There Are No Trees on Earth

An old friend, knowing my interest in such oddities, has alerted me to a wonderfully outlandish theory that seems to have attracted thousands of believers, many of them already adherents of Flat EarthTheory. It all began ten years ago, when someone in Crimea, whose account has since been deleted, posted a video on YouTube in which he argued that there are no trees on Earth: what we take for trees are mere bushes, shrubs and saplings, remnants of an age when supergigantic trees, with trunks two miles across, soared up to 40 miles into the sky. These trees were, alas, destroyed in a cataclysmic event, thousands of years ago, that destroyed 99 percent of Earth's biosphere – but happily their remains are there for all to see, in the shape of flat-topped geological features such as Ayers Rock, the Giant's Causeway and the Devil's Tower butte in Wyoming. These are clearly the stumps of gigantic trees, as the Crimean theorist demonstrates by comparing them to blown-up pictures of trees; they…