The oldest living tree on the earth today is only a little over 5,000 years old. The earth has been around for billions of years, and I’m sure tree’s have been apart of it’s existence for quite a long time, right? What gives?
Trees don’t live forever. Those are the oldest living individual specimens It’s pretty amazing that there are 4-5000 year old anything around isn’t it? The first trees grew on Earth about 300-400 million years ago.
Its hard to put down roots when everybody else keeps telling you to get off their lawn.
it’s a living plant. it dies for lots of reasons.
I blame the excess apostrophes.
Not quite sure I understand the question. Are you wondering why individual trees only get as old as 5,000 years, or if why trees as a collective species are only 5,000 years old?
The wiki page you linked gives a clue. Wood rots, and most of these ancient trees are hollow, with the original wood rotted away. Other than to earn awe and respect from saplings, there’s not much purpose for a tree to be very old. If you want to propagate and sustain a particular variety, multiple moderately old specimens with prolific offspring are more likely to be successful than one singular old tree.
It is amazing. I know this sounds dumb but it’s not like I’ve ever seen a tree “die.” What exactly happens? I understand the tree is a plant, and biologically speaking, it dies. But then what? Does it still remain standing for a period of time? Does it topple over and dissolve into the ground?
Go walk in the woods during non-winter. See those trees without leaves? Yup. There ya go.
Also notice all of the fallen trees. If conditions are right, over several years the fallen tree will rot, turn spongy, and eventually disintegrate. Some will be buried and remain intact over time scales of decades or even centuries, but eventually they’ll still disintegrate and become part of the soil.
Yes, typically an old tree grows too weak for its size, falls over, and is consumed by other organisms, particularly by fungi.
Sometimes a dead tree remains standing, in which case it’s called a “snag”. Sometimes it falls over and becomes a “log”. (Some trees are knocked over/uprooted while still living, and that’s what kills them.)
Yes, dead trees, whether standing or fallen, gradually decompose and crumble away. Go walk in a forest, as thicksantorum suggests, and you’ll see the process at work.
Read all about tree death.
It actually isn’t that hard to kill a tree.
In my urban forestry class, I learned that the average street tree only lives seven years. Of course, this statistic represents very long-lived trees along with short-lived ones. But still. Living in the company of people is risky business.
Trees can get all kinds of diseases, just like any other living thing. They can also be sensitive to drought and trunk damage. Even pruning them the wrong way can set them down a unfortunate, irreversible course. But rarely will you see immediate death. You might have a giganto tree in your front yard that looks strong and healthy to an untrained eye, but an expert might see a sad dying hunk of wood and recommend cutting the whole thing down.
There’s also the issue of compound probabilities. In order to survive a length of time, you need to survive each and every year. The longer that is, the less likely you are to make it through.
For example, suppose the probability of a tree surviving any given year is 99.9%. Then the probability of it going for 5000 years without dying is only 0.67%
Tell me about it.
In the 17 years I’ve lived in my house, I’ve had two trees in my yard die:
- One was a small elm tree, which just became sickly over the course of a year or so, and finally did not come back at all the next spring. It was probably 7-8 years old at that point.
- The second was a small lilac which my wife had bought and planted. It flourished for about a decade, then became overshadowed by the apple tree in my neighbor’s yard. Two years ago, it was suddenly rather sickly, and last year, it never budded out in the spring at all.
You should really go for a walk. Heck, I should go for a walk, but you should really go for a walk.
This can take quite a while depending on the climate the tree lives in. There is a snag of an old Ponderosa Pine in an area I camp in. The snag is a good 8-9 feet across and about 40’ tall. It looks utterly unchanged in the 35 years since I first saw it and my 83 year old father says it looks much the same as it did when he was a child. It probably lived for 500 odd years. And it’ll probably take 150 or more to decompose.
The Ice Ages ended only about 12,000 years ago. Large areas were covered in ice before then and had no trees at all. And there have been massive changes in climate over the past 12,000 years, even in the tropics. Areas that are suitable for a species today may not have been suitable even a few thousand years ago. So for an individual tree to have been around for even 5,000 years indicates either a remarkable degree of climatic stability where it is growing, and/or an ability by that species to survive substantial variation in climate.
This question is just bizarre. Name some organisms (other than simple asexually reproducing ones) that live longer than the oldest living trees.
I’ve read and heard over the years that much of the Eastern seaboard and south was deforested during the early settlements. The large trees we see now may only be a 100 years or so old. That’s a big tree but nothing like the monsters that the early colonies cut down.
Fires are naturally occurring too. Even today the Forest Service advocates allowing old growth to burn off. Just like it has for thousands of years. The fire is supposed to clear the brush and old rotten trees. The good trees get scorched but at least in theory they survive. It probably does shorten their life and that may be another reason we don’t see that many 800 year old trees.
If trees didn’t die, all land would be nothing but tree.
The oldest human is only about 115 years old, even though we’ve been around as a species for a million years or so. Same reason.