Giant sequoia is the tallest tree in the world, with a height of more than 100 meters and a volume of wood of hundreds of cubic meters. The sequoia habitat is a small strip of the Pacific coast of North America. Most of them are in the national parks of the states of California and Oregon.
This tree is striking in its majesty and size. The largest copies are listed in the Guinness Book of Records and they are given the names: “Hyperion”, “General Sherman”, “Helios” and others.
Giant sequoias have been growing in the national parks of the states of California and Oregon since time immemorial, but they have recently begun to measure their “growth”. The first record holder found in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park is the sequoia, called the “Stratospheric Giant.” Its height reaches about 113 meters.
True, she failed to maintain the status of “champion” among the trees. Soon, in 2006, a scientist Atkins found a taller tree named “Hyperion”, the size of which is 116 meters. This tree has been growing in Redwood Park, California for almost 4 thousand years and at the moment it is the tallest tree in the world.
In addition to California and Oregon, sequoias grow in national parks:
Great Britain
Hawaii
Italy
Canada
New Zealand
South Africa
The tree needs a moist marine climate, and therefore it grows in countries where it has the necessary climatic conditions. Giant trees, forever green, with an unusually clean smooth trunk and dense vegetation at the very top, are really worthy of attention.
However, do not forget that the tallest tree is not necessarily the largest. Scientists have great difficulty determining the size of these giants. We have to take into account the volume of the trunk and branches. Therefore, such calculations are rarely performed. Nevertheless, the largest tree was found, it was called “General Sherman”. In volume, it reaches more than 1480 cubic centimeters, although inferior in height to “Hyperion”.
Sequoias are “peers” of dinosaurs, they are the long-livers of our planet. In the Jurassic period, they grew everywhere. Most of them are over 1500 years old. However, there are units whose age is 3.5 or more thousand years. But although sequoias live for a very long time, but, unfortunately, their number is not so great. Many trees are destroyed for furniture, and young shoots do not always grow.
The name sequoias was received from the leader of the Indian tribe Cherokee, who once lived in these places.
A distinctive feature of trees is huge, unrealistically thick, but bare trunks. Initially, the branches completely cover the trunk, but as the tree grows, the lower branches fall off, covering only its upper part.
It’s not worth talking about the weight of such giants, these are hundreds of tons of valuable species, however, here all the trees are carefully monitored and even the fallen sequoias are not destroyed, but remain in the same place. They simply attach plates with information about the age of the tree, the date and reason for the fall.
In any case, this is exactly what they do in the Sequoia Reserve. This is where you can see an amazing picture. The roadway in the park is blocked by a huge collapsed tree. So that it does not interfere with the passage of guests, they just did something like a gate and calmly move through such an unusual obstacle, taking photos from time to time against its background.
