Nestled in Russia’s vast landscape lies a captivating island that is like no other. What sets this island apart from others is its remarkable feature of towering trees that dominate its terrain, creating a surreal and awe-inspiring environment.
Sakhalin is known as the largest island in the Russian Federation, and has been a point of contention between Japan and Russia for centuries. However, according to obscure reports over the past decade, this place, as well as the nearby Kuril Islands, have giant versions of many species of herbaceous plants. The normal species that only reached the height of a human’s knees grew several times taller on these islands than the average person.
According to a 2009 report in Izvestia, Russian scientists have long studied the giant plants that grow in certain regions of Sakhalin Island. For example, buckwheat is up to 3 meters tall (buckwheat is a herbaceous plant, 0.4-1.7m tall), burdock (normal height is about 1-1.5m) is up to 5 meters tall.
Researchers from the Institute of Marine Geology and Geophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences, said they had carried out studies on unusually large herbaceous plants in 12 different areas south of the Sakhalin islands. and Kunashir, and found that the giant plants, which only grow in certain areas of the islands, appear to be affected by tectonic activity that regularly generates considerable heat.
Obviously, the impressive sizes of the trees have little to do with the trees themselves, and much more to the environment. When taken out of the environment and planted elsewhere, they just grew to their normal size. Massive, submerged land-grown plants perched on faults in the Earth’s crust, through which large amounts of heat and petroleum hydrocarbons are supplied to plant roots.
Higher concentrations of copper and chromium compounds were also identified as a potential factor of this extraordinary growth.
Photos of giant plants including buckwheat, burdock and avocado trees believed to grow in Sakhalin and some of the nearby Kuril islands have gone viral on Russian social media.
