What is the Oldest Tree in the World?

Many trees over the years have secured the title of the “oldest tree in the world.” It’s certainly not an exact science even if you were to cut it down count rings.

It’s also possible that the oldest tree in the world remains undiscovered. While that might be hard to believe, there do exist many places that have escaped human mapping. Think regions like Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia, Mongolia and more.

Proud residents of Florida and California might even take issue with a grove of trees taking the title. The Pando tree in Fishlake National Forest, Utah, is both the oldest tree in the world, the largest organism in the world, and could well be the oldest organism and the world. And its discovery angered the traditional tree-loving world at the time of confirmation. Yes, people can get angry when “their” tree moves down the list.

Pando, taking from the Latin for “I spread”, is not a single tree in the eyes of many, but scientists have confirmed that each tree shares the same root system, and is so old at around 80,000 years, that it clones itself identically. This quaking aspen’s root system constitutes a grove whose root system spreads well over 100 acres.

Pando was discovered by the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor botanist Burton Barnes, whose research was later confirmed by Michael Grant, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The study of Pando is largely the responsibility of Utah State wildland resources researcher Paul Rogers. Rogers also heads the Western Aspen Alliance. And despite all this attention, it’s theorized that Pando is dying.

Pando is simply not growing at the rate that it once did since its discovery in 1968, and the study of it since. Additionally, cattle grazing, an increase of elk and deer (owing to fewer predators), human development and what’s to be a primarily assumed massive climate change by the scientific community also threaten its well-being.

Had you answered the 13,000 year-old Palmer’s Oak, largely known as the “Jurupa Oak” located in the Jurupa Mountains, Crestmore Heights, California, USA?

Either way, it’s important that each of these single-root trees of incredible life spans are protected in the future.

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