Deep in Taiwan's famously misty mountains, researchers have officially crowned the country's tallest tree. It's a 1,000-year-old fir, stretching higher than a 20-story building, and it comes with a name that sounds straight out of a fantasy novel: "the heaven sword of the Da'an River."
Because apparently, that's where we are now. And honestly, it fits.
Measuring this arboreal giant wasn't exactly a casual stroll in the park. A team of climbers, during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023, quite literally scaled the tree. Then, because science, they dropped a tape measure from the very top all the way down to the forest floor. The result? A staggering 84.1 meters (276 feet) of pure, ancient timber.
The Quest for Giants
The hunt for these towering titans began back in 2014, spearheaded by a wonderfully named group: the "Taiwan tree seekers." This isn't just a bunch of folks with binoculars; it's a multidisciplinary dream team featuring ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers, and, crucially, Indigenous people who know these lands better than anyone.
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Start Your News DetoxRebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, a lead author from the Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, put it simply: the team members are all "tree lovers and like adventures." Which, if you think about it, is both impressive and slightly terrifying given the terrain. Their findings were published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.
Taiwan, it turns out, is one of those rare sweet spots on Earth where trees can achieve such dizzying heights. The island sits right where tropical and subtropical zones duke it out, and its mountains are a natural haven for several types of enormous conifer trees. The record-breaker itself is a Taiwania cryptomerioides – a species so majestic the Indigenous Rukai people call it "the tree that hits the moon."
Despite nearly 60% of Taiwan being covered in forest, a significant chunk of its old-growth trees were lost to logging between 1912 and 1991. But some ancient forests, thankfully, survived. Their secret? Slopes so steep and treacherous, even loggers decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Finding the tallest tree in such a rugged, unforgiving landscape is a testament to perseverance, and perhaps, a touch of madness.
