Hear the Sound of a Plant Dying of Thirst
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Rachel Sussman spent a decade working with biologists and traveling the globe to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older.
The Oldest Living Things in the World: Photos
Rachel Sussman spent a decade working with biologists and traveling the globe to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. She traveled to remote locations from Greenland to Antarctica, Africa and Australia for her book " The Oldest Living Things in the World ." Above, bristlecone pines are the oldest unitary organisms in the world, known to surpass 5,000 years in age. In the 1960s a then-grad student cut down what would have been the oldest known tree in the world while retrieving a lost coring bit. A cross section of that tree was placed in a Nevada casino. PHOTOS: Sweet Methuselah! Oldest Animals on the Planet
©Rachel Sussman, from her book "The Oldest Living Things in the World"
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This critically endangered eucalyptus is around 13,000 years old, and one of fewer than five individuals of its kind left on the planet. The species name might hint to heavily at its location, so it has been redacted.
©Rachel Sussman, from her book "The Oldest Living Things in the World"
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What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a very dense, flowering shrub that happens to be a relative of parsley, living in the extremely high elevations of the Atacama Desert. NEWS: Oldest Rock Speck Zeros In On Earth's Cooling Date
©Rachel Sussman, from her book "The Oldest Living Things in the World"
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This 5,500-year-old moss bank lives right around the corner from where the Shackleton Expedition was marooned 100 years ago on Elephant Island, Antarctica. It was a victory simply being able to locate it. These days it's easier to get to Antarctica from space. VIDEO: Found: Youngest Galaxy and Oldest Star!
©Rachel Sussman, from her book "The Oldest Living Things in the World"
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At 100,000 years old, the Posidonia sea grass meadow was first taking root at the same time some of our earliest ancestors were creating the first known “art studio” in South Africa. It lives in the UNESCO-protected waterway between the islands of Ibiza and Formentera. PHOTOS: Oldest Flowering Plant Genome Mapped: Photos
©Rachel Sussman, from her book "The Oldest Living Things in the World"
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This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden. Living Fossils: Animals From Another Time
©Rachel Sussman, from her book "The Oldest Living Things in the World"
This is the soundof a plant dying of thirst. Heartbreaking isn’t it?
As a plant’s water source dries out, small bubbles form in the xylem — the hollow strands that carry water from the soil to the leaves of vascular plants.
The recording was made 30 years ago by Dr. Kim Ritman, using a very low-fi phone receiver with a pin soldered onto it to amplify the sound.
Ritman, who is now chief scientist at Australia’s Department of Agriculture, spent a good part of his PhD poking the pin into leaf stems of plants and recording the clicks as bubbles formed. The idea was to see if the diameter of the xylem determined the frequency of the sound, and he found that the larger the xylem, the lower the clicking sound.
“In general, our hypothesis that larger conduits produced lower frequency signals and smaller units at the ultrasonic frequencies was supported,” he writes in his study Acoustic Emissions from Plants: Ultrasonic and Audible Compared.
This story originally appeared on ABC Science .
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