The World's Oldest Trees

Although I'm not usually very interested in these topics, when I saw the statistics, I thought it was a good topic worth writing about. We can't actually know if the oldest trees we'll show in this article are truly the oldest, because not all trees in the world have been measured. The oldest trees measured so far are listed here.

The Trembling Giant

The Wobbly Giant, Image by J Zapell via USDA

The trees you see in the picture are actually a large colony called the Pando tree. This colony has lived for hundreds of millennia. Each tree in this colony, spread over a vast area, bears the exact same markings. This means that all of these trees are actually a single tree! Each tree you see as a tree has grown from individual branches of a single root. So, how old is the trembling tree? Scientists estimate it to be approximately 80,000 years old. This means that when the tree's roots first began to spread through the soil, all of humanity's ancestors were still in Africa. However, some researchers claim it to be 1 million years old. Finally, the trembling giant is the heaviest living organism on Earth. Weighing 5,900 tons, it deserves this distinction.

Old Tjikko

Old Tjikko. Image by Karl Brodowsky

The spruce tree in this picture is known as Old Tjikko. You'd probably pass by it without even noticing, but it's the oldest tree in the world found as a single tree, unlike the trembling tree (I used the word "multiple trees" because of that). Located in Dalarna, Sweden, the tree is exactly 9,550 years old. Its age was determined by carbon-14 analysis conducted in a laboratory in Miami, Florida. Like the trembling tree, it can establish a colony if it wants to. In other words, it can create clones of the tree trunk. Although the trunk is normally a few hundred years old, the organism has been able to survive this long by expanding its roots and growing a new trunk elsewhere when the trunk dies, using a technique called layering.

Bristlecone Pine

Bristlecone Pine. Image: USDA

This is the oldest tree in the world whose roots and trunk are the same age without cloning. This tree is 5060 years old. This means that when the first pyramids were built in Egypt, this tree was only a century old.