The world's oldest tree may have been standing for centuries when the first boulders were erected at Stonehenge, new research suggests.
The Gran Abuelo, a conifer that rises 196 feet above the misty forest floor in Alerce Costero National Park in Chile, was initially thought to be roughly 3,500 years old. But scientists had never analyzed its age systematically, Barichivich said.
The borer, however, could not reach to the center of the tree's 13-foot diameter, which means that many of the alerce tree's growth rings could not be counted. The team then used the model to simulate the tree's growth trajectory 10,000 times, Barichivich said. Those simulations gave a range of predicted ages for the Gran Abuelo.
"The ONLY way to truly determine the age of a tree is by dendrochronologically counting the rings and that requires ALL rings being present or accounted for," Ed Cook, a founding director of the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, toldWhile the tree has survived for thousands of years, its future is in doubt, Barichivich said.
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