The oldest Asian tree might still be a historically documented fig on the Old Tree List maintained by Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, but tree-ringers have found rivals in the forests of Vietnam, Taiwan and Pakistan.
Kevin Anchukaitis knows that a cypress he cored in Vietnam is more than 979 years old. The “increment borer” he used to take a pencil-width sample of its rings didn’t reach the center of the tree. He got back as far as a ring that represented the year 1030.
Anchukaitis, an associate professor in the University of Arizona School of Geography and Development, cored the tree while compiling a tree-ring record of the Angkor Wat region to help anthropologists determine whether climate might have aided the collapse of the thriving population at that Cambodian temple site in the early 1400s.
Anchukaitis said a colleague at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, William “Ed” Wright has another possible contender — a cypress in Taiwan at least 1,200 years old, also cored with a borer too short to get to the center of the tree.
Anchukaitis said Swiss and German scientists cored a juniper in Pakistan that may be even older, dating to 554 A.D.
A story that ran in the Arizona Daily Star Nov. 13 detailed the oldest trees on each continent, based on a list compiled by Peter M. Brown of Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Tree-ring researchers cautioned in that story that there were certainly older trees in Asia than the two listed there — a “sacred fig” in Sri Lanka with a historical claim for being more than 2,200 years old, and a Siberian larch in Mongolia that had been cored and cross-dated to 750 years.
Anchukaitis said his Vietnamese cypress was cored during a field trip he took while a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
A paper published on the group’s findings in 2010 did not mention the age of the oldest tree, concentrating instead on a 750-year tree-ring chronology that showed that the civilization at Ankgor Wat had toppled after a 20-year period of drought was followed by exceptionally wet years, followed by another drought.
The region around the temple was one vast waterworks that irrigated agricultural fields and prevented flooding, Anchukaitis said.
Drought and flooding were disruptive events that might have aided the decline of Angkor Wat, the paper concluded.
Anchukaitis said he never thought to report the tree to Brown, but intends to do so now.
Brown, who runs “OldList” as a sideline to his nonprofit research organization, said keeping up with the latest claims is difficult. Even the world record-holder, a 5,066-year-old bristlecone pine, has never been published in a journal, he said.
“There has been so much recent work, I can imagine there probably are older trees around that no one has reported,” Brown said.
“If people don’t actually mention it in their publications, I can be surprised,” he said.
