Chilean scientists believe that a conifer with a trunk four meters thick known as the Besavi could be the oldest living tree in the world, surpassing the current record by more than 600 years.
A new study by Dr. Jonathan Barichivich, a Chilean scientist at the Paris Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, suggests that the tree, a Patagonian cypress, also known as the Millennium Alert, may be up to 5,484 years old.
Maisa Rojas, who became Chile’s environment minister in March and a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, praised the news as a “wonderful scientific discovery.”
Known in Spanish as Alerce, the Patagonian cypress, fitzroya cupressoides, is a conifer native to Chile and Argentina that belongs to the same family as giant sequoias and redwoods.
They grow incredibly slowly and can reach heights of up to 45 m.
In 2020, Barichivich took a drilling sample of the Millennium Alert, a tree he would visit as a child, but the tool he used could not reach the core. He then used computer models to take into account environmental factors and random variation to identify their age.
As he has not yet made a full count of his growth rings, Barichivich has not formally published his estimate in a journal, although he expects to do so in the coming months.
If its findings are proven, the Millennium Alert would surpass in 600 years a 4,853-year-old bristlecone pine in California known as Methuselah, which is now believed to be the oldest tree.
The Besavi rises above a cool, humid valley in the Alerce Costero National Park, with its gnarled crevices that protect mosses, lichens and other plants.
Visitors can still surround their base, which Barichivich says is causing damage to the tree, along with climate change drying up the area.
Forest plantations cover more than 2.3 million hectares in southern Chile, according to the country’s forestry institute, and pulp production is an important industry for the country.
Thirsty non-native pine and eucalyptus plantations account for 93% of this total area, threatening Chile’s native species.
Between 1973 and 2011, more than 780,000 hectares of native forest were lost in Chile, and the forestry commission estimates that between 60,000 and 70,000 hectares of native forest have been destroyed each year in the last two decades.