Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.” Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023. The tree measured 84.1-meters (276-feet). The findings have been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. A team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers and Indigenous people that calls itself the “Taiwan tree seekers” began the search in 2014. “The common characteristics [of the team] are probably that we are all tree lovers and like adventures,” Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, lead author from Division of Forest Ecology, Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, told CNN. ‘The Heaven Sword’, Taiwan’s tallest tree, measures 84.1 meters. Photo courtesy of Steven Pearce. Taiwan is one of the few places on Earth where trees can grow this tall. The island sits where the tropics meet the subtropics, and its mountains host several giant conifer species. The species behind the new record, Taiwania cryptomerioides, is known to the Indigenous Rukai people as “the tree that hits the moon.” Although nearly 60% of Taiwan is covered in forest, loggers cleared much of the island’s old-growth forest between 1912 and 1991. However, its steep slopes were too dangerous to reach, and pockets of ancient forest survived. Still, finding the tallest tree amid the rugged terrain was a task. Taiwan…This article was originally published on Mongabay
by Kevin Hughes | Natural News The 2009 leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia revealed efforts by scientists to hide flaws, exclude skeptics and withhold data, raising serious questions about the transparency and credibility of the IPCC. The IPCC has been criticized for using non-peer-reviewed sources, such as environmental advocacy group newsletters, leading to retractions of claims about the Amazon rainforests, African crop harvests and Himalayan glaciers. The NIPCC report challenges the IPCC’s assertion that most warming since the mid-20th century is due to human greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that natural causes are […]
Iran exposed the fragility beneath American air dominance. Beijing is studying every loss. When the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran on February 28, 2026, Washington anticipated swift, overwhelming dominance. The arithmetic seemed straightforward: the world’s most advanced air force against a sanctions-hobbled regional power. The result was a cataclysmic failure. A […]
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