The World’s Oldest Living Tree Or Organism Is (80,000-1,000,000) Years Old

World's Oldest Is Spread over 105 Acres, And Weighing 6,615 tons!

Let's go through list of 7 oldest tree around the world.

7) Chestnut Tree of One Hundred Horses

 

This tree, located on Mount Etna in Sicily, is the largest and oldest known chestnut tree in the world. Believed to be between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, this tree's age is particularly impressive because Mount Etna is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. The tree sits only 5 miles from Etna's crater. The tree's name originated from a legend in which a company of 100 knights were caught in a severe thunderstorm. According to the legend, all of them were able to take shelter under the massive tree. It is listed by Guinness World Records as having the "greatest tree girth ever," at 190 feet in circumference. 

 

 6)Alerce

The Alerce is a common name for Fitzroya cupressoides, a towering tree species native to the Andes mountains. There's almost no telling how old these trees can get, since most of the larger specimens were heavily logged in the 19th and 20th centuries.To date, the oldest known living specimen is 3,640 years old.

 

5)Sarv-e Abarqu

 

Sarv-e Abarqu, also called the "Zoroastrian Sarv," is a cypress tree in Yazd province, Iran. The tree is estimated to be at least 4,000 years old and, having lived through the dawn of human civilization not far away, it is considered an Iranian national monument. Many have noted that Sarv-e Abarqu is most likely the oldest living thing in Asia. 

 

4) Llangernyw Yew

 

This incredible yew resides in a small churchyard of St. Dygain's Church in Llangernyw village, north Wales. About 4,000 years old, the Llangernyw Yew was planted sometime in the prehistoric Bronze Age — and it's still growing! In 2002, in celebration of the golden jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the tree was designated as one of 50 Great British trees by the Tree Council. 

 

3)Methuselah

 

At 4,841 years old, this ancient bristlecone pine is the oldest known non-clonal organism on Earth. Located in the White Mountains of California, in Inyo National Forest, Methuselah's exact location is kept a close secret in order to protect it from the public. (An older specimen named Prometheus, which was about 4,900 years old, was cut down by a researcher in 1964 with the U.S. Forest Service's permission.) Today you can visit the grove where Methuselah hides, but you'll have to guess at which tree it is. Could this one be it? 

 

2)Old Tjikko 

 The world’s oldest tree, a 9,500-year-old Norwegian Spruce named “Old Tjikko,”

Wait but its the number 2 how it could be oldest?? For answer check the number one.

“Old Tjikko,” is named after Professor Leif Kullman’s Siberian husky, continues to grow in Sweden. Discovered in 2004 by Kullman, professor of Physical Geography at Umeå University, the age of the tree was determined using carbon-14 dating.

“During the ice age sea level was 120 meters lower than today and much of what is now the North Sea in the waters between England and Norway was at that time forest,” Professor Kullman told Aftonbladet. Winds and low temperatures made Old Tjikko “like a bonsai tree…Big trees cannot get as old as this.”

In the Swedish mountains, from Lapland in the North to Dalarna in the South, scientists have found a cluster of around 20 spruces that are over 8,000 years old.Although summers have been colder over the past 10,000 years, these trees have survived harsh weather conditions due to their ability to push out another trunk as the other one died.

Therefore, we can now see that these spruces have begun to straighten themselves out. There is also evidence that spruces are the species that can best give us insight about climate change.

The ability of spruces to survive harsh conditions also presents other questions for researchers.

 

1)The Trembling Giant, or Pando 

 

Imagine: a single root system supplying thousands of tree “stems” over 105 acres, and weighing 6,615 tons (also making it the world’s heaviest living organism). While stems “only” live to be about 200 years old, the root system may be 1 MILLION YEARS OLD, by some scientists reckoning. Oh, and all the tree stems are genetically identical clones.

While many trees spread through flowering and sexual reproduction, quaking aspens usually reproduce asexually, by sprouting new trees from the expansive lateral root of the parent. The individual trees aren’t individuals, but stems of a massive single clone, and this clone is truly massive. 

 

ISN’T NATURE FUN?

 

The Trembling Giant, or Pando, is a enormous grove of quaking aspens that takes the “forest as a single organism” metaphor and literalizes it: the grove really is a single organism. Each of the approximately 47,000 or so trees in the grove is genetically identical and all the trees share a single root system.Pando was once thought to be the world’s largest organism (now usurped by thousand-acre fungal mats in Oregon), and is almost certainly the most massive. In terms of other superlatives, the more optimistic estimates of Pando’s age have it as over one million years old, which would easily make it one of the world’s oldest living organisms.

Unfortunately, the future of the giant appears grim. According to Paul Rogers, an ecologist at Utah State University in a October 2010 article in the Deseret News, the Trembling Giant is in danger. While the mature stems of Pando routinely die from the eternal problems of pests and drought, the regenerative roots of the organism that are responsible for Pando’s resilience are under attack as well. Rogers reported a marked absence of juvenile and young stems to replace the older trunks, blaming overgrazing by deer and elk. Without new growth, to replace the old, the Trembling Giant is vulnerable to a catastrophic, sudden withering and shrinking. Rogers confessed, “It’s slipping away very quickly.”

The quaking aspen is named for its leaves, which stir easily in even a gentle breeze and produce a fluttering sound with only the slightest provocation. The effect of this in Pando, multiplied over the tens of thousands of trees and hundred acres, can be unnerving, giving a real sense of life to the ancient, dying, trembling giant.