Photo: Salomón Henríquez
In a valley in southern Chile stands a lone alerce tree that could be the world's oldest living tree. “It was like a waterfall of green, a great presence before me,” climate scientist Jonathan Barichivich, 41, says of first time he saw Gran Abuelo, or “great-grandfather”, as a child. In January 2020, he visited Gran Abuelo with his mentor, dendrochronologist Antonio Lara, to take a core sample but they could reach only 40% into the tree as its center is likely to be rotten. That partial sample yielded a finding of about 2,400 years. Then Barichivich set about devising a model to estimate Gran Abuelo’s age, producing an estimate of 5,484 years. This is more than six centuries older than Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in California that is the world’s oldest non-clonal tree (a plant that does not share a common root system). Some clonal trees live longer, such as Sweden’s Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce thought to be 9,558 years old.
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