Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff, Lauren vocal bomb. Here to the almost undeniable evidence that climate change is real and inflicting massive damage on our planet, we now add another damning bit of substantiation, the sudden death of several majestic and ancient African baobab trees. The baobab, with its massive, often hollowed out trunk, shiny fibrous bark, and high, gnarly branches that resemble roots, is scattered throughout
African savannahs. It's an odd looking tree. One legend has it that a god threw it out of paradise and it landed upside down on Earth, where it continued to grow. The baobabs, known colloquially as wooden elephants or upside down trees, are used by many African peoples for a host of reasons. Some people's in Tanzania and Kenya use pulp from the
wood to make beer. The trees bark can provide a variety of uses, including rope, harness straps, mats, snares, and fishing lines, cloth, musical instrument strings, tethers, bedsp ings, and bow strings. In both Senegal and Ethiopia. The fibers are woven into waterproof hats. They may also serve as drinking vessels, and the fiber is the best for making the famous
Kiondo baskets of Kenya. It's a tree that can live, by conservative estimates, to two thousand years old, but a June study in the journal Nature Plants reveals some alarming news about the species. Nine of thirteen oldest baobabs, five of the six largest trees that researchers examined over the past twelve years, have now died. The reasons for the sudden die off are as yet unclear, but climate change
induced drought is the top suspect. Let me quote from the study, the deaths of the majority of the oldest and largest African baobabs over the past twelve years is an event of an unprecedented magnitude. These deaths were not caused by an epidemic, and there's also been a rapid increase in the apparently natural deaths of many other mature baobabs.
We suspect that the demise of monumental baobabs may be associated, at least in part with significant modifications of climate conditions that affect Southern Africa, in particular, it's strange and unprecedented that so many trees that live for so long would succome at the same time. The studies authors point out that more research is needed to find a definitive cause.
But as Erica Wise, the head of the Climate and Tree Ring Environmental Science Research Group at the University of North Carolina, told The Atlantic, when around of your one thousand, five hundred to two thousand year old trees died within twelve years, it is certainly not normal. It's difficult to come up with a culprit other than climate change. The Baobab, it should be pointed out, is not easy to kill either. It's a legendary for its ability to withstand fire and
the stripping of its bark. Here's what the agro Forestry Database has to say about it. The thick, fibrous bark is remarkably fire resistant, and even if the interior is completely burnt out, the tree continues to live. Regrowth after fire results in a thickened, uneven integument that give the tree its gnarled appearance, resembling an elephant skin, but that serves as an added protection against fire. The trees grow so big that they're hollowed. Interiors are often used for shelter,
water storage and local gatherings. Yet between two thousand five and twenty seventeen, as researchers began to measure and record, dozens of the biggest baio babs, sturdy trees started dying off. The largest, the Platland tree, also known as the Sunland Baiobab of Limpopo Province, South Africa, was about sixty two feet that's nineteen meters high and in astonishing a hundred and eleven feet that's thirty four meters around. In twenty six and seventeen, it split four times and it's five
stems crumpled to the ground and died. When another big baobab collapsed in sixteen, the researchers found that it contained just forty nine water compared to seventy nine percent for a healthy baiobab. Yen's gay Bour, a horticulturalist at the Rhineval University of Applied Sciences, told The New York Times. The new paper nice brings together information showing that the death of the millennial bail Babs is likely due to
an unprecedented combination of temperature increase, and drought. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other environmental topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.