What went missing in photos taken a century apart at Arizona’s Petrified Forest?
A forest of petrified trees is eerie enough, but Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park added to the site’s mystique days ago by sharing photos of the exact same cliff, taken a century apart.
The two images appeared to be duplicates (one color, one black and white), but an anomaly had been discovered and the park challenged Facebook followers to spot it.
Most figured it out quickly: A massive square boulder had gone missing.
However, the real mystery appeared to be what exactly happened to the massive block of crystallized tree trunk.
It’s a riddle that got hundreds of reactions on Facebook, and the debate referenced everything from climate change to UFOs. There were also multiple suggestions the boulder had been “Photoshopped” into the 20th century photo and was never really there.
“Hoping it’s on display somewhere,” Jen Scott wrote on the park’s Facebook page.
“It’s crazy to steal from the park! ... If you’re into stealing rocks don’t forget that curses come with them,” Debra Jones posted.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say aliens took it,” Doreen Tidwell Meyer said. (The 221,390-acre park has had reported UFO sightings, according to UFO-Hunters.com.)
The online discussion raged for days before park staff stepped in with an explanation. No, Photoshop had not been involved, nor had the giant rock been stolen.
“It fell,” park officials told McClatchy News. “It’s down below, rolled far from the bottom edge of the photo. We get a lot of that through erosion, pieces breaking up as they hit the ground.”
Petrified Forest National Park, about 200 miles northeast of Phoenix, is famous for its apocalyptic landscape. It hosts “numerous types of plant fossils including complete logs, upright stumps, delicate ferns and gymnosperm leaves, and pollen spores,” according to the National Park Service.
“Over 200 million years ago, the logs washed into an ancient river system and were buried quick enough and deep enough by massive amounts of sediment and debris also carried in the water, that oxygen was cut off and decay slowed to a process that would now take centuries,” the NPS reports.
Minerals seeped into the “wood over hundreds and thousands of years” and eventually “crystallized within the cellular structure” of the trees, the park service says.
This story was originally published December 21, 2020 at 10:48 AM with the headline "What went missing in photos taken a century apart at Arizona’s Petrified Forest?."