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World's Oldest Trees (In The Wild)

rynner2

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World's oldest living tree over 9,000 years old
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 8:40am BST 18/04/2008

The world’s oldest living tree has been found in Sweden, a tenacious spruce which took root just after the end of the last ice age.

The 9,550-year-old tree has rewritten the history of the climate in the region, revealing that it was much warmer at that time and the ice had disappeared earlier than thought.

Previously, pine trees in North America were thought to be the world’s oldest, at around 5,000 years old.

But scientists now believe that in the Swedish mountains, from Lapland in the north to Dalarna (“the dales”) in central Sweden, there are much more ancient spruce trees (Picea abies).

Prof Leif Kullman at Umeå University and colleagues found a cluster of around 20 spruces that are over 8,000 years old.

The oldest tree, in Fulu Mountain, Dalarna, was dated by carbon dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida to 9,550 years old.

The finding is surprising because the spruce tree has been regarded as a relative newcomer in the Swedish mountain region and is thought to have originated 600 miles away in the east.

“Our results have shown the complete opposite, that the spruce is one of the oldest known trees in the mountain range,” said Prof Kullman.

Ten millennia ago, a spruce would have been extremely rare and it is conceivable that the ancient humans who lived there imported the tree, he says.

“Man immigrated close to the receding ice front. We have also found fossil acorns in this area, and people may have taken them with them as they moved over the landscape.”

It had been thought that this region was still in the grip of the ice age but the tree shows it was much warmer, even than today, he says.

“Spruces are the species that can best give us insight about climate change,” he said.

The summers 9,500 years ago were warmer than today, though there has been a rapid recent rise as a result of climate change that means modern climate is rapidly catching up.

The tree probably survived as a result of several factors: the generally cold and dry climate, few forest fires and relatively few humans.

Today, however, the nature conservancy authorities are considering putting a fence around the record breaking tree to protect it from trophy hunters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ree118.xml
 
that's brilliant. empires have come and gone, our history books fail us, but the old spruce is still there!
 
No part of that thing above the ground has been around for 9000+ years it just aint so.If you're going to count clonial things then 9000 years is beaten by the creosote bush and perhaps the coast redwood.
As a native Californian I feel obligated to point this out (not that we really need the 'oldest' tree record what having both Height & size (volume) sewed up without challenge) but still if you're going to try to de- throne the Bristle cone pine as the oldest you've got to do better than this.
 
One of my novels started out with a plotline leading to the discovery of an enormous tree that outgrew the gravitational boundaries of its physical structure to grow out to 300metres in circumference and 500m tall. Impossible, but imagine that.
 
"300metres in circumference and 500m tall. Impossible, but imagine that."

Hmmm.. that's approaching the spread of those trees on Mars!

Mars_Trees_02.jpg
 
Those trees on Mars are certainly interesting. I don't think NASA has come up with an excuse explanation for those.
 
Since this thread has taken in other trees, this is an interesting article about ancient US trees.

Into the Wild Woods

Featuring Bristlecone Pines, at least one of which is older than 5000 years, Sequoia at 1800 years, and Sugar Pines, the largest pines in the world. The pic is a Bristlecone.

p049kwt4.jpg
 
NOTE: The (American-based) database cited in this story does not reflect the Swedish specimen cited above.

The oldest living thing on Earth

... A team of researchers in the US keeps a list, called the Old List, of officially dated ancient trees.

They've found a sacred fig tree in Sri Lanka that is at least 2,222 years old.

There's a Patagonian cypress tree in Chile which, at 3,627 years old, is as old as Stonehenge.

A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains named Methuselah comes in at 4,850 years old. But the oldest tree on the list, an unnamed bristlecone pine from the same location, has a core suggesting it is 5,067 years old.

This time-worn tree has lived through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It was already established when the Ancient Egyptians started building pyramids.

Is this 5,000-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine the oldest single living thing on the planet? That depends on your definition of a "single tree".

In Fishlake National Park in Utah in the US lives a quaking aspen tree that most people would struggle to see as "a tree".

It's a clonal tree called "Pando", from the Latin meaning "I spread", and for good reason.

It is so large that it is easy to mistake for a forest. However, Pando, despite being the size of Vatican City, has all sprung from one seed, and, over the years, has grown a single vast rootstock supporting an estimated 50,000 tree trunks. Accurately estimating how many years is problematic, says population geneticist Prof Karen Mock from Utah State University, who works on the aspen.

"There have been all kinds of different estimates but the original tree is almost certainly not there," he told the BBC.

Clonal trees grow in all directions and regenerate themselves as they go. This means taking a core from a trunk will not give you the age of the whole tree.
Scientists try to get around this problem by equating size to age. It's an inaccurate process and Pando's estimated age ranges from a few thousand to 80,000 years old. ...

FULL STORY: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991
 
Here's a news story concerning the recently-crowned oldest (non-clonial) tree in Europe.

The Oldest-Known Tree in Europe Is Having a Growth Spurt
Perched high on a cliff in southern Italy, a bone-white pine tree has watched the Renaissance come and go, seen dozens of wars rage and resolve, and stood by as thousands of less-persistent organisms lived and died on the rocky slopes below. The tree, nicknamed Italus, has seen a lot. You would, too, if you were more than 1,200 years old.

With a life span of about 1,230 years, Italus has been deemed the oldest scientifically dated tree in Europe, according to a new paper published May 16 in the journal Ecology. The stately Heldreich's pine was discovered in an ancient grove among several other millennium-old trees in Italy's Pollino National Park, south of Naples. ...

Italus, the oldest of the trees studied over a recent three-year survey, snags the title of Europe's oldest tree from the 1,077-year-old Bosnian pine known as Adonis, which was dated in Greece in 2016. Unlike Adonis, though, dating Italus wasn't as simple as counting rings; the old pine's insides were too mangled with age to get a clear reading.

"The inner part of the wood was like dust — we never saw anything like it," study co-author Alfredo Di Filippo, a professor in the Department of Sciences and Technology for Agriculture, Forest, Environment and Energy at Tuscia University in Viterbo, Italy, told National Geographic. "There were at least 20 centimeters [7.9 inches] of wood missing, which represents a lot of years."

To work around these missing years, the researchers took radiocarbon-dating samples from the tree's exposed roots to determine when the pine first began to bud. They also compared tree-ring counts from the pine's roots and what was left of the trunk, which grow at different rates but can still provide some ballpark date ranges to work from.

With these methods combined, the team estimated that Italus' first ring formed in A.D. 789, making it roughly 1,230 years old. (To put that into a historical perspective, Italus would have been sprouting just as the first Viking raiders landed in England.) And while the tree's battered core indicates it clearly went through some rough patches over the past 1,200 years, its rings have begun growing again in the past few decades, the researchers wrote. Italus could even live to be 1,300. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/62697-italus-europes-oldest-dated-tree.html
 
I was going to contest the (caveated) claim made here:
Here's a news story concerning the recently-crowned oldest (non-clonial) tree in Europe
....until I re-read the clonial caveat.

This is because I was always brought-up (ever since I was a young sapling) to believe that I'd touched the 'oldest tree in the the world', and that I'd walked in the footsteps of Pontius Pilate...

https://www.scotsman.com/news/mystery-of-the-5-000-year-old-yew-of-fortingall-1-4292618

(ps I've just tried searching for references regarding this local-to-me factoid on FTMB, and I'm raising a (bandwidth-constricted?) nada-ziltch....surely this British Isles folklore classic has been covered here, previously, and in FT itself??)
 
This is the only mention I can
@EnolaGaia many thanks....the classic adage "seek and ye shall find" rarely applies (for me) within the FTMB....I do blame my current (and often) poor bandwidth....

Ideally one day the mobile broadband provision across Scotland will genuinely be both good, and omnipresent. But I think old trees (and I) will have aged quite a bit, before that point is reached.
 
The oldest known temperate hardwood tree (an oak) has been identified in Italy.
An Ancient Oak in Italy Just Turned Out to Be Nearly 1,000 Years Old

Radiocarbon dating has now revealed the oldest temperate hardwood tree in the world sits atop a steep rocky slope in a remote mountain belt of the Mediterranean.

Here, on this rocky precipice in Italy, lives a community of ancient trees. And one of these oaks has withstood freezing temperatures, snow storms, high-speed winds, and drought for over nine centuries, or 934 ± 65 years to be exact.

Even at high elevations - more than 1,000 metres above sea level - it seems that some hardwoods can survive for much longer than we thought. ...

As remarkable as it is, this oak isn't actually the oldest tree on our planet, nor is it even the oldest hardwood tree. Under the right conditions, the softwood in evergreen conifers is known to stand for several thousand years, while flowering trees with hardwood interiors tend to rot out after a few centuries.

Oak trees make it longer than most of their counterparts, but exactly how long is up for debate, especially in areas that are less lush. ...

In the past, tree ring counts have revealed very large temperate oaks in Switzerland, Bosnia and Sweden that were roughly 930 years old, 866 years old, and 600 years old respectively.

But figuring out a tree's age using its rings or a partial part of its core is not an accurate cross-dated analysis, and some think we could be overestimating the true age of these oaks when using this method.

Radiocarbon dating may be a better approach. The technique has already confirmed two old oaks in Romania are something like 645 years old. ...

FULL STORY:
https://www.sciencealert.com/radioc...e-oldest-temperate-hardwood-tree-in-the-world

PUBLISHED REPORT (Currently in Pre-Press Status):
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ecy.3179
 
Last edited:
Oldest Tree?

ALERCE COSTERO NATIONAL PARK IN CHILE—Some 5400 years ago, about the time humans were inventing writing, an alerce tree (Fitzroya cupressoides) may have started to grow here in the coastal mountains of present-day Chile. Sheltered in a cool, damp ravine, it avoided fires and logging that claimed many others of its kind, and it grew into a grizzled giant more than 4 meters across. Much of the trunk died, part of the crown fell away, and the tree became festooned with mosses, lichens, and even other trees that took root in its crevices.

Now, the tree—known as the Alerce Milenario or Gran Abuelo (great-grandfather) tree—might claim a new and extraordinary title: the oldest living individual on Earth.

Using a combination of computer models and traditional methods for calculating tree age, Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean environmental scientist who works at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, has estimated that the Alerce Milenario is probably more than 5000 years old. That would make it at least 1 century senior to the current record holder: Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in eastern California with 4853 years’ worth of annual growth rings under its gnarled bark. (Some clonal trees that originate from a common root systems, such as that of the Utah-based aspen colony known as “Pando,” are thought to be older, but dendrochronologists tend to focus on individual trunks with countable rings.)

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-tree-growing-ravine-chile
 
Oldest Tree?

ALERCE COSTERO NATIONAL PARK IN CHILE—Some 5400 years ago, about the time humans were inventing writing, an alerce tree (Fitzroya cupressoides) may have started to grow here in the coastal mountains of present-day Chile. Sheltered in a cool, damp ravine, it avoided fires and logging that claimed many others of its kind, and it grew into a grizzled giant more than 4 meters across. Much of the trunk died, part of the crown fell away, and the tree became festooned with mosses, lichens, and even other trees that took root in its crevices.

Now, the tree—known as the Alerce Milenario or Gran Abuelo (great-grandfather) tree—might claim a new and extraordinary title: the oldest living individual on Earth.

Using a combination of computer models and traditional methods for calculating tree age, Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean environmental scientist who works at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, has estimated that the Alerce Milenario is probably more than 5000 years old. That would make it at least 1 century senior to the current record holder: Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in eastern California with 4853 years’ worth of annual growth rings under its gnarled bark. (Some clonal trees that originate from a common root systems, such as that of the Utah-based aspen colony known as “Pando,” are thought to be older, but dendrochronologists tend to focus on individual trunks with countable rings.)

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-tree-growing-ravine-chile

It may soon be recognised as being older than Methusaleh.

In a forest in southern Chile, a giant tree has survived for thousands of years and is in the process of being recognized as the oldest in the world.

Known as the "Great Grandfather," the trunk of this tree measuring four meters (13 feet) in diameter and 28 meters tall is also believed to contain scientific information that could shed light on how the planet has adapted to climatic changes.

Believed to be more than 5,000 years old, it is on the brink of replacing Methuselah, a 4,850-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine found in California in the United States, as the oldest tree on the planet.

"It's a survivor, there are no others that have had the opportunity to live so long," said Antonio Lara, a researcher at Austral University and Chile's center for climate science and resilience, who is part of the team measuring the tree's age.

The Great Grandfather lies on the edge of a ravine in a forest in the southern Los Rios region, 800 kilometers (500 miles) to the south of the capital Santiago.

It is a Fitzroya cupressoides, a type of cypress tree that is endemic to the south of the continent.

In recent years, tourists have walked an hour through the forest to the spot to be photographed beside the new "oldest tree in the world."

Due to its growing fame, the national forestry body has had to increase the number of park rangers and restrict access to protect the Great Grandfather.

By contrast, the exact location of Methuselah is kept a secret.

Also known as the Patagonian cypress, it is the largest tree species in South America.

It lives alongside other tree species, such as coigue, plum pine and tepa, Darwin's frogs, lizards, and birds such as the chucao tapaculo and Chilean hawk.

For centuries its thick trunk has been chopped down to build houses and ships, and it was heavily logged during the 19th and 20th centuries.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-cypress-in-chile-could-soon-break-the-record-for-worlds-oldest-tree
 
I'm thinking there's some ancient yews in North Wales and am hoping to get a squizz at a couple when I'm up there!
 
The oldest trees in world (top 6, ranked)

Methuselah is the oldest living tree in the world and is said to be 4,855 years old. The ancient Great Basin bristlecone pine stands in a secret location within the Methuselah Trail in the Inyo National Forest White Mountains in California, USA.

oldest-tree-Methuselah-b15ffb0.jpg


The US Forest Service doesn’t tell visitors precisely where Methuselah stands, nor does the organisation release photographs of the ancient tree. This is done to protect the tree from tourists who could otherwise damage the old-timer and weaken its roots.

See ‘em all!

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/oldest-tree-in-world/

maximus otter
 
No part of that thing above the ground has been around for 9000+ years it just aint so.If you're going to count clonial things then 9000 years is beaten by the creosote bush and perhaps the coast redwood.
As a native Californian I feel obligated to point this out (not that we really need the 'oldest' tree record what having both Height & size (volume) sewed up without challenge) but still if you're going to try to de- throne the Bristle cone pine as the oldest you've got to do better than this.

I agree, but we'll have a photo of it for reference:

Old-Tjikko-2011-07-19-001-1.jpg

Old Tjikko is a 9,550 year-old Norway spruce, located on Fulufjället Mountain of Dalarna province in Sweden. Old Tjikko originally gained fame as the "world's oldest tree". Old Tjikko is, however, a clonal tree that has regenerated new trunks, branches and roots over millennia rather than an individual tree of great age. Old Tjikko is recognized as the oldest living Picea abies and the fourth-oldest known clonal tree.

More:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko

For non-clonal specimens, they have one famously old oak:

Kvillek.jpg

The Rumskulla oak, also known as the Kvill oak, is an oak tree (Quercus robur) near Norra Kvill National Park in Rumskulla socken, Vimmerby, Kalmar County, Småland, Sweden. It is the oldest oak in Sweden and one of the largest trees in Scandinavia, and was first described in 1772.

More:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumskulla_oak
 
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