I was looking through some old vacation pictures and came across this one. It sure gives a perspective on how big these trees are.
It's cool because we killed the tree.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
576 points (99.3% liked)
Mildly Interesting
19685 readers
2240 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It was a better display alive where it was than in any museum.
God... I hope they build the 8th wonder of the world, or the biggest homeless shelter, or a palace orphanage with this tree. Please don't tell me, it is some stupid statue or a salon furniture ensemble with this...
Even worse. Many of our ancient forests were cut into boards for personal profit.
Worse still, half of the wood from these trees was rendered unusable when the massive trees hit the ground
boards for personal profit
So they turned it into shelves??! (O_0)
Maybe not this particular tree, but yeah. Shelves, house framing and siding, etc. We're a horrible greedy little species.
House I can understand... Us human needs wood and housing is necessary but a majestic tree needs a majestic purpose and a majestic woodwork.
Louis the XIV have destroid France's ressources of oak trees to make war ships. More than 300 years later we are still missing them.
pretty sure yall wouldnt be called france without them, humans are still part of the natural order we arent aliens or supernatural
Worse, decking that has long since been sent to the landfill and replaced with Trex and the like
This isn't mildly interesting or even mildly sad, it's a lot sad 🌳😭
I love chopping down trees, unironically. It is super satisfying, feels ooga booga good.
I don't think I could ever cut down a tree like that. It would just feel so fucking wrong. It's a goddamn miracle it's beautiful holy shit it's so big.
Sigh
Yeah, you stand next to one of those things and you understand animism.
Fun fact, General Sherman (the biggest tree on earth by volume) is officially measured in baths. This is an actual sign at the ~~state~~ national park
Americans will use anything except the metric system
Come on… American units are entirely absurd but this sign clearly displays both cubic feet and cubic meters.
These numbers are difficult to conceptualize so they’re accompanied by number of baths for context. Nothing official about baths.
reposted to /anythingbutmetric
Ok, yes pedantically. “An official sign posted at the General Sherman Tree measures the tree in baths. The sign was made by national park officials, posted by national park officials, and is maintained by the official national park service. Though the national park office made this measurement and posted it, it is not an official measurement of said tree. That should only be done in cubic feet and/or meters.”
I’ve since fixed my comment specifically for your enjoyment
Edit: forgot Sequoia was a national park. Different office, still official
I remember that tree. The sign wasn't so pretty back when I went.
This is such a sad picture. Imagine the life that tree could have facilitated and harbored over its lifetime. We should all be replanting natives as fast as we possibly can.
The cool part about humanity is we could do it again. We made the Amazon rainforest by abandoning millions of acres of farmland and letting it grow over into a rainforest. We didn't do it on purpose, but now that we understand what happened, we totally could. All it requires is multigenerational discipline. So it might as well be a dream lmao
Go back over the part where "We made the amazon rainforest" for me?
Alright, so before the whites showed up, there were massive civilizations living where the Amazon rainforest is today. I'm talking cities of hundreds of thousands of people numbering in the dozens. A massive population center. All those people needed food, and for the most part, they farmed. A lot of ice cream bean trees, for example. They also used controlled burning to build up soil so good we still can't replicate it perfectly today (check out terra prima). At or around the time the white devils first showed up, these population centers had already been largely abandoned due to social upheaval and/or disease. We're talking within a generation or three. By the time more white devils showed up with their book burnings and God bothering, those population centers had already become myth. Took the dumb whites another couple hundred years to figure out that the city of gold wasn't literally made of gold, but rather the massive cities surrounded by cops ready for harvest. We're juuuust now finding them using LIDAR to scan what is now rainforest floor.
Wait, did I miss something? When was the Amazon rainforest ever farmland during the lifetime of humanity?
Central, north, and south America have been home to humanity for tens of thousands of years. Did you think they all just lived in mud huts and worshiped the sun?
The Amazon rainforest is less than 1000 years old. We know that because we can find 1000 year old human ruins built UNDER the rainforest. Did you think the first settlers to reach south America just lied about the cities and people's they found?
(Edit: actually 2k years back is the start of the forest. It really took off after people left and the farmland went wild)
Sorry, but that's just wrong. The Amazon rainforest is tens of millions of years old. Just think about the incredible amount of biodiversity, it could never develop in just 1000 years.
If I'm wrong, please show me studies, but this doesn't pass the basic logic check.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amazon-rainforest-is-much-younger-than-commonly-believed/
You can think what you want but the science is there. People took grasslands and farmed them for generations, then died off and the forests took over. 1-2k years is nothing when it comes to geologic time.
This is a single study, and it states that "that perhaps a fifth of the Amazon basin, in the south, may have been savannah until the shift, with forests covering the rest". So it's not that the forest was all farmland, there was farmland close to the forest and it grew to cover it. This is very different from what you're claiming.
And again, it's not possible for such biodiversity to develop in such a short amount of time.
My claim is that humanity made the Amazon rainforest what it is today. I stand by that, and my claim grows stronger with each new ancient city discovered under the trees.
Yeah, I disagree. We didn't play an active part in doing this, we played a passive one by not fucking it up. I'm also not responsible for a mountain just because I don't dig it up.
Even if you were right, your own study says that we'd at most be responsible for 1/5th.
Super cool picture, but it's absolutely disgusting that all those awesome, ancient trees were clear cut :(
This is the Mark Twain stump in Kings Canyon National Park. In 1891 they fell this tree to display it at the Museum of Natural History. So not too sure if clear cutting occurred, but the stump is 16 feet wide either way!
I wonder how wide the stump is...
My wife, the one lying on the stump, is 5' 3" if that helps.
I tried looking it up but I'm stumped.
Sequoiadendron is the giant redwood, coastal redwood is the tallest, it's unique in that it's a hexaploid which rare for a gymnosperm, except ephedra plants. Scientist speculated it's because it evolved from its self(cloning behaviour) although it's capable of outcrossing too. The final genus is the metaseaquoia, the Chinese dawn redwood
Scientist speculated it's because it evolved from its self(cloning behaviour)
So it is an abomination of some sort?
apparently plants like to vegatively reproduce, redwood especially, one of the reason it has duplicates(6 copies of its genome) is during meisosis, during gamtes are "unreduced" so they dont form like half like normal, they just keep the duplicated genome(most conifers are diploids). its not a problem for plants when they do this, but its less common in animals.
The Mark Twain Stump https://www.nps.gov/places/000/big-stump.htm
Oh, cool. Thanks. I imagine it took some manipulation to fell it and move it.
I've not been there enough, somehow missed this completely. Have to go back. Having grown up in California, in the redwoods, I understand the scale of these things but this photo doesn't even look real. It's nuts. So, I learned something. Thanks for posting.
That is so freakin' cool! The size of that plant is on display in its stumpy remains...just revel in thoughts of its original girth and height!
Ugh...imagining it's majesty by extrapolation makes me sad at what I see that is no longer there. That makes me sad.
When the pioneers and settlers came upon those giants they must have thought they had wandered into another world.
were
Took me a second to realize that was a person lying down and not bits of mushroom
My wife.
"I too choose this dead tree's wife"
Not a very flattering picture of Ms. Stump, but ok.