[size=-1]Mercury News Washington Bureau
[/size]Thu, Nov. 14, 2002
WASHINGTON - Recent images from space satellites reveal hundreds of little-known primeval forests and stands of ancient trees scattered all across the United States. Scientists say these trees -- some dating before the rise of the Roman Empire -- provide an unequaled record of droughts and floods that can help them understand historic disasters and predict environmental changes.
In addition to California's famed redwoods and giant sequoias, researchers have discovered that millions of very old trees remain in their pristine state in dozens of states from New England to the Carolinas and across Texas to Arizona and Nevada.
"We can still find unmolested virgin forests," said David Stahle, a forest scientist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. "There are still trees that are thousands of years old, the last relics of the great forest primeval that has been heavily disturbed or completely destroyed by man."
According to Stahle, the largest old-growth forest left in the United States consists of ancient blue oaks covering more than 4,000 square miles of the California foothills. But even in the thickly populated eastern United States, Stahle thinks, more than 2,000 square miles of old-growth woodlands survive to this day.
"People used to think there were no ancient trees in the eastern United States. That is not the case," Stahle said. "The abundance of ancient forest sites strongly contradicts the common misconception that most ancient forests were destroyed by logging and agricultural development."
Old-tree hunter Robert Leverett, executive director of the Friends of the Mohawk Trail in Deerfield, Mass., has discovered a 626-year-old black gum tree in New Hampshire. There are 400-year-old red oaks on a Massachusetts mountain in view of the Boston skyline. Only 50 miles north of Manhattan, 500-year-old pitch pines cling to a mountainside in the Hudson River Valley.
Farther south, bald cypress trees, 1,500 to 2,000 years old, dwell along North Carolina's Black River. Stands of 900-year-old junipers survive in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. About 500 square miles of post oaks up to 400 years old remain in eastern Oklahoma, some only 15 miles from downtown Tulsa.
