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3,500 Year Old Florida Tree Dies of Natural Causes
hondo77 writes with an excerpt from The Daily "'Mother Nature claimed one of her oldest living specimens (Monday) in a freak fire that destroyed a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree towering over central Florida. Known as "The Senator," or simply "The Big Tree," the hollowed-out majestic timber, standing at 118 feet tall, ignited before dawn. Firefighters watched helplessly as the oldest tree east of the Mississippi — and the fifth oldest in the world — blazed and then collapsed in a heap of flaming embers.' The fire likely started by 'either a weeks- old lightning strike that smoldered until combustion occured, or friction caused by buffeting winds that ignited a spark and erupted in flames.'"
This one would have had a TON of boring stories about animals walking by.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Damn those pythons!
Ok, I’m not normally one of the guy’s who says this... but
The hell is this doing on Slashdot?
It’s not tech related, it’s not significantly world changing to fall into the “stuff that matters” side of things, and it’s not even related to a topic that frequently interests this demographic (anyone here know off-hand where the other 4 older trees are?).
Regardless, this is a (sorta) discussion site, not a news aggregator. What is there to discuss here? Potential open source solutions to prevent this kind of thing from happening? Did the tree infringe anyone’s copyright? Can this be used as more evidence that Google is turning evil?
Lets discuss the bus strike that just started here in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada) instead! Huge pain in the ass traffic backed up, people scrambling to get to work, lots of people who are just plain screwed. Also, bus drivers make way more than I thought they did! I mean it’s a shitty job and all, but I figured it was a crappy paying shitty job.
Which side are you on? I kind of suspect HRM only wanted to change the rostering thing.. and threw the contracting stuff in there as something they could then take out and make the union look petty. On the other hand, the union is coming across as somewhat unreasonable. Opinions?
What's the year again? (Observe confirmation bias to have a smash year this year.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Mother Nature claimed one of her oldest living specimens
Anthropomorphize much?
I live right by the park, I could have thrown a rock at the tree. It happened January 16th, this story is old.
Natural causes? Freak fire? Which is it?
More proof of global warming. Pretty soon we'll need one of these just to step outside!
In Florida? Are you serious? Does anyone else realize that unless there's a hurricane Florida (especially central Florida) is basically a dead zone for winds. That's not to say a freak wind storm couldn't occur but I've lived in some pretty windy places and never heard of a fire started by buffeting winds. Lightning, yes. I've googled for it, can someone point me to evidence of this phenomena actually happening? Having tried to get a spark or start fire by rubbing two sticks together, I can tell you that it would indeed by a freak occurrence if wind did just that.
My work here is dung.
On one hand one of the oldest trees in the world is no more, but on the other hand a Senator died in a fire...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
First:
Seminole County investigators first pronounced the Big Tree Park fire suspicious. But as the day wore on, state arson inspectors determined the inferno was not deliberately set but rather was caused by a curious confluence of natural events described as being either a weeks- old lightning strike that smoldered until combustion occured, or friction caused by buffeting winds that ignited a spark and erupted in flames.
Then they said:
The national landmark burned yesterday from the inside out, ...
Alrighty then.
Out of curiousity, if I lit some dry grass on fire and chucked it into the hollow of the tree, I'm real curious how they could tell if it was arson?
I for one am sorry to see a living monument such as this go. I have grown up seeing the forests around my home killed due to a massive slash-and-burn, all in the name of "progress," when in fact we did not need another warehouse doomed to be shut down in 5 years. The result is that there is rarely to be seen any tree older than 25 or 30 years old. I don't know, mod me down if you want, but I believe that any currently living being that was around before the printing press was invented certainly deserves a degree of respect and a chance to keep living.
I wondered the same.
They can normally tell if a fire was started by an arsonist by finding accelerant residue, such as petrol.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Dude, that tree was smoking hot.
I live in central Florida and this happened about 3 weeks ago.
Wow. I wonder if that ever happened before.
Whatever happened to using the full form, with the abbreviation in brackets before using the abbreviated form?
I come here for the love
I think it was the light from Venus that was focused through a lens of marsh gas that started the fire.
You decided I wasn't an orc. I'll never forget you.
wow, that's not carbon-neutral...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This story should be coming from the pre-primary-bush-burning dept., as it's old news and therefore occurred before Florida's closed primary.
This is how nature voted in the Republican primaries.
a 3500 year old tree is a major scientific item. a more exciting tree would be a 4500 year old tree. or a 5500 year old tree. there's one in some american desert.
Read radical news here
This tree clearly self-immolated to protest deforestation and global warming. Maybe this will start a general protest among the trees and instead of an Arab Spring we will have an Arbor Spring.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
IT WAS A FIRE
if no fire it would live , its like saying you died cause the electrical outlet blew and your home caught fire, thus it was electricity that killed you , when in facts it was improper wiring or whatever....
If only Florida had imported elephants to prevent wild fires this tree would still be alive today.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
15% of us die of accidents, violence or suicide in our 80 year lifespans. Eliminating all natural causes of death would only extend our lives so much, unless we practiced a culture of extreme safety. (This has been the theme of many scifi stories about immortals.)
Some trees may essentially immortal, but suffer from weather or animal trauma etc. Almost nothing is alive older than 10K years.
"That means it sprouted about the same time that biblical history has Moses talking to God via a burning bush, and when Greece was in its pre-Homeric Bronze Age."
And note, that this was merely 1000 years after Noah put all biological life (except the poor the dinosaurs) on the Ark.
Florida is supposed to be subtropical with a relatively wet climate, but at the moment the place seems bone dry. Many wetlands have simply dried up and people fear that even most 'gator holes will not be deep enough for the reptiles to survive any significant frosts (the poor critters look pretty skinny as it is). Therefore, I guess it's not totally surprising that parts of the forest seem to be going up in flames spontaneously. When I lived there as a kid in the 60s and 70s, drought was never an issue, but now it has been for more than the past decade. To me, this is yet another strong sign that, climatologically, we live in a changing world.
This story happened weeks ago, and originally it was suspected as arson, and that it was in too dense of an area for Firefighters to reach. Here is a link to the NPR story.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/01/17/145342304/one-of-worlds-oldest-cypress-trees-the-senator-burns-in-florida.
This happened in mid-January. "On Monday (Jan. 16, 2012) Seminole County firefighter Al Caballero applied water to the smoldering base of The Senator. "
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
It just spent winters in Florida.
Have gnu, will travel.
Wow this tree is old enough to be the forbidden fruit tree from the Garden of Eden! Maybe if we took a core sample we would find a heart saying "Adam + Eve" :)
Was it natural causes or was it... MURDER?! Certainly no one would SUSPECT the other trees in the area! But they all just STOOD there!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I like how the damn article refers to this tree being majestic but then doesn't even feature a photo of the tree. Instead they present the reader with three useless photos.
In this day and age it's inexcusable for a news site to not feature big, quality photos. It took me all of 5 seconds to do a search online and find a good photo of the tree. You mean to tell me the so-called journalist who wrote this article couldn't have done the same? And then get some intern to get in touch with the rights-holder for permission to run it?
This was news two weeks ago. Seriously slashdot is so late to the game these days on everything.
http://www.priweb.org/globalchange/climatechange/studyingcc/scc_01.html
Open Standards Portal
...M U R D E R???????????
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. =[
Mother Nature claimed one of her oldest living specimens (Monday) in a freak ...
I saw this on the news weeks ago. The article itself is dated Tuesday, January 17, 2012 (Last Monday Was January 30th). Shouldn't someone catch this stuff before it is published?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That's not what we include under "natural causes" when a person dies!
``John Doe died of natural causes when he fell asleep with a cigaratte ...''
Natural causes usually has connotations of something related to old age within the organism itself, and not some external accident.
People are natural causes too!
Now if they just wouldn't insist to be some sort of animated machine of some sort.
Je me souviens.
ugh....if you're 3500 dead at years old...any death is natural causes.
it happens sometimes, people just explode; natural causes
... I died of natural causes?
Be seeing you...
Weird to think about but some of these crazy old trees have been around longer than the guy whose birth we base our new calender around.
"Yup, that there tree WAS 4900 years old, waddayou know!"
Also define a living thing? Typically beyond single cell it is something that is made up of other living component parts.
Some hippy will point out that GAIA is the oldest living thing at 3 or 4 billion years old... :P
Yes, but how many Nav'i were consumed in the fire?
Actually I've seen trees set alight by underground fires. It works like this: A forest fire burns a tree, setting old roots smouldering and can survive underground for months. This can travel a hundred metres or so and strike another tree.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!