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Methuselah’s environment lacks nutrients, water, and oxygen. In other words, it’s the perfect place to grow very very old.

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Great basin bristlecone pine tree: a species of pine tree that includes many of the longestlived individual trees on Earth.
Bark beetles: the common name for a subfamily of beetles that has destroyed millions of acres of forest across the Western United States.
Terpenes: waxy chemicals that increase wood density in certain pine trees.
Bark morphology: a trait of certain bristlecones in which strips of exposed wood extend up and down the tree, allowing them to pass nutrients even when other parts of the trunk have died.
Dolomite: a type of rock high in magnesium and calcium that turns into extremely alkaline soils.
Extremophile: an organism that is tolerant to environmental extremes.

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REFERENCES
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Bentz, Barbara (2022). Personal Communication. Research entomologist, US Forest Service. https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/abou...

Millar, Connie (2022). Personal Communication. Scientist emirata, US Forest Service. https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/abou...

Ababneh, L. (2006). Analysis of radial growth patterns of stripbark and wholebark bristlecone pine trees in the White Mountains of California: Implications in paleoclimatology and archaeology of the Great Basin. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper...

Ross, A. (2020). The Past and Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Karlamangla, S. (2022). In California, Where Trees are King, One Hardy Pine has Survived for 4800 years. New York Times. ​​https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/us...

Bentz, B.J., Hood, S.M., Hansen, E.M., Vandygriff, J.C. and Mock, K.E. (2017), Defense traits in the longlived Great Basin bristlecone pine and resistance to the native herbivore mountain pine beetle. New Phytol, 213: 611624. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.14191

Waldo S. Glock (1970). Bristlecone Pine in the White Mountains of California: Growth and RingWidth Characteristics, Arctic and Alpine Research,2:3, 227229. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...

Pennisi, E. (2016). Greenland Shark may live 400 years, smashing Longevity Record. Science. https://www.science.org/content/artic...