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A few amazing facts about trees

• Trees are some of the largest — and oldest — organisms on the planet. The very first trees were not actually made of wood — that came later.
• In fact, the largest living organism that is currently on the planet is a massive grove of Aspen trees in Utah known as Pando. Every tree in the grove is genetically identical to the tree next to it, and all share a single root system. This mega-organism has been around for hundreds, and even more likely thousands of years.
• When wooden trees did evolve, there did not yet exist any bacteria that was capable of breaking down the cellulose and lignin after they fell. (And they fell often, because they grew tall but had very shallow root systems). This created a massive glut of un-decayed dead trees piling up on the ancient forest floors, which eventually formed the vast majority of coal deposits that now exist on this planet.
• Trees should be no taller than 10 meters or so. This is because a tree has to actually draw water up from the ground, but there is a limit to how far up that water can go in any cylinder, before the suction pressures actually create a vacuum and cause the water to boil away. That limit is about 10 meters or so.
   
  So how do trees do it? Capillary action cannot account for this, because the internal “tubes” are too wide. However, trees have evolved some fascinating internal mechanisms — basically a complex series of nano-sized pores — that allow it to exert as much as NEGATIVE 15 ATMOSPHERES of pressure on the water.
   
  Which is amazing — remember, as soon as the water hits 0 atmospheres of pressure, it should boil away. But because the “tubes” in the tree do not have any gas in them whatsoever, the water is forced to remain in a meta-stable liquid state even though it should be boiling. Which basically puts something like a tension pressure on the water — the tree is literally *stretching liquid water* like an elastic band, causing the water molecules to then pull each other up the tree.

  And after all that work to bring the water all the way up to the top of the tree, 95% of it is then released. Only 5% of the water actually gets used for photosynthesis and to absorb carbon dioxide. That’s a lot of work for just a few molecules!

• Have you ever asked yourself, “where does a tree’s mass actually come from?” Think about it for a moment. When a tree grows larger, where does that mass actually come from?
   
  Most people intuitively say “the ground”, and think that the roots are pulling up nutrients from the soil that are eventually converted into the tree’s mass. However, if we think about the conservation of mass, that would mean there should be a giant hole in the ground wherever a tree grows. So that’s not it.
   
  Other people say “then it’s the water!” But as we just demonstrated, the tree actually uses only a tiny fraction of the water molecules it pulls up from the ground, not nearly enough to form all of that mass.
   
  And it’s obviously not sunlight, because as amazing as trees are, they haven’t quite figured out how to convert raw energy into mass at those scales.
   
  So that only leaves us one more option:
   
  Trees are made of air.
   
  They pull the carbon out of the carbon dioxide in the air, and that carbon then becomes part of the tree’s mass.
   
  Which means that every time you exhale, your breath becomes part of a tree’s body. You lose some of your own mass with every breath, which then becomes part of a tree’s mass.
   
  Trees are literally made of you.
   
  We are inextricably linked to these amazing ubiquitous organisms, and I think that is miraculous.