The World’s Oldest Living Tree Found in Sweden
Posted by Paul, April 17th, 2008 - under Uncategorized.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
For 9550 years a Spruce has survived in the mountains on the Swedish landscape, Dalarna, bordering Norway. This means that this tree is the oldest known tree in the world.
About 20 Spruces have been found in the mountain area that are over 8000 years old. They have survived climate changes due to their ability to shrink to bushes in cold weather and standing / growing erect in warmer weather.
Evidence indicates that the Spruce will be THE species that will give us the most information about climate change, said Professor Leif Kullman from Sweden.
Check out the story (if you speak Swedish) and the photo of the old tree.
Let’s hope Michael Mann doesn’t turn it into a Hockey Stick!
Thanks to Ann Novek of Sweden for this very interesting story.
UPDATE
The Daily Telegraph: World’s oldest tree discovered in Sweden
The tree has rewritten the history of the climate in the region, revealing that it was much warmer at that time and the ice had disappeared earlier than thought.
It had been thought that this region was still in the grip of the ice age but the tree shows it was much warmer, even than today.
The summers 9,500 years ago were warmer than today, though there has been a rapid recent rise as a result of climate change that means modern climate is rapidly catching up.
Yet another inconvenient truth.
And to think, the normal state of climate is to change. It has always been so.
How did that tree survive without a government program? There must have been a supporting tree nearby, such as the algoraspruce.
Now when the tree has made the headlines , it is in danger from trophy hunters!
Let’s hope the tree can be protected quickly.
The difficult part of using such trees, it seems to me, is determining how closely related their tree ring width is to temperature change. In the case of the bristlecone pine the correlation is somewhere between poor and non-existant. So while I’m anxious to accept a finding of hotter climate in the past, I don’t want to do it until I know more about the correlation reliability of this tree.
The tree doesn’t seem to be all that big. Imagine 9000 rings in just the radius. The rings must be tiny.
Maybe these trees are old, and maybe they’re not … http://www.creationontheweb.com/images/pdfs/tj/j20_3/j20_3_95-103.pdf
With the mere mention of Creationism Kosmo almost had me avoiding that link entirely.
Twisted trees in odd places have been my interest for ages, particularly where tree growth is limited by climactic conditions. Let’s outline another inquiry re tree rings downunder.
Spiral growth of Snow Gums in Alpine regions of Australia.
http://www.anbg.gov.au/gnp/interns-2003/eucalyptus-pauciflora.html
http://users.northnet.com.au/~yallaroo/Yallaroo/E.pauciflora.htm
IMO this is a topic worth taking up with gurus from ANU Forestry.
Very interesting paper Kozmo, thanks.
You’re too late.
Al Gore just traded $50,000 worth of carbon offsets for the tree, which is being flown by private jet to his lavish 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville. A team of specially selected illegal immigrants is waiting to turn the tree into a finely crafted showcase to display his Oscar and Nobel Prize in a “proper paleoclimatological setting”.
Scrap left over from the project will be burned to heat the 1,000-square-foot doghouse in which his two dogs, Shiloh and Daisy, reside among all known canine creature comforts. “This further demonstrates our commitment to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by using renewable fuel sources”, said a Gore spokesman. “Another one will be ready to harvest in 9,550 years,” the spokesman added.
As I have stated before whenever this topic comes up, tree rings have never been a suitable climate proxy because they can be substantially altered by competition from other trees that have long since died.
The width of a growth ring, whether it is a single annual one or a double, merely reflects the sum of the available moisture, nutrients, sunlight and ambient temperature. So a wide ring could be the result of abundant moisture in a cooler year or a mild drought in a hot year.
In the long term, a sequence of narrow rings could be produced by an abundance of smaller competing stems which are subsequently destroyed by wildfire after which the rings would be wider.
The same narrow sequence of rings could also be produced by shading from a large tree that then declined into senescence. This would also produce the sort of pattern that has been mistaken for a gradual warming over a number of decades.
Other changes in ring width could be caused by changes in drainage patterns over time. An adjacent landslip, for example, would alter both the volume and duration of groundwater flows to the detriment of ring width in some situations and to the benefit of them in others.
These changes would also produce differing competition thresholds for the surrounding vegetation. So a situation where ring growth is not impacted by competition could be converted to one where it is through changes in groundwater flow systems.
Another important influence on ring width is the behaviour of insects and animals that feed on the leaves. As Tim Low, in “The New Nature” (p214) has observed;
“Bellbirds are dietary specialists. They eat psyllids, tiny sap sucking bugs found on gum leaves, and lerps, the sweet shields the bugs build. In colonies ranging from twenty to 200 they zealously guard their food bearing trees. A colony may last forty years and command 2 hectares of forest. Because bellbirds harvest only part of the food supply, their eucalypts often suffer severe bug infestation. Bushmen will tell you bellbirds live in ’sick’ forests”.
In such cases, the aggressive territoriality of the bellbirds in keeping out all other bird species produces an over-abundance of other leaf eating bugs that impairs the trees growth for almost half a century.
So one would need to know the long term history of the immediate site, including fire history and the history of trees that are no longer present, and the insects and fauna that dwelt in them, before any but the most generalised of conclusions could be drawn from growth rings.
Thank you for a very informative post Motty.