‘It’s a miracle’: Gran Abuelo in Chile could be world’s oldest living tree

Barichivich grew up in Alerce Costero national park, 500 miles south of the capital, Santiago. It is home to hundreds of alerces,, slow-growing conifers native to the cold, wet valleys of the southern Andes.could be,” he said. “Records don’t really interest me.” However, Barichivich’s groundbreaking study has shown the 100ft giant could be the world’s oldest living tree.with his mentor and friend, the dendrochronologist Antonio Lara, to take a core sample from the trunk.

“Some colleagues are sceptical and cannot understand why we have revealed the finding before formally publishing it,” he said. “But this is post-normal science. We have very little time to act – we cannot wait one or two years, it could already be too late.” He has embarked on a five-year project to assess the future capacity of forests to capture carbon, hoping to add tree-ring data from thousands of sites around the world into climate simulations for the first time.

Lara, a professor at the Faculty of Forest Sciences and Natural Resources at Chile’s Austral University in the southern city of Valdivia, has been able to prove that alerces can absorb carbon from the atmosphere and trap it for between 1,500 and 2,000 years in standing dead trees. Buried alerce trunks can hold carbon for more than 4,000 years.

Alerce shingle was used as currency by local populations throughout the 1700s and 1800s and the wood was commonly used in construction. The famous Unesco-protected wooden churches on the island of Chiloé are built from alerce trunks.while out on a patrol in the early 1970s. Although he was reluctant to disclose the find at first, word soon got out and people began to arrive: now, more than 10,000 tourists trek down to the small wooden viewing platform next to the tree each summer.

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