I'd always thought that the Methuselah Tree in California was the oldest living tree. Apparently there's some disagreement, as Old Tjikko is a clonal tree, meaning the trunks come and go but the roots stay living underneath [1].
So if you're counting non-clone trees, Methuselah is the oldest. If you're counting clonal trees, some Quaking Aspens are believed to be between 80,000 and 1,000,000 years old [2].
When I had ambitions for general interest blogging, I had an article kicking around in my head on the dangers of being a superlative tree.
Prometheus was the oldest tree, killed by a core sample.
Tree of Ténéré, the most isolated tree in the world, felled by a drunk driver. [1]
The Senator, the biggest cypress in the world was lit afire by an arsonist. [2]
Kiidk'yaas, a rare golden spruce, was felled by someone protesting logging. [3]
I also remember reading about the 2nd (largest, tallest, widest?) tree in the world being lit alight by someone smoking meth in its branches, but I can't find the source or name.
Well there's always a tallest tree in the forest, if the current tallest is cut down, another becomes the tallest, so there's no particular gain or loss over and above any other big tree.
Which is exactly the point: the park does not want to lose any big old tree, and singling out superlative individuals would make them targets in a way that the collective isn't. People out for the attention of attacking a superlative individual won't just fall back to any random tree.
Surprised it's such a small tree, more like a Bonzai tree. Though as mentioned in the article, "Big trees cannot get this old".
"The world’s oldest tree, Old Tjikko, is a 9,500-year-old Norwegian Spruce tree that was discovered in 2004 by Professor Leif Kullman, and to this day remains the world’s oldest tree."
I often think that tidbits like this should be kept local or private. I can imagine some jackass trying to chop this one down now, but it seems like it might survive it as long as they don't kill the roots.
I wonder what percentage of the world's trees have been carbon dated. I'd bet that effectively 0% of the world's trees have been carbon dated and that there remain older ones out there.
~0% of sampled trees does not necessarily mean ~0% certainty that we have found the oldest tree, since tree ages are correlated strongly with each other in local neighborhoods. We know where to look to find "oldish" trees and then narrow our search there. No need to sample trees from a new growth forest to be reasonably certain how old they are.
Suppose there's a thousand square kilometers of new growth forest. Is every tree in that area new? What if there's a tree that substantially predates the others and is now surrounded by new growth?
I'd agree that percentage tested isn't directly the same as likelihood we've found the oldest, but I do think there's a strong correlation.
If you look at the trunk of a tree, almost all of it is actually dead. There is only a relative thin layer of tissue (the cambium) under the bark that is alive. The same is true for roots (with minor differences).
There is a research project [1] and book [2] by Rachel Sussman and Hans Ulrich Obrist called »The Oldest Living Things«, which features this and many more fascinating trees, moss, and other plants.
Would have been fun to see this tree in the film Midsommar, but it would have been terrible if it was damaged somehow (film makers aren't always they best at keeping nature intact, just look at the Maltese beach ecosystem which was destroyed during the filming of the GoT Dothraki wedding scenes).
So if you're counting non-clone trees, Methuselah is the oldest. If you're counting clonal trees, some Quaking Aspens are believed to be between 80,000 and 1,000,000 years old [2].
[1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/old-tjikko
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)