The oldest tree in the world

In the eastern part of California, there is the magnificent Sierra Nevada, where the first peak of the United States, Whitney Peak (4,418 meters above sea level), the largest waterfall in the United States, Yosemite Falls (739 meters), the largest alpine lake in the United States, Tahoe Lake (lake area of 490 square kilometers)... Nevada is the Spanish word "covered by snow", even in July, the peak of the Sierra Nevada is still covered with white snow. In the eastern part of the mountain range, there is the endless Mojave Desert to the south and the White Mountain Mountains to the north. It is opposite to the Sierra Nevada Mountains across the Irvine Valley. The highest peak is 4,344 meters, the fourth highest peak in the United States.
White Mountain belongs to the United States in the country's forests, and is inaccessible compared to the Sierra Nevada, which has national parks such as Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon. The narrow winding mountain road will also discourage some tourists. There are several kilometers of roads on the Panshan Highway, and there are no shoulders. The vehicles are driving slowly against the cliffs. The driving must be focused and careful, and cannot be distracted by the magnificent scenery. This kind of adventure is to see a piece of "ancient thorn pine forest" on the top of the mountain.
The name of the fruit is because it has thorns on the female pine cones. It is a generic term for three closely related pine trees growing in the high mountains of the western United States: the Great Basin thorns grown in California, Nevada, and Utah; the Rocky Mountain thorns grown in Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Foxtail pine grown only in California. Among them, the foxtail pine was first discovered by botanists. To commemorate the 19th century British botanist John Hutton Balfour, the Latin name is Balfours. These three pine trees are collectively called berth. The Foa group, so China often refers to them as the foxtail pine. According to the principle of the owner from the name, I think it is better to call the thorn fruit pine according to the American name, which is not easy to cause confusion.
The thorn pine in the ancient Pinus koraiensis forest in Baishan Mountain is the Great Basin thorn pine (the thorn pine is referred to as the thorn pine). It grows at an altitude of more than three kilometers and grows in arid, barren soil where almost no other species (except a few pines) can survive. The branches are entangled by wind sculptures, like a magnified bonsai. Its wood texture is very dense and rich in resin, so it can resist the invasion of insects, fungi and bacteria. Even if it is completely exposed, it will not rot, but it will be affected by wind and frost like a stone. It becomes grotesque like a huge one. Root carving. The most eye-catching of the fruit of the thorns is the old trees that only have bare, sturdy trunks. The first feeling is that they are dead. This feeling is sometimes right. You may be faced with a dead tree that has been dead for many years but is standing still, and some have been dead for thousands of years. But more often, look carefully and notice that green leaves grow from the branches, indicating that it is still alive. The thorn pine has a peculiar attribute, and part of the trunk is dead, which does not prevent other parts from continuing to survive and grow. The ancient thorns often have most of their trunks dead, and only a small part of the trunk is still alive. This is because the roots of Pinus sylvestris are very special. Each root transports moisture and nutrients to a part of the trunk. When it dies, it will only kill the part of the trunk and not affect the trunk of other parts. For other trees, if most of the roots are dead, the remaining roots are not enough to provide water and nutrients for the whole tree, which will lead to the death of the whole tree. For the thorn pine, the death of most of the roots is only the death of the part of the trunk that is connected to it, and does not prevent the rest of the trunk from continuing to survive by the remaining roots.
Therefore, the life span of Pinus sylvestris is extremely long and can be as long as 5,000 years. It is the longest-lived organism known. This was discovered by University of Arizona scientist Edmund Schulman. In 1957, he went to Baishan, a census of the prickly pine forest. As we all know, there is a fairly accurate way to determine the age of a tree, which is to count the annual rings it forms during its growth. The simple way is to cut the tree to the annual ring of the trunk, but this completely ruined the tree. In order not to damage rare trees, botanists use a special tool, the growth cone, to drill the trunk to obtain a sample of the core of the pencil, so that the tree can be harvested without cutting down the tree. Trees with very irregular trunk shapes, such as thorn pine, require multiple borehole sampling to obtain complete annual ring data.
In this way, Schulman discovered that many of the trees of the thorns were surprisingly long. The oldest one, he calculated to sprout in 2833 BC, was 4,789 years old. This tree was later called the Methuselah tree, named after the longest-lived mythical figure in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, this person lived only 969 years old. Shulman died in the second year of discovering the Methuselah tree. He lived only 49 years old, and the tree is still alive. It is 4,851 years old and is the oldest tree in the world. In order to avoid being destroyed by tourists, the exact location of the tree is kept secret and not marked. Of course, there are so many thorn pines that they have not been sampled and ageed. It is entirely possible that there are still more ancient trees than the Mato Sala tree, which are still undiscovered. In 2010, Tom Harlan, a researcher at the University of Arizona, claimed that there was a tree older than the Ma Tau Sala in Baishan, which was as old as 5062. Shulman took the tree, but it was too late to study his age. Harlan discovered it when he studied the tree core sample left by Shulman. Unfortunately, the researcher did not disclose to anyone the tree. The tree core sample he studied was not found by others after his death. Where is the tree, is it really age? There is no way to confirm. Therefore, the Methuselah tree is still recognized as the oldest still alive tree in the world. The Methuselah tree is not only alive, but also capable of reproduction. In 1972, when the researchers studied the Martialilla tree, they found that it had a pine cone and 96 seeds in the pine cone. They planted the seeds into the soil and all sprouted into saplings.
The reason why the Ma Tesala tree is "still alive" is because a thorny pine that is older than the Matra Tara tree has been found in history, but it is already dead. In 1964, Donald R. Currey, a graduate student in the Department of Geology at the University of Utah, was studying the effects of climate change on glaciers. His mother sent him a copy of National Geographic, which included Schulman's article on Pinus sylvestris. For the first time after he read it, he knew that there was such an ancient tree. Corey did research at the Great Basin National Park in Nevada, where there was also a thorn pine. He thought that perhaps by studying its annual rings, one could understand the changes in the glaciers in Nevada. He randomly saw an old tree called the Prometheus tree. At first, he tried to sample with a growth cone, but it never succeeded. So he applied to the Forest Administration to cut down the tree so that he could directly count its annual rings and get approval. With the help of the ranger, the tree was cut down. Corey cut the trunk disk back to the hotel for several years, counting it over and over again, and horrifiedly found that he accidentally fell down the world's oldest tree: 4862 Years old, while the Ma Tusala tree was 4796 years old.
The Methuselah tree can tell us more than 4,800 years of history, but there are still some dead thorn fruit pines that are older than the Mesquita trees, and their annual rings can also tell us about the age of their lives. By arranging the rings of the living and dead arborvitae, there is an uninterrupted history of more than 9,000 years. This history is very accurate and even used to proofread the carbon 14 dating method. The annual rings not only tell us the age of the trees, but also tell us about the changes in the environment (temperature, rainfall, sunlight, etc.) that occur during the growth of the trees, because these changes will affect the growth rate of the trees, in the annual rings. Can show it.
By studying the annual rings of arborvitae, there are sometimes unexpected discoveries. For example, when studying the annual rings of the Martialilla tree, scientists found it to grow particularly slowly in 1627 BC. The most likely explanation was that there was a particularly large volcanic eruption that year, and the volcanic ash was full of the atmosphere, long-term Shading the sun, causing the temperature to drop, makes the thorns grow extremely slow. The largest volcanic eruption in the history of human civilization was the eruption of the Santorini volcano in the Aegean Sea, which led to the destruction of the Minoan civilization in Crete. It was speculated that the legend of the continent of Atlantis came from this. But geology and archaeological studies could not determine the exact year of the eruption of the Santorini volcano because there was no historical record at the time. Maybe it was recorded by the Mesquite tree living on the other side of the globe?
Some research results on the annual ring of the thorn fruit pine are expected. Researchers at the University of Arizona, after studying the annual rings of 678 live and dead arborvitae, found that trees grew particularly well during the 50 years from 1951 to 2000, with a median annual width of 0.58 mm. The median of any 50-year interval has been greater since 2650 BC. This is because the climate has warmed over the past 50 years, causing the growth rate of Pinus sylvestris to become faster. But warming is not conducive to the survival of the fruit pine. They are more suitable for growing in a cooler environment. In geological history, there are still some places in California, such as the foothills of the Mohave Basin, which once had a pine forest, and then disappeared as the climate warmed. Different from the previous climate warming, the current climate warming is caused by human beings and changes rapidly. Is this oldest tree destroyed by human hands?