The giant spruce in the video above, shot during my 1996 honeymoon trip to Kitamaat, a village in northern British Columbia, is just one example at the giant end of the spectrum. Here’s the geological survey summary:
Trees do not slow in their growth rate as they get older and larger — instead, their growth keeps accelerating, according to a study published today in the journal Nature.
“This finding contradicts the usual assumption that tree growth eventually declines as trees get older and bigger,” says Nate Stephenson, the study’s lead author and a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “It also means that big, old trees are better at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere than has been commonly assumed.”
An international team of researchers compiled growth measurements of 673,046 trees belonging to 403 tree species from tropical, subtropical and temperate regions across six continents, calculating the mass growth rates for each species and then analyzing for trends across the 403 species. The results showed that for most tree species, mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size — in some cases, large trees appear to be adding the carbon mass equivalent of an entire smaller tree each year.
“In human terms, it is as if our growth just keeps accelerating after adolescence, instead of slowing down,” explains Stephenson. “By that measure, humans could weigh half a ton by middle age, and well over a ton at retirement.” [Read the rest.]
This all brings to mind the “impossible hamster” animation that I wrote about in 2010:
Addendum | On an unrelated front, two contrasting reflections on my songwriting and music have been posted — one an interview with me by Mark Tercek, the president of the Nature Conservancy and the other a prickly critique of my song “Liberated Carbon” by No Tricks Zone climate blogger Pierre Gosselin, who says:
I’ll buy his CD (minus one song), but only after he says thank you to the petroleum industry, who made it possible for him to compose and produce the music in the first place.