Really Big Trees

This past weekend I drove up to Sequoia National Park to see the oldest and largest living things on Earth. Of course, I took lots of pictures, but I immediately ran in to the problem of scale. The difficulty with taking a photograph of something very large is that the impression is lost to the viewer without some sense of scale to the whole thing. The eye automatically assumes that the trunk of a tree is, maximum, about as wide as your outstretched arms. But if you look carefully at the image on the right, you’ll see a couple little dots at the bottom… Those are cars! Actually, the vehicle on the left is a minivan.

Walking around the giant sequoias (redwoods) is a humbling experience. Their immense size just makes you feel small, kind of like learning that the 100 billion stars in our mid-sized galaxy are insignificant because there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. Kind of like working at Google, too, for that matter.

This tree here is “General Sherman“. It is the largest living thing on Earth. (The little figure in front is me.) Amazingly enough, it’s not that old at only 2,200 years or so. It lost it’s largest branch about a year ago, which in itself was larger that most large trees. A giant sequoia will add as much mass to its trunk in a single year as most trees will add in their entire lifetime. Interestingly, sequoias don’t seem to have a natural lifetime. They may simply live forever unless destroyed by an outside force. Their bark and wood contain tannin, which gives it the reddish color and acts as a natural perservative against insects. The sap is also quite watery making it resistant to fire. In fact, sequoias generally won’t burn without some sort of external fuel to keep the fire alive. They also heal themselves remarkably well, living for centuries even after being seriously burned (see photo of split-trunk tree in the middle, below — click for larger version).