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Along the Black River in North Carolina, bald cypress trees have been growing gently for millennia. Scientists have recently discovered trees over 2,000 years old, including at least 2,624 years old.
This makes it the fifth oldest known non-clonal tree in the world. (The Pando of Utah, an old trembling aspen forest, breeds asexually by cloning from an 80,000 year old root system.)
Another nearby tree is 2088 years old – and geoscientists believe that more bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) in the Three Sisters marsh could be the same age or even older.
"There are surely many trees over 2,000 years old in Black River," said geoscientist David Stahle of the University of Aransas. Charlotte Observer.
"I think there are some who approach, if not exceed, 3000 years."
The top 10 oldest trees known in the world. (University of Arkansas)
It has been known for decades that some of the trees in the area are old. In the 1980s, Stahle and his colleagues discovered 1,700-year-old trees. This led to the private purchase of 16,000 acres by North Carolina Nature Conservancy to help protect these majestic plants.
But this new discovery is reducing the known age of trees by nearly a thousand years.
It was carried out in a wetland area not yet visited by the research team.
With the help of a sampling tool called progressive borer that does not harm trees sustainably, researchers can take a basic sample that allows them to count tree rings, those formed by annual growth layers. These specimens may be complicated by core rot, resulting in the presence of hollow trees in the center. The team has selected solid trees all along.
Surprisingly, a tree named BLK227 was at least 2,624 years old. This makes it a seedling or a young tree in 605 BCE – a period that precedes the centuries-old Roman Empire and the year Nebuchadnezzar II ascended the throne of Babylon.
Another tree, BLK232, was 2,088 years old – it dates back to 70 BC, around the time of the birth of Queen Cleopatra.
"It's extremely unusual to see an old stand of trees running the length of a river like this," Stahle said. "Bald cypresses are valuable for wood and have been heavily exploited.Much less than 1% of virgin virgin cypress forests have survived."
These trees are not remarkable only by their age. The rings of bald cypresses are a clear record of rainfall during the growing season of a given year.
Thus, the rings of BLK227 and BLK232 contain valuable information on nearly two and a half millennia of climate information – droughts and floods dating back to the time of the neo-Babylonian empire.
The severe drought that began in 1587 and lasted two years coincided with the first attempts to settle in Roanoke, North Carolina – which could explain why the Roanoke Colony settlers disappeared between 1587 and 1590.
"It's an incredible coincidence that the oldest living trees known from eastern North America also have the strongest weather signal ever detected on Earth," Stahle told the Smithsonian.
"The best correlations we have ever seen are with these trees, why I do not know, they are incredibly old and extremely sensitive to climate, especially rainfall."
The team has dug only 110 trees, out of tens of thousands, which is not only possible, but that there are probably older trees in the marsh. Some of them may be hollow, and so dating may be impossible, but that does not make them any less incredible.
This makes the protection of the region even more important. There is of course the threat of logging mentioned above, but other human activities pose a more indirect threat. Pollution. Climate change. Elevation of the sea level.
"To counter these threats, the discovery of the oldest known living trees in eastern North America, which are among the oldest living trees on Earth, is a powerful stimulant for conservation. private, by the state and federal of this remarkable waterway "the scientists wrote in their article.
The search was published in Communications on Environmental Research.
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