Published via Ecency

Trees are beautiful and do a lot: They hold the ground together to prevent erosion, make urban areas cool and provide shade with their branches, and produce oxygen, which is good for animals and humans. We have a lot of trees with different trees having different functions.

If I were to ask you to describe a tree, you would say a plant with a straight, tall stem, that has strong branches and deep roots but trees in the dancing forest aren't straight to the top. Found in the Caronian Spit of the Baltic Sea, the forest is called the drunken forest by locals. In this forest, the pine trees curve and twist as they go upwards to the sky.

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Why this happens isn't understood yet, but trust scientists to come up with different theories on the cause, with some saying it is as a result of unstable soil, some are with the belief that it could be as a result of Nuclear Radiation, others say wind, and some very funny ones like beetle damage. But locals believe that crawling through the tree loops gives extra life to whoever does it.

For the wind theory, the Alpine zone forest is a good precedent for it. This forest has in it twisted trees known as Krummholz which are disturbed by terrible cold wind causing them to grow more horizontally. While this theory looks more realistic, some other people believe these trees have been trained to grow that way just like we have been manipulating trees for a long time like Bonsais being trained by Mr Miyagi. We have learned to train trees from when they are little and this can affect their tissue characteristics over time.

This said, another thing that keeps me in awe is how old trees can get. Some trees can grow for years that when you are told how old they have been existing, you could be moved to ask how they have survived this long but then, what is the oldest tree?

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The oldest known individual tree was discovered not too long ago, in 2012 in East Central California. This tree is 5068 years old, and it is the Great Northern Bristlecone Pine. This was identified thanks to crossdating where samples from both living and dead trees are collected and matched up to the pattern of their rings so as to get a timeline.

While the Great Northern Bristlecone Pine has lived long, another tree found in the Fishlake National Forest in South-Central Utah is up for the challenge. The Quaking Aspen (Pando) which is a tree with so many trees is the oldest living thing on earth. This is not an individual tree but all the trees there are identical genetically. While the trees currently are not above 300 years, their root are about 80,000 years old. So if we are looking forward to the oldest tree, it is dependent on how you see it.