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| - Fact Check: This incredible stack of stones standing atop each other is NOT a natural occurrence
This formation was created by a stone balance artist based in Colorado, US.
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India Today Fact Check
This video shows a rock formation made by Michael Grab, an artist based in Boulder Creek, Colorado.
Nature is bizarre and fascinating at times. A video of a stack of rocks that has been making the rounds of social media appears to be an example of this trait. It consists of a huge unwieldy stone standing on its pointed edge atop two smaller ones in the middle of gushing water. While this is baffling enough, another stack of three circular stones can be seen balanced over it.
Sharing the video, some credited the stack of stones to God, while others claimed that some sort of asceticism was at play here. Archives of such posts can be found here, here, and here.
India Today, in its investigation, found that this video shows the work of Michael Grab, an artist based in Boulder Creek, Colorado in the US.
Our Probe
A reverse search of keyframes from the viral video on Yandex led us to a news report from 2013, about a Colorado artist named Mike Grab. According to the report, Grab arranges stones in perfect balance to make astonishing stacks. The report also featured photos of several stacks of stones that looked similar to the one seen in the viral video.
We noticed that a few of these photos were watermarked “GravityGlue.com”. Using this, we found an Instagram account named “gravityglue” which, per its bio, belongs to Michael Grab. Skimming through its posts, we found a photo shared on August 19, 2019, featuring the same stack of rocks that could be seen in the viral video. The post was geotagged to Boulder, Colorado.
According to the website of Gravity Glue, such stone formations are created using a skill called Rock Balancing. We also found a video of the process of creating a stone formation on Grab’s Facebook page. One can see him stacking the stones on top of each other and adjusting them one by one. In another video, one can even see the stones toppling down many times in the process.
Thus, it’s clear the rock formation seen in the viral video is just a temporary rock formation made by a stone balance artist.
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