In a harsh alpine desert, the Great Basin bristlecone pines abide amid climate change. Among them is the oldest tree on Earth (if you can find it).
Great Basin bristlecone pine trees endure in harsh conditions that other vegetation cannot withstand.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Before the Egyptians built the Pyramids, before Jesus was born, before the Roman Empire formed or collapsed, the trees were here.
Ten thousand feet up in the White Mountains of central California, in a harsh alpine desert where little else survives, groves of gnarled, majestic Great Basin bristlecone pines endure, some for nearly 5,000 years. Their multicolor trunks bend at gravity-defying angles, and their bare branches jut toward the sky, as if plucked from the imaginations of Tim Burton or J.K. Rowling.
“Bristlecones are kind of magical that way,” said Constance Millar, an ecologist who for more than three decades has been studying the pines, which grow only in California, Nevada and Utah. Wandering the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in Inyo County, where these conifers have eked out an existence for millenniums, she said, “gives you that sense of infinity.”
These trees, however, face a number of challenges that stem primarily from a changing climate. Severe drought in the West is fueling megafires that have destroyed giant sequoias and redwoods, once thought to be largely fire-resistant. And Dr. Millar recently published research revealing that bark beetles, exploding in population amid warmer temperatures, are, for the first time, killing Great Basin bristlecones.
