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One baobab tree has been estimated to be 2,500 years old.
In South Africa's Limpopo province, a
baobab tree once grew so large and stood so strong that its human neighbors decided to do the obvious: They built a pub inside
the living tree's thousand-year-old hollow trunk, which measured more than 150 feet around and enclosed two interconnected cavities.
For two decades, the
Sunland baobab attracted tourists wanting to knock back a pint in a tree. But in August 2016, one of the monster stems forming the interior wall cracked and collapsed. Eight months later, another huge chunk
toppled over, and now, five of the giant Sunland stems have collapsed and died, leaving only half of the tree standing.
Though the Sunland tree's demise could sound like a consequence of human visitation, it's part of an alarming trend:
A startlingly high percentage of the oldest, largest baobabs in Africa have died within the last 12 years, scientists report today in the journal
Nature Plants.
Comment: Interestingly, at 1,000 years old, one of Wales' oldest oak tree's recently
died following a storm, and in India a 700-year-old banyan tree had to be put on a life-saving drip. Also, one of the oldest sequoias in California
died last year too.
In the animal world, reports of
mass mortality events with no discernible cause appear to be on the rise, alongside a worldwide
collapse of
insect populations.
When taken together, with the obvious changes to climate
patterns, the erratic, shifting of seasons, and the consequential
crop delays, damage and failure, there clearly are great changes afoot on our planet which we cannot yet fully account for - but for goodness sake,
that doesn't mean it's 'not natural'!
Comment: Could it be that Antarctica was relatively ice-free say 20,000 years ago but some cataclysmic event induced rapid cooling on our planet?
In The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes: In Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes Pierre Lescaudron writes: See also: