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PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEITH LADZINSKI
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Some of these trees have been standing long before the time of Muhammad, many centuries before Jesus and Cleopatra, even before Egypt’s pyramids. In high altitudes, their pale trunks, twisted by centuries of gusting wind and rain, have grown slowly in terrain that frustrates other plants. Evidence shows one of them has endured nearly 5,000 years.
But will climate change fell the mighty Great Basin bristlecone pine of North America and its possible longevity challenger, South America’s Patagonian cypress?
Experts tell Nat Geo’s Craig Welch that bristlecones at lower elevations may be vulnerable, but change would have to occur more rapidly than projected to kill the bristlecones higher up mountains, where the trees are most at home.
Read the full story here.
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