Seeing a New Zealand kauri sitting implacably in dense forest is an awe-inspiring sight.  A Gondwanaland relic, these conifers are massive in scale and age: individuals can be several metres across and live up to 2000 years.  Staggeringly, many trees found today started life before any human ever stepped foot on New Zealand (the earliest Polynesians seemed to have arrived around AD 1300). Unfortunately, early European settlers also thought the trees were great and plundered their forests to use kauri for building material and ship spars; even the resin was put to use as a polish. It didn’t take long before the kauri was decimated.  Fortunately today, the few remaining living stands are protected.

But buried in former marshlands across northern New Zealand are ancient kauri trees, relics of a bygone age.  Dating anywhere back to 130,000 years ago, the forests are preserved in peat.  As the farmers have dug drainage ditches, the trees are slowly coming to the surface. They’re perfectly preserved; the wood looks like it was cut down yesterday and in some cases the leaves are still be green when first exposed to the air.  The trees have effectively been frozen in time and preserve a moment in our planet’s past. Research on living trees has shown that their rings give a year-by-year measure of the climate.  A team of us are now working with the millers who are extracting the wood.  We’re starting to get a handle on what happened when in the past and we’re hoping to use this to better predict future climate change.  To give you an idea of what these ancient trees look like here is a short movie showing Dave Stewart and the team at Ancient Kauri Kingdom extracting the wood.