What do you think the world's oldest tree is? Take a moment to think about it and make your guess. The answer is at the end of this post. When you've made your guess, continue on...
I became interested in really old trees when I was looking at pictures of the world's biggest trees, the giant sequoia redwoods. Here are some pictures, and please click to see bigger versions. This is General Sherman, the largest tree by volume in the world, thought to be between 2300 and 2700 years old:
(from the Wikimedia Commons)
Here's the "Grizzly Giant," another huge tree with branches that look like huge trees by themselves:
(from the Wikimedia Commons)
My favorite pictures of the redwoods are the ones that show people standing next to the base:
It looks like people are about to be stomped on by giants.
So, redwoods are pretty big, but they aren't the oldest of trees. If you want to figure out what the oldest trees are, you have to qualify it a bit -- you could be talking about individual clonal trees (those with genetically identical offspring), clonal colonies (clonal trees connected by an underground root system), or non-clonal trees. I'll start with the younger trees and move on towards the older ones.
The oldest non-clonal tree is named "Methuselah," and its estimated germination date is in 2832 BC. It is about 4800 years old. This tree predates the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, and was born shortly after the Egyptian civilization unified under its first pharaoh, and it's still thriving in the Methuselah Grove in California. It's a bristlecone pine, and it is in a grove full of very old bristlecone pines that looks like this:
The oldest individual clonal tree is about twice the age of the Methuselah tree at 9550 years old. Its name is "Old Tjikko," and it's a Norway Spruce tree living in Sweden. It was named after a dog. It is thought that this tree sprouted as the ice age was receding from Scandinavia, but due to the harsh conditions, it remained a stunted little tree until the last century, when the warming climate caused it to start growing upwards. You'd think that this amazingly old tree (it predates writing and the wheel) would be large, but...
That's it. Crazy, isn't it? That fairly small tree is so old that when it first sprouted, the newest big idea in the world was agriculture.
So, we come now to the world's oldest clonal colony tree. These are the trees that are connected by underground root systems. Individual trees may only reach an age of 130 years or so, but the underground root system lives on. Take a moment to remember your guess from the beginning of this blog post...
The oldest clonal colony tree is a colony of quaking aspen trees in Utah named "Pando" (Latin for "I spread"). Its age is estimated at around 80,000 years, placing its date of birth in the Middle Paleolithic. If this estimate is correct, the birth of this tree would coincide roughly with the emergence of
homo sapiens. The height of technology was the stone arrowhead and tools made out of bones. And some of those roots that began their life then are still around, according to scientists. A quaking aspen grove looks like this:
That's all the interesting stuff I have to talk about tonight. Until next time!
