360° Giant Sequoias on a Changing Planet – Part 2 | National Geographic

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one of the things that’s so interesting
about the giant sequoia trees is how
long they can live a thousand two
thousand three thousand years and
although they are incredibly resilient
we’ve managed to change our climate so
much we just don’t really know how
they’re going to deal with climate
change and in order to understand how
those changes are affecting these trees
we need to get up into their Crown’s get
samples measure the conditions that
they’re experiencing so that we can get
a better picture of how they’re doing
and how they might do in the future
being such large organisms may make them
more vulnerable as the planet warms and
if there’s less water available we’ve
found on a typical summer day that these
trees can use two to three thousand
liters of water in a single day and
that’s an enormous amount of water
especially when you take into a context
an entire forest of these trees as
conditions continue to change as
temperatures continue to increase and as
snowpack continues to decline it just
may get too hot and dry for them
the rate that temperature is increasing
on the planet is unlike anything that
these trees have experienced in the past
and as tough and resilient as these
trees are every organism has a limit and
a threshold beyond which they can’t
survive and if they’re not able to
continue to grow then we’re going to
lose that irreplaceable forest that we
love so much
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