Gravity Response: What Deformed 400 Trees In Poland's Crooked Forest?

In Gryfino , western Poland , there is a forest containing an unusual mystery . Around 400 trees – surrounded by trees growing usually – are bent 90 degrees at their alkali , with the majority of them bow towards the North .

We know that the trees were planted some time in the 1930s , before Gryfino was invaded and destroyed in World War II , with residents vacate the town and take away with them clues to what deformed these pines .

There are , however , a number of theories about how the Tree got misshapen . Of naturally , there are the great unwashed who think the trees were crushed by analien space vehicle , perhaps by an alien civilization that has get the hang interstellar travel but has n’t quite got the hang of parking . more or less more naturalistic – though still unbelievable – is that they were trounce by Nazi tank during the warfare as sapling , before grow once again towards the light . give that they are surrounded by the common verticaltreeswe’re accustomed to , this seems unlikely .

A natural account is that the trees ended up in a horizontal lieu as saplings , perhaps due to a storm or fleshy coke , and this is how they develop their strange shape .

“ It looks , to me , like a classic gravity response , ” Gary Coleman , an associate prof of plant scientific discipline and landscape painting architecture at the University of Maryland , told theWashington Post . “ Whenever the stalk is horizontal to gravitation , the plant has a mechanism through which it can reorientate itself . ”

Coleman has seen such Tree after tempest while work in the US Forest Service . However there is another explanation , more potential than natural explanations .

Traces of slice and knots havereportedlybeen receive on the Tree , suggesting that humans may have observe them nigh to the earth during the early years of their growth , before let the somberness reply to work its deception . It could be a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree farm , where the pines had been bended for function on curved furniture , frames or barrels , as by nature bent wood is stronger than straight wood that has been bent after being felled .

We may never know what the reliable explanation is , though the human - made bends seems likely . Meanwhile , there is a much bigger tree - bending closed book : No matter where they are on Earth , Cook yen treeslean toward the equator .