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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.
Actually, there's a good answer for that: One of the really fulfilling and profounding affirming activities for nerds to engage in on a tech / "news for nerds" site is to complain about articles that don't fit that profile. But the problem is that if there never were any irrelevant articles, nobody would have anything to complain about, and thus we would have a compromised experience. It's paradoxical, but everything seems to be going according to plan.
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
(anyone here know off-hand where the other 4 older trees are?)
This is Slashdot, so I don't expect anyone here to know this, but TFA helpfully provides information about the other oldest trees :)
Agree. Better title would have been "oldest tree dies of smoking related causes.".
I figured this is science/biology related, and - I know, it seems impossible - but there is nerd stuff out there that isn't just IT stuff.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
While I agree it maybe doesn't belong on Slashdot, I actually live about 5 minutes from the park where this tree was and would take my kids there to see this tree. Pretty magnificent. So, I at least find it cool to see it on /. even if it doesn't "really" belong here. Also, disappointed to see it go. I don't know if my kids were old enough to really remember seeing it from the last time we went there. I had been meaning to get back there, but, you know, who expect a 3500 year old tree to be suddenly gone. Also, they now suspect arson and not natural causes as originally thought.
"(anyone here know off-hand where the other 4 older trees are?)"
Methuselah, believed to be about 4,800 years old. It's a species of pine tree somewhere in California. The exact location is kept a secret. This is believed to be the oldest tree still alive.
Most of the other oldest trees still living are giant sequoia scattered around California. I think Canada, Australia and Chile also have a few trees that were centuries old when Greek democracy was new.
If a person were to die in a naturally caused forest fire, it's generally not attributed to natural causes. It's attributed to burning in a fire.
Wow. I wonder if that ever happened before.
I suppose any death is by "natural causes," unless one dies at the hands of some supernatural entity.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I'm guessing he means BoingBoing.
When I hear "boing boing" I just think "TITS!", but apparently it's a new aggregator..
which is totally what she said
There is an interesting article on the oldest trees in the world in this article. It also has a good picture of The Senator before the fire.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Methuselah, believed to be about 4,800 years old. It's a species of pine tree somewhere in California. The exact location is kept a secret. This is believed to be the oldest tree still alive.
Methuselah is a bristlecone pine. And there's a pretty good reason for the secrecy. The article mentions the fear of vandalism. But in the case of the bristlecones, something worse happened. In 1964, there was another one nicknamed Prometheus that was believed to be the oldest tree. The US Forest Service sent a guy in with a chainsaw to cut it down so they could verify its age. It turned out to be over 4900 years old. No older bristlecones have been found. Other forestry people were sufficiently outraged by this that it turned into a standard textbook-level warning, and people who study the oldest bristlecones refuse to report their locations, to protect them from the Forest Service as well as from common vandals.
Actually, there are a number of plants that aren't trees that are known to be older, but their living parts are all young. The textbook example is the creosote bush, which sends up offshoots around its edges, and then the central parts die off. This produces "creosote rings" that spread out across the landscape. A few have been found whose oldest remnants are dated to over 11,000 years. But the living parts are only a few centuries old.
The question "What's the oldest living thing?" turns out to be trickier to answer than you might expect. There are more than one way to define a "living thing", and there are several ways to measure age.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There's a Radiolab episode that covers the story of Prometheus being cut down. Sad story.
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/jun/28/
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?
People interested by that may also be interested to know the demise of the former oldest living thing in the world, the Prometheus Tree, which a graduate student cut down so he could count the rings.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?