On April 25, 2026, the Ethereal Earth Facebook page posted an alleged authentic video (archived) of snow surrounding a giant sequoia in California's Sequoia National Park. The clip received tens of millions of views.
The caption with the video read:
These giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park are the tallest trees on Earth.
A single tree can weigh over 2 million pounds and live for more than 3,000 years.
The person at the base gives you a scale no view ever truly captures.
We share the planet with giants. Most of us just never see them.
In short, the video was fake. The Ethereal Earth Facebook page displayed a bio noting its owners publish some content with artificial intelligence. The bio read, "Some images may be AI depictions with sole purpose of sparking interest in Earth and especially nature."
As for the truth of the Ethereal Earth Facebook post's caption, while Sequoia National Park hosts impressively massive trees, the U.S. National Park Service reported Hyperion — a coast redwood located in California's Redwood National Park — is the tallest tree in the world. (For years, users have falsely associated Hyperion with a photo of a different tree.)
The NPS website reported Sequoia National Park's General Sherman tree is the largest in the world at 52,508 cubic feet (1,487 cubic meters), with some other trees having a larger size in terms of only ground circumference or height. Photos of the General Sherman tree show a smaller size and different appearance than the alleged giant sequoia in the fake video.
(m01229 accessed via Wikimedia Commons)
Regarding age and weight, NPS says giant sequoias "are known to reach ages of up to 3,400 years," and VisitSequoia.com said the General Sherman tree "weighs a staggering 2.7 million pounds," or 1.2 million kilograms.
Snopes attempted to contact Ethereal Earth via an email address listed in the page's bio. We received an "Address not found" error. The page itself did not display a "Message" button for Facebook's Messenger.
Researching the fake video
The fake giant sequoia video featured signs of AI. For example, the clip lasted exactly 15 seconds, which is a common duration of AI-generated videos. The clip also featured a very smooth pan up indicative of either AI or professional videography equipment.
In order to learn more about the Ethereal Earth Facebook page's content creation process, we initiated several scans with Google Gemini's SynthID Detector, a tool that scans images and videos for an invisible watermark that only appears with content generated with Google's AI platforms.
A SynthID scan of the fake giant sequoia clip confirmed users did not create the video with Google's AI tools. It's unclear which AI platform users prompted to generate the clip.
Additional SynthID scans of other image-based posts on the Facebook page confirmed finding Google's invisible watermark. For example, the scans located Google AI watermarks in images of a dragonlike cloud (archived) over Mount Rainier at sunrise and a raw steak (archived) resembling President Donald Trump.
For further reading, we previously reported about whether a Redditor truly got revenge for the removal of his beloved tree by planting dozens of giant sequoia trees around Redondo Beach, California.