31–37 of 37 posts
Would have been fun to see this tree in the film Midsommar, but it would have been terrible if it was damaged somehow (film makers aren't always they best at keeping nature intact, just look at the Maltese beach ecosystem which was destroyed during the filming of the GoT Dothraki wedding scenes).
Midsommar was recorded in Hungary in any case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongeegen
Strangely there were three ancient oak trees close to each other until a few decades back, the other two died recently.
I'd always thought that the Methuselah Tree in California was the oldest living tree. Apparently there's some disagreement, as Old Tjikko is a clonal tree, meaning the trunks come and go but the roots stay living underneath [1]. So if you're counting non-clone trees, Methuselah is the oldest. If you're counting clonal trees, some Quaking Aspens are believed to be between 80,000 and 1,000,000 years old [2]. [1] https:…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you visit Muir Woods north of SF, they refuse to tell you which tree is the tallest in the park. For good reason. People suck.
Well there's always a tallest tree in the forest, if the current tallest is cut down, another becomes the tallest, so there's no particular gain or loss over and above any other big tree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also Prometheus, which was older than Methusaleh but was cut down by people looking for the old trees. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(tree)
When I had ambitions for general interest blogging, I had an article kicking around in my head on the dangers of being a superlative tree. Prometheus was the oldest tree, killed by a core sample. Tree of Ténéré, the most isolated tree in the world, felled by a drunk driver. [1] The Senator, the biggest cypress in the world was lit afire by an arsonist. [2] Kiidk'yaas, a rare golden spruce, was felled by someone prote…
I wonder what percentage of the world's trees have been carbon dated. I'd bet that effectively 0% of the world's trees have been carbon dated and that there remain older ones out there.
~0% of sampled trees does not necessarily mean ~0% certainty that we have found the oldest tree, since tree ages are correlated strongly with each other in local neighborhoods. We know where to look to find "oldish" trees and then narrow our search there. No need to sample trees from a new growth forest to be reasonably certain how old they are.
I'd agree that percentage tested isn't directly the same as likelihood we've found the oldest, but I do think there's a strong correlation.