around 19:25 it starts talking about the hexagonal structures of interlocking columns found on many plants, trees as well as geological formations(mountains, plateau's, mesa mountains, etc). I did some checking a few days ago to see if this occurs only with basalt rock as basalt is igneous(rock derived from lava) and found that there are the same structures found elsewhere around the world made of sandstone(non igneous stone).



I've never seen a volcano or any information of an eruption that looks like this. It looks like a stone tree stump. As the video progresses it starts presenting images of other large tabletop mountains(mesa's) and I can't help but wonder how did mountains end up so flat? Maybe you can help clarify some of it, I'm no expert.

Post: #13

Apparently columnar jointing in sandstone can happen, that's interesting.

To preface, this is a Geology 101 level explanation. I may simplify or omit some details that are not important to the discussion.

One point I should make to begin with is the earth is a really, really huge system. We don't often think of it that way, given how easy it is to travel, but it's really an enormous place, especially once you start including the subsurface volume even a few miles deep. The reason I bring that up is because the earth is so huge, sometimes we see really strange outliers that have a very low probability of occurring in nature. For example, people have found naturally occurring stainless steel in sufficient quantity to try to mine it. There are enormous geode caves around the world. Things lined up just so for those structures to form. One in a million odds isn't a handicap if you're going to have billions of chances.

That's an important thing to understand because anybody can cherry pick some outliers and say they are evidence to support their hypothesis that the world is different than we believe. Most buttes/mesas do not look anything like a tree stump, but apparently at least one does.

As to that specific butte, Devils Tower, it's a shallow igneous intrusion of some kind. What you're seeing is the cooled remains of a column of magma that cut through the overlying sedimentary rocks a long damn time ago. Since igneous rocks are generally much more resistant to erosion than sedimentary rocks, the sedimentary rocks were eroded and left that cool structure behind. Maybe it was a volcano, maybe it didn't quite make it to the surface, maybe it was just a lava flow or terminated in a sill (a flat subsurface igneous structure) that has since eroded away. Pretty neat, but nothing suspicious about it.

Note, not all igneous rocks are volcanic. All kids learn that magma is underground and lava is above ground, but if the magma never reaches the surface and solidifies you end up with intrusive igneous rocks. If lava flows out and cools, you have extrusive igneous rock.

Also, you mentioned mountains. While buttes are sometimes referred to as mountains, I consider mountains to be formed through uplift of some kind (including volcanic formations), while buttes and mesas are formed by erosional processes. They're opposite mechanisms. Buttes and mesas are flat on top because the tops are normally horizontal layers of erosion-resistant rock. Sandstone is quite a bit more resistant to erosion than limestone, for example. An igneous sill would also serve the purpose. So if you have a sandstone layer on top of a bunch of limestone, you end up with mesas and buttes. This image illustrates the process, sort of:



The idea is rivers cut channels that isolate the mesas from the rest of the plateau, and as the "softer" underlying limestone is exposed the mesa capstone is undercut by the erosion of that limestone and breaks off bit by bit. The mesa shrinks and becomes a butte, then eventually whatever the next smallest structure is (can't remember off the top of my head), then eventually disappears entirely. But all that takes millions and millions of years, so within a human life we basically see a geologic snapshot. Most processes happen far too slowly to see. There are exceptions, of course, like Niagara Falls. It moves back several inches a year.

-----

I watched a few more minutes, starting from around 19 minutes. Whoever made the video is basically saying "I don't understand columnar jointing so science must be bullshit". Nature forms patterns, what's new about that? Pyrite can form perfect cubes. So can galena (lead sulfide mineral). I was polishing a rock slide to examine it with an electron microprobe once and ended up with a perfect microscopic stepped pyramid structure in one of the pyrite crystals. I've been underground in the middle of winter and seen perfect hexagonal ice crystals so fragile they broke if you breathed on them.

I've seen columnar jointing in quarries in Alaska and in Yellowstone National Park, among other places. There were no giant "tree stumps" there, just cuts in a rock wall.

Also, the columns are nowhere near perfect, even looking at them with my eyes. You can't "calibrate your equipment" or whatever off them. They clearly are not perfect hexagons and they're not perfectly straight. It wasn't a "lava fountain", it was an intrusion that was exposed by erosion. Whoever made the video is clueless about geology.

Also also, why are they using other examples from nature to try to show how a natural formation couldn't happen? That is totally ridiculous. Are rocks not natural? What do snowflakes have to do with living structures?

To back up, I'll also point out that whoever made the video has no idea at all how fossils happen. Petrified forests aren't "from the silicon age" any more than there were once pyrite-shelled nautili swimming around the ocean or sandstone crinoids living on the ocean floor.

I have pictures I took of a rock that looks exactly like a giant crying T-rex head. I also have pictures of me standing on a rock in Colorado that looks exactly like a giant stone boot. Nature makes weird shit. Doesn't mean I think there were once giant stone T-rexes wandering around or a giant stone boot factory in the area.

I understand most people do not know much about geology. Nothing wrong with that. But the videomaker is completely bonkers. It honestly sounds like the wild extrapolation a smart child might indulge in given a skin-deep understanding of a few fields of science.

------------

Anyway, if you have other questions feel free to ask.


Edit - Oh god so many typos

Post: #14

(08-18-2016 02:59 PM)weambulance Wrote:  I have pictures I took of a rock that looks exactly like a giant crying T-rex head. I also have pictures of me standing on a rock in Colorado that looks exactly like a giant stone boot. Nature makes weird shit. Doesn't mean I think there were once giant stone T-rexes wandering around or a giant stone boot factory in the area.

This sums up perfectly the flawed logic of so many of these conspiracy theories.

They take one misinformed/misunderstood/spurious thing and extrapolate that out.

"I can still see that boat far out there- Earth is flat"

Post: #15

Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

Post: #16

(08-19-2016 10:45 AM)CrashBangWallop Wrote:  Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

No one ever ended up poor by underestimating the stupidity of common folk.

Post: #17

(08-19-2016 10:52 AM)Suits Wrote:  

(08-19-2016 10:45 AM)CrashBangWallop Wrote:  Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

No one ever ended up poor by underestimating the stupidity of common folk.

You mean no one ended up poor overestimating the stupidity of common folk?

G