Have you ever wondered why we have so few old trees? An 800-year-old Grunwald oak in Kaliningrad, an oak growing in Chuvashia, which is 480 years old, a plane tree in Dagestan, 700 years old - there are about 20 long-lived trees in our country. They have long become local attractions, they are taken care of in every possible way, excursions are led to them, they are photographed against their background. But most of our forests are young. Despite the fact that oaks can live up to 1500 years, pines up to 300, and spruces up to 400, you will not find trees at least 200 years old. Most of our forests are made up of 100-120 year old plants. Why is this happening?
What's wrong with our forest?
Having made some simple calculations, you can see that the trees in our today's forests began to grow at the end of the 19th century. And everywhere. There are simply no old-timers who have reached at least 130–140 years. One gets the impression that giant lumberjack brothers walked across our plains and simultaneously cut down all the vegetation. But why did they need it? Or maybe they are not lumberjacks at all?
If we recall the photographs taken after the fall of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 in the Siberian taiga, then it can be seen that the trunks of the fallen trees are of average and approximately the same thickness, which indicates their rather young age. As if some 20-30 years ago there was no forest in this place at all, and then it appeared simultaneously on a large territory. But this is a deaf, untouched thicket, stretching for many kilometers of Siberian expanses!
Why is there a meteorite that fell at the beginning of the last century! Take our days. Remember your trips to the forest: how many trees have you seen there, at least one meter in circumference? No one! All trees are 20-30 cm in diameter, which means that their age is about 40-50 years.
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Where are the old-timers?
Does the official science have any explanation for this fact? It turns out there is. Researchers believe that most of our massifs are so-called derivatives, which were formed on the site of forests that were once cut down or burned down. It is rather problematic to imagine that gigantic squares were cut down by peasants of the 19th century with one ax. Even with modern technology, this is a very difficult task. What's left? Fire.
Scientists say that fires are so common that it is not worth focusing on this at all. Some even view fire as a natural mechanism for reforestation. It happens that a bug will undermine a tree, or it will fall from a strong wind, and sometimes a fire flares up and burns everything out at once. All our young forests stand on burnt-out areas, which explains their young age.
But what kind of fire was it supposed to be, which destroyed millions of hectares of trees at once? And why we do not know anything about such a large-scale catastrophe - no documentary evidence, no information has reached us.
The fire, going through the wall, spares nothing on its way. Whole villages and cities were to be burned along with the forest. And this is not fiction - remember the modern news about conflagrations, when the fire came close to the extreme houses of the settlements, or even burned them out. At least some facts should have remained about the global raging fire element, but they are not. Maybe historians are hiding something from us?
Could it be the climate?
After all, mammoths became extinct precisely because of catastrophic global warming, which, by the way, was accompanied not only by the extinction of the animal world, but also by a significant change in the vegetation. It is known that at that time the undersized tundras and steppes, which made up the landscape of the earth, gradually began to change their appearance and turn into forests.
Be that as it may, while science does not have plausible versions of the reasons for the young age of our forests, you yourself choose what to believe in. After all, a person hypothetically can live up to 130 years, but there are very few people who have even crossed the 90-year mark.
Trees are the same story. A pine tree can live up to 300 years under ideal conditions, the plant should have enough sunlight, water and space so that neighbors in the forest do not pull resources for survival on themselves. But where did you see ideal conditions? We have a flood, then a drought, then evil woodcutters.
There are many versions, and although there are more questions than answers, let your inquiring mind decide for itself which of them are worthy of attention and further study, and which should be discarded due to their obvious absurdity.
Natalia Illarionova