Giant Trees Hiding in Taiwan: Taller Than a 25-Story Building
Summary
Scientists just measured the tallest tree ever found in Taiwan — a misty-mountain giant standing 79.1 meters tall, about the height of a 25-story building. Using lasers fired from an airplane, they also discovered hundreds more skyscraper-sized trees hiding in a cloud forest nobody had fully mapped.
Transcript
0:00A Hidden Giant
Imagine standing at the bottom of a tree so tall that if you dropped your hat from the very top, it would take almost four whole seconds to reach the ground. Now imagine that tree was hiding — right here on our planet — and nobody had ever measured it. That actually happened. High in the misty mountains of Taiwan, a team of scientists just found a tree taller than a twenty-five-story building. Seventy-nine meters of wood, bark, and green branches, standing quietly in the fog like a sleeping giant. And here is the wildest part: it was not alone. When the scientists looked closer, they discovered hundreds of other enormous trees hiding in the same mountains, in a forest nobody had ever completely mapped. Hundreds! Just standing there, growing, for centuries, while people walked around the mountains below without a clue. So how do you lose a tree the size of a skyscraper? And how on earth do you measure one? Stick with me, because the answer involves lasers, drones, ropes, and one very brave measuring tape.
0:57Island Of Mountains
First, let us talk about where this happened. Taiwan is an island in East Asia, shaped a little like a sweet potato, and it is not very big — you could drive from the top to the bottom in about a day. But here is the surprise: Taiwan is absolutely stuffed with mountains. Not little hills. Enormous, steep, cloud-poking mountains. More than two hundred and fifty of Taiwan's peaks stand over three thousand meters tall. That is higher than most airplanes fly right after takeoff! The tallest one, Jade Mountain, reaches nearly four thousand meters into the sky. Now picture all those mountains wearing a thick green coat of forest, with rivers cutting deep valleys between them, and clouds rolling through the treetops almost every single day. Some of those valleys are so steep and so tangled with plants that almost nobody ever walks into them. And that, my friend, is exactly the kind of place where a giant can hide. But what makes these particular mountains so perfect for growing record-breaking trees? That is where things get really interesting.
1:58The Cloud Forest
High up on those slopes, between about eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred meters, there is a special kind of forest called a cloud forest. And that name is not a poem — it is a description. Almost every afternoon, warm damp air rolls up the mountainside, cools down, and turns into thick white mist. If you stood there, you could watch a cloud drift right past your knees. The air feels cool and wet on your face. Everything drips. Moss grows on moss. Ferns sprout out of tree branches instead of the ground. Sunlight comes through in soft glowing beams, and sounds go strangely quiet, like the whole forest is whispering. For a tree, this place is basically a five-star hotel. Lots of water, cool temperatures, rich soil, and gentle light. Trees that live here can grow slowly and steadily for hundreds and hundreds of years. But that same beautiful mist that helps the trees grow is also the reason nobody could find them. Want to know why fog is a giant tree's best hiding trick? Let us go and see.
2:57Lost In Green
Here is the problem with looking for a huge tree in a mountain forest: you cannot see it. That sounds silly, right? A seventy-nine meter tree is gigantic! But when you are standing underneath a forest, you are standing under something scientists call the canopy — a roof of leaves and branches so thick that only a little sunlight sneaks through. Look up, and you see green. More green. Even more green. You cannot tell if the tree above you is thirty meters tall or eighty. From an airplane it is just as tricky, because the treetops all blend together into one bumpy green carpet, and half the time that carpet is buried in cloud. And walking there? Ouch. The slopes are so steep that hikers sometimes climb using their hands, tree roots, and a whole lot of patience. Some valleys take days to reach. So for a long, long time, Taiwan's biggest trees were the world's best hide-and-seek players. Until a group of scientists came up with a brilliant idea involving beams of light. Ready?
3:51Lasers From Above
The idea came from a simple question: what if you could measure a forest without walking into it at all? What if you could measure it from the sky? A team of Taiwanese researchers, working on a project all about finding the island's tallest trees, decided to use a technology with a very cool name: LiDAR. It is spelled L-i-D-A-R, and it stands for Light Detection And Ranging. Here is the basic trick. You put a special scanner in an airplane. The scanner shoots tiny, harmless pulses of light straight down at the ground. Each pulse bounces off whatever it hits and comes zipping back up. The scanner times how long that round trip took, and because light always travels at the same super speed, that timing tells you exactly how far away the thing is. Do that once, and you learn about one spot. Do it a few hundred thousand times per second while flying across a mountain, and something amazing happens. The whole forest turns into numbers. And those numbers can be turned into a picture.
4:48Echoes Of Light
Let me show you the truly magical part. When a light pulse hits a forest, it does not all bounce off the same thing. Some of it hits the very top leaves and bounces back early. Some of it slips through a gap, hits a branch halfway down, and bounces back a bit later. And a tiny bit sneaks all the way to the forest floor and bounces back last of all. So one single pulse can send back several echoes at different times. Scientists collect all of them, and now they know two very important numbers for every spot: how high the ground is, and how high the treetops are. Subtract one from the other and — ta-da — you get tree height. No climbing. No guessing. Just light and math. When they put billions of these measurements together, they can build a three-dimensional model of the forest on a computer, so detailed you can spin it around and look at individual trees. Bats use echoes of sound to see in the dark. These scientists used echoes of light to see through clouds. And when they finally looked at the results, their jaws dropped.
5:47Hundreds Of Dots
Picture the scientists sitting at a computer, watching the forest appear on screen as a glowing cloud of dots. Green for short, yellow for taller, red for whoa. And then, scattered across the mountains, red dots start popping up. One. Then another. Then dozens. Then hundreds. Each red dot meant a tree that might be over sixty-five meters tall — the height the team had chosen as the line between a big tree and a true giant. Before this project, most people could name only a handful of Taiwan's famous huge trees. Suddenly there was evidence for hundreds of candidates, hidden across ridges and valleys, many of them in places no scientist had ever set foot. It was like turning on a light in a room you thought was empty and finding it full of elephants. But a dot on a screen is only a clue, not a fact. Computers can be fooled. A tree on a steep slope can look taller than it really is. So there was only one way to know for sure. Somebody had to go there.
6:43The Taoshan Giant
Out of all those red dots, one made everybody lean in close. It sat in a remote corner of Shei-Pa National Park, in northern Taiwan, in a valley near a waterfall on a mountain called Taoshan. The computer said this tree was around seventy-nine meters tall. Seventy-nine! If that number was right, it would be the tallest tree ever measured in Taiwan, and one of the tallest in all of East Asia. The team gave it a name: the Taoshan Giant Tree. Now, you might think finding it would be the easy part. Nope. The tree was sitting in a valley with no road, no trail, and no simple way in. To reach it, the team had to plan a full expedition — food, tents, ropes, climbing gear, scientific instruments, and enough energy bars to feed a small army. This was not a walk in the park. Well, technically it was in a park. But you know what I mean. So what happens when a group of tree hunters walks into a valley nobody has mapped? Let us find out.
7:37Days Of Hiking
The journey started with hiking. Lots of hiking. The team carried heavy backpacks up mountain trails, then left the trails behind entirely and pushed into wild forest. Imagine walking on a slope so steep it feels like a staircase built by someone who never learned about stairs. Add slippery moss. Add fallen logs the size of buses. Add rain, because in a cloud forest there is always rain. It took days of tough travel just to get close. And when you are hunting for one specific tree in a forest of a million trees, even a good map does not make it simple. The team used satellite positioning devices to check their location, then looked up, squinted through the mist, and tried to spot something enormous. Here is a funny truth about giant trees: they are so big that up close you often cannot tell. You see a trunk, and it looks like a wall. Then you step back, and back, and back, and slowly your brain goes: oh. OH. And that is exactly what happened next.
8:32Face To Trunk
When the team finally stood at the base of the Taoshan Giant Tree, the trunk in front of them was so wide that several people holding hands could barely wrap around it. The bark was reddish brown, peeling away in long soft strips, and covered in patches of green moss. Mist curled between the branches. Way, way overhead, the crown of the tree disappeared straight into cloud, so from the ground you literally could not see the top. Try to imagine that for a second. You are standing at the bottom of something so tall that the sky swallows the end of it. Around the base, roots spread out like the toes of a dragon, gripping the slope. Small ferns grew in the cracks. The forest was quiet except for dripping water and a few bird calls. Scientists who visit trees like this often say the same thing: you stop talking. You just look up. But looking up does not give you a number, and science runs on numbers. So how do you measure a tree when you cannot even see the top of it?
9:26How To Measure
This is a genuinely tricky puzzle, and I love it. Option one: use a really long ruler. Not happening. Nobody makes an eighty-meter ruler, and if they did, carrying it up a mountain would be a nightmare. Option two: use a laser rangefinder from the ground. Scientists do use these, and they are great, but in a thick forest they can be tricky, because the laser might bounce off a branch instead of the true top, or the very top might be hidden behind leaves. On a steep slope it gets even messier — where does the tree even start? Option three: fly a drone up alongside the tree and film the tip. That helps a lot, and the team did use drones. But if you want the gold-standard answer, the number nobody can argue with, there is only one method scientists fully trust. You send a trained climber up the tree with a rope, all the way to the very tip-top, and you drop a measuring tape straight down to the ground. Yes. Really. And that is exactly what they did.
10:18Experts Only Climb
Now, before we go any further: climbing a giant tree is a job for trained professional scientists with years of practice, special ropes, harnesses, helmets, and a whole team helping from the ground. It is absolutely not something to try at home, or at the park, or on that big tree in your neighborhood. Please leave the giant-tree climbing to the experts and keep both feet happily on the ground. Deal? Great. Here is how the experts do it. First, they use a special launcher to send a thin line up over a strong branch high above. Then they use that line to pull up a much thicker climbing rope. Then, wearing a harness clipped safely to the rope, the climber rises slowly upward using a system of grips and foot loops, checking every single piece of equipment along the way. It is slow. It is careful. It takes hours. And as the climber goes higher, the world completely changes. Because the top of a giant tree is not just a tree. It is a whole different country.
11:14Seventy Nine Meters
Up near the top of the Taoshan Giant Tree, the climber reached the highest point where the trunk finally thins out into slender branches. From up there, the view is unbelievable: an ocean of green treetops rolling away into the mist, with mountain ridges floating above the clouds like islands. Then came the moment everybody had been waiting for. The climber attached a measuring tape and let it unroll straight down, past branch after branch after branch, all the way to the forest floor, where teammates were waiting to read the number. And the number was: seventy-nine point one meters. Seventy-nine point one! That made the Taoshan Giant Tree the tallest tree ever properly measured in Taiwan. The prediction from the laser scan had been very close, which meant the whole method worked — and that all those other red dots on the map were probably real giants too. High fives all around. Probably some very happy shouting. Definitely some very sore legs. But hold on. How tall is seventy-nine point one meters, really? Let us make that number make sense.
12:17How Tall Really
Numbers are slippery, so let us build a picture. Seventy-nine meters is about the height of a twenty-five-story building. It is roughly forty-five kids your size standing on each other's shoulders — please do not test that. It is longer than eight school buses parked bumper to bumper, except pointing straight up at the sky. A basketball hoop is about three meters high, so this tree is more than twenty-six basketball hoops stacked on top of each other. The Statue of Liberty, from her feet to the tip of her torch, is about forty-six meters. This tree could look right over her head with room to spare. A blue whale, the biggest animal on Earth, is around thirty meters long. You would need almost three blue whales nose-to-tail to match this one tree. And if you climbed a normal staircase to reach the top, that would be roughly four hundred steps. Four hundred! So what kind of tree grows into a marvel like that? Time to meet the record holder up close.
13:09Meet The Cypress
The Taoshan Giant Tree is a Taiwan red cypress. Its scientific name is Chamaecyparis formosensis, which is a real mouthful, but the important part is this: it grows naturally nowhere else on Earth except Taiwan. Scientists call that being endemic. If you want to see a wild Taiwan red cypress, you have to go to Taiwan. Full stop. These trees have soft, flat, feathery leaves that look a bit like little green fans, and reddish bark that peels off in stringy strips. Crush a tiny piece of the wood and it smells wonderful — a sharp, fresh, lemony-pine kind of smell. That smell is not just for show. It comes from natural oils inside the wood that help protect the tree from insects and from the fungi that make wood rot away. That is one big reason these trees can survive for so incredibly long. They come with their own built-in bug spray and their own weatherproofing. Which brings up a question I have been dying to ask. Exactly how old is this enormous, wonderfully smelly tree?
14:09Eight Hundred Years
Scientists estimate the Taoshan Giant Tree has been growing for somewhere around eight hundred years, and possibly even longer. Let that sink in. Eight hundred years ago there were no cars, no planes, no electricity, no video games, and definitely no videos like this one. People wrote by hand with ink, traveled by boat and on foot, and the fastest message in the world moved at the speed of a galloping horse. And through all of that, this tree just... stood there. Growing. Quietly making wood, one ring at a time, through eight hundred years of sunrises. That is around three hundred thousand mornings. Think about the storms it has stood through, the snowfalls, the dry summers, and the thousands of generations of birds that raised babies in its branches. It was already a big tree long before your great-great-great-great-grandparents were born. And it started as a seed smaller than a grain of rice. How do we know all this? Because trees keep a diary, and it is written in a code that anyone can learn to read. Ready to learn it?
15:07Rings Tell Time
If you have ever seen a cut tree stump, you have already seen the diary. Those circles are called growth rings, and most trees make one new ring every year. In spring and early summer, when there is plenty of water and warmth, the tree grows quickly and makes wide, light-colored wood. Later in the year growth slows down, and the wood gets darker and denser. Light band, dark band — that pair equals one year. Count the pairs and you have counted the years. But it gets even cooler. The rings also record what each year was like. A wide ring means a great year with lots of water and sunshine. A skinny ring means a hard year, maybe a dry one. Scientists can read a pattern of fat and thin rings like a barcode of past weather, going back centuries. And do not worry, they do not have to cut down a giant tree to do it. They use a thin hollow tool to take out one straw-sized sample, and the tree heals up just fine. Now here is a puzzle that stumped scientists for years: how does water get all the way to the top?
16:05The Longest Straw
Think about it. A tree has no heart. No pump. No motor. Yet water has to travel from the roots in the soil all the way to leaves seventy-nine meters overhead, straight up, every single day. How? The answer is one of my favorite science facts ever. It starts at the leaves. Tiny holes in each leaf let water evaporate into the air, and that is called transpiration. When one water molecule leaves, it tugs on the one behind it, because water molecules stick to each other like the world's tiniest magnets. That stickiness is called cohesion. So the entire column of water inside the tree gets pulled upward, like the world's longest, thinnest drinking straw — except the straw is really millions of microscopic tubes inside the wood. The sun does the work. The tree just built the plumbing. A big tree can move hundreds of liters of water in one single day, without a single moving part. Nature figured out engineering long before we did. But that same straw has a limit, and that limit explains something huge.
17:07Why Trees Stop
Here is a question scientists actually argue about: is there a maximum height for a tree? And the answer seems to be yes — somewhere around one hundred and twenty to one hundred and thirty meters. Why? Because of that giant straw. The taller the tree, the harder gravity pulls back on the column of water, and the more effort it takes to lift each drop. Near the very top of a super-tall tree, the leaves end up a little bit thirsty, so they cannot open up fully to take in the air they need to make their food. Less food means less growing. Eventually the tree reaches a point where growing taller simply does not pay off, and it starts putting its energy into getting wider and stronger instead. So trees do not grow forever. Physics gently says: that is enough. Which makes the giants we do have even more amazing, because reaching seventy-nine meters means everything went right for centuries. Right soil, right water, right shelter from wind, right amount of light. And in Taiwan's cloud forest there is one more secret ingredient. It falls from the sky sideways.
18:12Drinking The Clouds
In most places, trees get water when it rains. In a cloud forest, trees also drink the clouds. Here is how it works. When thick mist drifts through the forest, billions of tiny water droplets bump into leaves, needles, moss, and branches. Those droplets stick, then join together into bigger drops, then get heavy and — plop — fall to the ground. Scientists call this fog drip, or cloud stripping, and it is not a small thing at all. In some cloud forests this sideways water adds a big extra helping of moisture on top of normal rainfall, and it keeps arriving even during dry spells. So a giant tree with a huge crown full of branches and moss is basically a gigantic water-collecting machine. It combs the clouds. And the water it drips down does not just feed the tree. It soaks into the soil, seeps into little streams, and eventually flows into rivers that people and animals depend on far below. One tree can help water a whole mountain. But wait until you see what lives up there in the branches.
19:11Gardens In Sky
Way up in the crown of a giant cloud-forest tree, something wonderful happens. The branches are so thick, so old, and so damp that real soil actually forms on top of them. Actual soil, made from fallen leaves and moss slowly breaking down, sometimes tens of centimeters deep — a whole garden sitting in the sky. And in that garden, other plants grow. Ferns unroll their green spirals. Orchids bloom. Mosses pile up like soft cushions. Even small shrubs, and occasionally little baby trees, take root right on the branches of the big tree. Plants that grow on other plants like this are called epiphytes, and they are not stealing food from the tree — they just want a good seat with a nice view of the sun. Scientists who climb into these canopies sometimes find species that live nowhere else, hundreds of meters above the ground, unseen from below for centuries. One tree can be an entire ecosystem. It is like discovering a floating island. And of course, if there is a garden up there, there are visitors.
20:09Forest Neighbors
So who lives in a sky garden? Start with birds. Taiwan's mountain forests are home to colorful creatures like the Taiwan blue magpie, a long-tailed beauty that is bright blue with a red beak, and the Mikado pheasant, which is so special it appears on Taiwan's money. Then look for giant flying squirrels. They do not really fly — they glide, using a stretchy flap of skin between their front and back legs, sailing from tree to tree like furry paper airplanes. Some can glide the length of a soccer field in one go. Add tree frogs that lay their eggs in tiny pools of rainwater trapped in mossy branches. Add thousands of insects, and spiders spinning webs between the ferns. Add a Formosan rock macaque, a monkey found only in Taiwan, sitting on a branch and quietly judging your climbing skills. All of that life, stacked in layers from the roots to the tippy-top. And here is the thing: this tree is also connected to a hidden network underground. This next part is genuinely mind-blowing.
21:07Underground Network
Under the forest floor there is a whole second world made of threads. They belong to fungi — the same family as mushrooms — and they grow in fine white webs through the soil, wrapping around and even into tree roots. This is a partnership, and both sides win. The fungi are brilliant at pulling water and minerals out of the soil, so they hand those over to the tree. The tree, using sunlight, makes sugar, and hands some of that back to the fungi. Scientists call this a mycorrhizal relationship, and almost every tree on Earth has one. But it gets stranger. Because those fungal threads spread from tree to tree, one fungus can connect many trees together underground. Some researchers nicknamed it the wood wide web. There is still lively scientific debate about exactly how much trees share through it, which is a perfect example of science in action: real scientists keep testing, keep asking questions politely, and keep learning. What we do know for sure is that no giant tree stands completely alone. And speaking of not being alone...
22:08Hundreds More Giants
Remember all those other red dots on the laser map? The team has been checking them, one by one, and the results keep coming in. They have confirmed a whole family of enormous trees across Taiwan's mountains, with names given by researchers and by local Indigenous communities who have known and respected these forests for a very long time. Several of those trees have measured over seventy meters. Many more are still waiting in valleys that take days to reach. And the scientists estimate there could be hundreds of trees on the island standing sixty-five meters or taller — a hidden population of giants that, until recently, existed on exactly zero maps. Think about how strange and wonderful that is. In a world full of satellites and phones and maps of almost everything, there were still hundreds of skyscraper-sized living things waiting to be found. It makes you wonder what else is out there. Because Taiwan is definitely not the only place growing champions. Let us take a quick trip around the world and meet the competition.
23:08World Champions
Ready for the world championship of tall trees? In first place, from the foggy coast of California, is a coast redwood named Hyperion, standing about one hundred and sixteen meters tall. That is taller than a thirty-five-story building, and its exact location is kept secret so that crowds of visitors do not trample the delicate soil around its roots. In second place, from the island of Tasmania in Australia, is a mountain ash called Centurion, at around one hundred meters. Mountain ash are the tallest flowering plants on the entire planet. And in the tropics, in the rainforests of Borneo, a yellow meranti nicknamed Menara reaches about one hundred meters too — the tallest tropical tree ever measured. Next to those giants, seventy-nine meters might sound modest. But every one of these trees is a champion of its own region, and Taiwan's cloud-forest cypresses are the tallest known trees in all of East Asia. Which raises a serious question. Beyond being incredibly cool, why do these ancient giants actually matter?
24:09Why Giants Matter
Big old trees do enormous jobs. First, they are carbon champions. Trees pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock the carbon away inside wood, and a single giant tree can hold as much carbon as many, many small trees put together, because wood adds up fast when your trunk is that wide. Second, they are water managers, catching fog and rain, slowing it down, and letting it soak into the mountain instead of rushing away all at once. Their roots grip the steep soil and help hold the slope together. Third, they are apartment buildings. Hundreds of species of plants, insects, birds, and mammals live in and on one ancient tree, and some of them cannot live anywhere else. And fourth — this one really matters — they are irreplaceable. You cannot plant a new eight-hundred-year-old tree. You would have to wait eight hundred years. That is why finding these trees was only step one. Step two is making sure they keep standing. And that is a story with some genuinely hopeful news in it.
25:05Protecting The Forest
Here is the good part. The Taoshan Giant Tree lives inside Shei-Pa National Park, a protected area where the forest is cared for and logging is not allowed. Taiwan has set aside large areas of mountain forest as national parks and nature reserves, and modern rules protect these ancient cypress forests. Long ago, many of Taiwan's old cypress trees were cut down for their beautiful, fragrant, rot-resistant wood. Today the thinking has changed: a living giant is worth far more standing up. And the map the scientists built is a protection tool all by itself, because you cannot take care of something if you do not even know it exists. Now conservationists can point at a map and say: right there, that valley, those are the important ones. The researchers also share their findings openly, so other countries can use the same laser-mapping method to find their own hidden giants. In fact, teams around the world are already doing exactly that. So here is my question for you: how would you like to be a tree scientist right now, today?
26:06The Shadow Trick
You do not need an airplane or a laser. You need a sunny day, a friend, and a measuring tape — plus a grown-up to help. It is called the shadow method, and it is over two thousand years old. Step one: find a tree standing on flat, open ground. Step two: measure how tall your friend is. Step three: measure the length of your friend's shadow on the ground. Step four: measure the length of the tree's shadow. Now the math. Divide the tree's shadow by your friend's shadow, then multiply that answer by your friend's height. That is roughly the tree's height. For example, if your friend is one meter tall with a two-meter shadow, and the tree's shadow is twenty meters long, then twenty divided by two is ten, and ten times one meter equals ten meters of tree. You just measured something you cannot reach, using nothing but sunlight and multiplication. That is real science. And there is one more measurement you can take, and it is even easier.
27:01Be A Scientist
Try measuring how wide a tree is. Wrap a measuring tape around the trunk at about the height of your chest and write the number down. That is called the circumference. Do it for several trees in your neighborhood and you will quickly find out which one is the local champion. Even better, measure the same tree once a year on the same date, and keep a notebook. Over a few years you will actually watch it grow — and you will be doing exactly the kind of long-term record-keeping that real forest scientists do. You can also become a leaf detective. Collect fallen leaves from the ground, press them flat between the pages of a heavy book, and try to work out which tree each one came from. Just remember the tree-scientist rules: stay on the ground, never pull leaves or bark off a living tree, and always bring a grown-up along. Trees are patient. They will still be there tomorrow. Alright — let us pull all of this together, because we learned a LOT today.
27:52Keep Looking Up
So what did we discover? High in Taiwan's misty mountains, scientists used LiDAR — pulses of light fired down from an airplane — to see through the clouds and map a forest nobody had fully explored. The laser map lit up with hundreds of possible giants. A team hiked for days into a wild valley, found the Taoshan Giant Tree, and a trained climber went all the way to the top and dropped a measuring tape: seventy-nine point one meters, the tallest tree ever measured in Taiwan, and roughly the height of a twenty-five-story building. We learned it is a Taiwan red cypress that grows nowhere else on Earth, that it is around eight hundred years old, that it drinks the clouds, that it lifts water using nothing but sunshine and stickiness, and that its branches hold whole gardens up in the sky. Here is your challenge: go outside this week, pick the biggest tree near you, and measure it with the shadow trick. Then tell your family the wildest fact you learned today. Because somewhere out there, another giant is still waiting to be found. Keep looking up.
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Series: science (English)