Leo Gillick
It has been discovered that the Pando tree in Utah Aspen is between 16,000 and 80,000 years old, making it not only one of the oldest trees, but one of the oldest known organisms on earth.
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Where it is: The Quaking Aspen that makes up the Pando tree in Utah is what’s known as a Clonal. These trees will often look like a forest of the same tree. But, in actual fact, they all share a root system and are genetically identical.
- This means that, although they may all look like separate trees, they are just one huge one, sharing roots. The trees above ground are just stems. Living like this, it has been able to survive for millennia, becoming the oldest tree in the world.
Pando, The Ancient Largest Tree
The ancient Pando is made up of around 40,000 different stems and covers an area of around 44 hectares. It has been estimated that the entire clonal tree weighs somewhere in the region of 6 million kilograms.
Oldest in the world: This tree is considered the oldest in the world. It is suspected that it originated from a seed just after the last melting of the icecaps. This dates it to around 16,000 years old. However, there are further estimations that date it as far back as 80,000 years.
- Pando has been around for millennia longer than modern civilisation. It has watched the rise of humanity, and probably seen every step of human evolution stroll through its many stems. It would be incredible to know the things it has witnessed throughout its tens of thousands of years.
Of course, being human beings, we have put this ancient organism at considerable risk, as we always will. But, there are serious conservation efforts happening to prevent our tiny blip in the oldest tree’s life from being its fatal one.
Despite being the oldest tree in the world, it may be contested as the oldest organism. Some neputine grass in the Mediterranean is suspected to be more than 100,000 years old.
If you’re in Utah, take a trip to Pando and pay respects to something unimaginably ancient.
