Just In...World's Oldest Living Tree = Norway Spruce

16 years ago

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Scientists have found a cluster of spruces in the mountains in western Sweden which, at an age of 8,000 years, may be the world's oldest living trees.

The hardy Norway spruces were found perched high on a mountain side where they have remained safe from recent dangers such as logging, but exposed to the harsh weather conditions of the mountain range that separates Norway and Sweden.

Carbon dating of the trees carried out at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, showed the oldest of them first set root about 8,000 years ago, making it the world's oldest known living tree, Umea University Professor Leif Kullman said.

California's "Methuselah" tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine, is often cited as the world's oldest living tree with a recorded age of between 4,500 and 5,000 years.

Two other spruces, also found in the course of climate change studies in the Swedish county of Dalarna, were shown to be 4,800 and 5,500 years old.

"These were the first woods that grew after the Ice Age," said Lars Hedlund, responsible for environmental surveys in the county of Dalarna and collaborator in climate studies there.

"That means that when you speak of climate change today, you can in these (trees) see pretty much every single climate change that has occurred."

Although a single tree trunk can become at most about 600 years old, the spruces had survived by pushing out another trunk as soon as the old one died, Professor Kullman said.

Rising temperatures in the area in recent years had allowed the spruces to grow rapidly, making them easier to find in the rugged terrain, he added.

"For quite some time they have endured as bushes maybe 1/2 meter tall," he said.

"But over the past few decades we have seen a much warmer climate, which has meant that they have popped up like mushrooms in the soil."

(Reporting by Niklas Pollard; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Here is a link that might be useful: World's Oldest Living Tree

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Comments (8)

pineresin
16 years ago
Saw a post about this on a Danish tree forum by one of Denmark's top tree scientists, which was very dismissive about the reliability on the measurement.

I'd not hold your breath about this ever getting established as a reliable record!

Resin
spruceman
16 years ago
Well, there are all sorts of claims out there about long-lived trees. And all sorts of criteria for deciding what form there trees might grow in. There are reports of creosote bushes in the American West living for more than 10,000 years with the bush slowly growing outward from an original bush and forming a ring. One plant? One root system?

Well, I will leave all this alone, except to say that for me an old tree should grow from one continuously growing trunk, preferably one trunk that puts on a complete growth ring each year around the entire trunk. If you get my drift, you know which trees this would disqualify.

Anyway, all that aside, I am fascinated that Norway spruce is a contender now. As some of you know I have been shamelessly promoting Norway spruce in these forums ever since I joined a couple of years ago. And one of the several misconceptions about NS that have been promulgated in some popular but ridiculously wrong-headed publications is that the tree is inconveniently short-lived. In fact, NS is at least moderately long-lived, with a "norm" under very good conditions of 400 years or so.

But now? Wow! Very interesting!

--Spruce
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pinetree30
16 years ago
Yeah, like resin I would hold my breath for a while. Apparently what they found was a Norway spruce clone, probably formed by layering, not by "pushing out" new trunks when older ones died. I have no idea what they carbon-dated, but if it was rotten old rootwood they may have trouble proving it was from the same tree as the living material.
There is a certain zone of similarity between old trees in spruceman's sense, and clonal creations, which I have described in The Bristlecone Book. I won't repeat myself, but will let you read it there.
pineresin
16 years ago
Don't you mean you won't hold your breath?!? If you do, you'll die of asphyxiation long before it is proven . . .

;-)
pinetree30
16 years ago
Another point -- as a clone that has had material carbon-dated this spruce has to compete with Tasmania's kings holly which has been estimated at 43,600 y.o.
scotjute Z8
16 years ago
Was interested a couple of years ago to read that Scandinavian scientist have developed a system of tree-ring dating which was more accurate than C-14 dating which is subject to a couple of variables that are typically assumed to be constant. The dendrochronolgy was being used to date Viking ships. Now this batch of scientists is back to using C-14 method for dating, after previous articles spoke of its inaccuracies.
jaro_in_montreal
16 years ago
"as a clone that has had material carbon-dated this spruce has to compete with Tasmania's kings holly which has been estimated at 43,600 y.o.color>"

Carbon dating depends on determining the abundance of the radioactive carbon-14 isotope, which has a half-life of 5,730 years.
As a general rule, after 10 half-lives (57,300 years) there is nothing left.
That 43,600 y estimate is rather close to the limit where useful information can be obtained.

Incidentally, no clone (Swedish spruce or anything else) will give you any sort of carbon date result, since clones are *new* plants, and as such do not preserve C-14 accumulation & decay records from their parent plant....
pinetree30
16 years ago
Clones are "new plants"? The currently living portions of them are relatively young, but those portions trace back to much older components. Usually these old parts have rotted away and the estimates of the clone's age is based on its size and the supposed rate of growth at which it attained that size. In this spruce case, the news item does not state what material was carbon dated.