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not sure if i buy their methodology or their claim, but that's what they're saying.
Quote:
Chilean environmental scientist Jonathan Barichivich, working at the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory in Paris, has estimated that the tree is 5,484 years old. If Barichivich's unique process for calculating the tree’s age is correct, that would make Alerce Milenario much older Methuselah, a 4,853-year-old bristlecone pine in California currently thought to be the world’s oldest tree.
Researchers typically calculate a tree’s age with a process known as dendrochronology, which involves counting the number of rings in the tree’s trunk. While a tree is still alive, they do this by boring into the trunk and examining a core sample; they may also take a sample from the roots and use carbon-dating techniques to determine its age.
But Chile’s Alerce Milenario is too wide for a standard borer to reach its center, and the roots of the ancient tree have become too fragile with its advanced age, so Barichivich had to take a different approach.
"The objective is to protect the tree, not to make headlines or break records," Barichivich tells Newsweek’s Jessica Thomson. “It's not the point to make a big hole in the tree just to know that it's the oldest. The scientific challenge is to estimate the age without being too invasive to the tree."
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