The Norway Spruce, Picea abies, is native to Central and Eastern Europe, and can grow to an astounding 180 feet in height. At only 16 feet tall, Old Tjikko, discovered in 2004 by geologist Leif Kullman and named after Tjikko, his dead dog, is believed to be the oldest living tree on Earth, coming in at 9,550-years-old.
To be more exact, Old Tjikko is the oldest known individual vegetatively cloned tree. in the world. What does this mean? Let’s go back to when Tjikko began to take root and sprout at the end of the last Ice Age. At that time, an ice bridge still connected Great Britain to Europe and glaciers were just beginning to retreat across Scandinavia.
Kullman, a professor of Physical Geography at Umeå University, explained that for thousands of years, the tree has survived due to vegetative cloning. The tree that is visible is relatively young, at only a few hundred years of age, but it is the root system that is thousands of years old. Carbon dating was done on genetically matched plant material collected from under the tree, giving scientists the true age of the remarkable tree.
What is amazing is that the trunk of the tree may die and regrow many times, but the root system remains alive and intact, sprouting a new tree when the old one dies. Another really neat survival tactic occurs in the winter when heavy snows push the tree’s lower branches to the ground where they take root, helping them to survive to live again the following year.
The harshness of the weather on the shrubby mountaintop, at an altitude of 2,985 feet (910 meters) also helped in the tree’s survival, letting it survive in shrub-form for thousands of years. It was only in the last century that Tjikko grew into a full-fledged tree, and Kullman believes a warming climate is responsible. “The fact that we can see this spruce as a tree today is a consequence of recent climate warming since about 1915,” said Kullman.
Older trees are in abundance around the world
In the same general area where Tjikko was found, a stand of about 20 spruce trees was discovered about the same time, all around 8,000 years old. It would be almost impossible to find older trees in Sweden because ice sheets covered the country until about the end of the Ice Age.
For even older trees, we can go to Utah, in the U.S. You can see Pando, also called the Sleeping Giant, a clonal colony of single male Quaking Aspen that contains 47,000 trees covering 107 acres. Pando’s root system is an estimated 80,000 years old, among the oldest known living organisms on Earth.
