Methuselah was 969 years old when he cast off his mortal coil during the year the Great Flood destroyed all the sinning world. During this first climate catastrophe caused by human misbehavior, Methuselah’s grandson, Noah, labored faithfully under God’s command: to build an ark with huge capacity, then float himself, his family, and the animals, two by two, to safety. When the rain finally let up, God sealed his covenant with a rainbow: He would never again destroy the world by flood. On the subject of fire, God was silent.

Biblical literalists understand “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty-nine years” as solar years. And this is important for a certain understanding of time; Methuselah was the fifth great grandson of Seth, Adam and Eve’s child. His genealogy thus linked Adam to Noah—the Garden of Eden to the world’s destruction—covering the entire history of humankind.

At 4,854 years old, the Methuselah Tree, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, beats Methuselah the man by almost four thousand years. It clings to a precipitous slope below ten-thousand-foot ridges in the White Mountains, separated from the ramparts of the Eastern Sierra by several miles of thin air above Bishop, California.

The Methuselah Tree’s long-winged seed germinated around the time humans imagined the concept of writing, several hundred years before the peak of pyramid building. It would have been about two thousand years old during the life of Buddha, three thousand at the start of the English language.

I walked the trail that passes through Methuselah’s Grove on a still and brilliant July day. The ancient trees are gnarled, majestic. Their wide trunks smoothed by the blasting action of wind-blown ice, sculpted into fluted forms, as rock is shaped by swift water. Without competition at this inhospitable site, they rise from gleaming and equally inhospitable dolomitic soil like huge arthritic hands, silent, gentle, commanding.

An ironic challenge for Bristlecones is their long endurance. Irresistible processes of erosion expose vulnerable roots to cold and drying winds at an average rate of about a foot every thousand years. But when a Bristlecone’s major root dies from this exposure, the tree does not usually topple. Only the section of trunk and branches emerging from the exposed root perish. The rest of the tree can survive. In the oldest of these trees, spiraling strips of live bark encircle great twisted drums of polished amber and russet, each a lifeline that delivers sustaining water to the surviving limbs that are startlingly covered by pelts of vivid green.

It is under exactly these grim conditions that the oldest of the Bristlecones prevail. And it is here where they have revealed profound lessons about time and change.

During the summer of 1957, Dr. Edmund Schulman’s discoveries among the White Mountain Bristlecones significantly advanced the science of dendrochronology, how we understand the past by paying close attention to what trees tell us through their accumulation of yearly growth rings.

Trees that are on the thin edge of survival in arid circumstances are exquisitely sensitive to rainfall. Their densely packed rings thus record distinctive sequences of wet and dry years—relatively wider and narrower rings—in microscopic detail. Frost rings, created when volcanic eruptions trigger early winters that damage still-forming wood cells, add quirks to the pattern. A pencil-thin core from a living tree reveals uniquely recognizable sets of lines.

The distinctive line patterns can be matched from tree to ancient tree, and from these to fallen logs whose own trees go back thousands of years. By cross-dating sequences between downed trees and living trees and then adding data from wood in bogs and wood used in historical buildings, the tree-ring record has been pushed back some 13,910 years.

The dendrochronology of the White Mountain Bristlecones provided the original continuous tree-ring sequence of known ages for the first calibration of carbon 14 dating. The insights from tree-ring libraries have been used to establish the conversion tables that literally ground-truth radiocarbon dates all over the world, providing us with accurate ages for the lodestones of archeology: bone, cloth, wood, and plant fiber.

Thus tree-ring dating has been enormously important in understanding ourselves as humans, providing, for example, insight into when we Homo sapiens supplanted Neanderthals in Europe. It has also helped us comprehend the impacts of climate change and our ability across history to respond to shifting conditions on the planet.

In Roman times, warm and wet summers recorded in tree rings correlate to periods of fortune, whereas increasing variability in the climate from around 250 to 600 CE corresponds to the turmoil of large-scale migrations across Europe and the demise of the western Roman Empire.

Most urgently, the dendrochronology of Bristlecone Pines provided key data for the “Hockey Stick” graph, which offered vital visual representation to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The graph shows average global temperatures over the past thousand years. For nine hundred years there was little variation; the graph’s line is largely horizontal, like the shaft of a hockey stick lying on its side. Then, the alarming and dramatic upward thrust of the hockey stick blade reveals the twentieth century’s sharp temperature rise.

Over his long career, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi returned repeatedly to the theme of what he called skyviewing. He wanted his art to help humanity calibrate “the relative value of all things” and made sculptures encouraging “an awareness of the void” (Yngvason et al., 2022).  With yearning eloquence, he described the Jantar Mantars, massive astronomical instruments built in India in the eighteenth century: “They contain an appreciation of measured time and the shortness of life and the vastness of the universe” (Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, 2015).

So do NASA’s first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, released during a live broadcast the week I walked the Methuselah Grove. Those images exploded into the public eye as astonishing dispatches from the forming universe, freeze-framing the fifty-thousand-to hundred-thousand-year process of a star’s birth, the bright and silent evidence of galaxies colliding, the swirling atmospheres of planets far outside our own solar system. Some of the light captured by the telescope has been traveling toward us for more than thirteen billion years. In these images, we look deep into the origins of everything conceivable.

The white and chunky dolomitic soil that causes trouble for almost every sort of life except the Bristlecones started as mud on the floor of a warm and shallow inland sea six hundred million years ago. More than half a billion years later, the seafloor was pulled east to west by inexorable planet-wide tectonic forces. In this great process of expansion, affecting hundreds of square miles and still ongoing after ten million years, immense sections of the Earth’s crust broke loose and dropped to form valleys, which would, over time, be mostly filled by sediments shed by the surrounding mountains. Thus was born the Owens Valley. Its attendant escarpments are the massive slopes of the Eastern Sierra on one side and its much smaller reflection, the dolomite-encrusted White Mountains on the other. About 694 million years after water first rippled across that whitish seafloor mud, apelike creatures began walking on two legs.

“The shortness of life and the vastness of the universe” is much in my mind as I stand next to the immense open palm of a Bristlecone, looking up. Each spire reaches toward a blue sky dimmed on the edges to the color of skim milk—a drift of far-off smoke that warns of fire, fast moving in the desiccated forests of the Western Sierra.

The lifespan of the Bristlecone Pine, the oldest tree species on the planet, is at once stunning to my human lifetime, puny in Earth eons, and infinitesimal in the cosmos. The breath in my body marks with metronome’s beat the very smallness of an individual’s human existence. And the fires in the distance remind me of the possibility that the time on Earth remaining for humans is running down. Calibration indeed.

In Washington State’s Quinault Valley stands the world’s largest Spruce tree. This Sitka spruce is 191 feet tall and a stunning 58’ 11” around. At one thousand years, it is just older than the biblical Methuselah himself. A sense of gravitas, religious awe, and a kind of grand beneficence pervades its small clearing. Afternoon light brushes the lichen dozens of feet above. Families approach for pictures. Children climb elephantine roots. Folks lightly touch the bark, gaze upward, dumbstruck and delighted.

Other moments containing this same thrum of deep peace: the Grand Canyon at dawn, Tuolumne Meadows after rain, silence in the breathing company of whales between islands in the Gulf of California. Time suspends in the presence of great beauty. It is as if we could, for a moment, leave behind the insistent mutterings of our day-to-day.

Between the Methuselah Grove’s austerely gorgeous mountain slopes and the mist-blessed valley of the Sitka spruce, the once-abundant forests of northern and eastern California were the domain of the vanilla-scented Jeffrey Pine. That changed in 2021, when California’s largest single wildfire in recorded history, the Dixie Fire, incinerated almost a million acres—an area larger than Rhode Island. Firefighters described a monstrous blaze with conditions never seen before; strong winds driving explosive and unpredictable growth combined forces with towering pyrocumulonimbus, described by NASA as a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds” (Gammon, 2022).  These behemoths essentially generate their own weather, including thunderstorms with lightning that ignite yet more blazes, making the fire below spread further and faster.

We drove north from the Bristlecone slopes and through the wreckage, gawping at denuded landscapes and recalling the luxuriantly soft-needled trees that had shaded the Feather River and clothed the hillsides around snow-covered Lassen Peak. The river seems diminished now. Bare and exposed, “naked as the eyes of a clown,” as John Prine sang.

A Jeffrey Pine will never grow as old as the ancients in the Methuselah Grove, and the species does not boast an Ent-like colossus like the world’s largest Sitka Spruce, but this generous tree is what I think of as every-day miraculous. Tall and big limbed, with a spreading crown, lustrous needles and fragrant red bark, Jeffrey Pine can endure up to five hundred years of short seasons, drought, and cold while producing abundant seed crops that make it an actual Tree of Life for a long list of forest dwellers, from ground squirrels to black bears.

Using dendrochronology techniques developed from working with Bristlecones, researchers found that the ring patterns of Jeffrey Pines tell the story of local fire history unusually well. Closely spaced fire-scars reveal what this forest was like in the years before European settlement. Low intensity fires burned through the Jefffrey Pines every eleven years or so. The flames passed quickly and served to maintain an open-spaced forest—tall old trees shading a rich carpet of grasses and flowers.

Climate change has exacerbated the searing heat and unprecedented dryness of the western forests. Years-long drought and a century of post-European fire suppression provided the literal fuel for the Dixie inferno. The number of acres burned in California each year has more than doubled in the past two decades. Seven of the ten largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2015.

The Cosmic Calendar, popularized by Carl Sagan, is a way to scale the stupendous 13.7 billion years of the universe to an understandable level. It maps cosmological, geological, and evolutionary events onto the months of a single year, with “now” as the final second of the year’s last day.

According to the Cosmic Calendar, the Big Bang takes place on January 1. The Milky Way Galaxy forms in May. Our own Earth, the perfect distance from a new sun, appears in mid-September. Life in the form of microscopic single-celled organisms develops on Earth toward the end of September. Photosynthesis begins oxygenating our atmosphere in mid-October. Dinosaurs finally appear on December 25, mammals on December 26, birds around December 27, and flowers on December 28. Late to the party, hominids show up in the evening on December 31. We started playing with fire, sculpting and painting, and growing plants for food during that last wildly exciting minute before midnight.

An equally revealing, but much more unnerving, depiction of time in the Anthropocene is the Doomsday Clock. This clock was originally conceived by Albert Einstein and other scientists who had worked to develop nuclear weapons under the Manhattan Project, but later formed The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists “to equip the public, policymakers and scientists with the information needed to reduce man-made threats to our existence” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, n.d.).

The Doomsday Clock posits midnight as the end of time, the moment of apocalypse. It began ticking seventy-eight years ago, two years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both a potent metaphor and a vividly informative graphic, it represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe as the relative time before midnight. The clock’s original scope has expanded to include any human-made global threat, with an emphasis on climate change.

Every year, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board resets the clock’s time. In 1947, the world was at seven minutes to midnight. On January 28, 2025, the board moved the clock to 89 seconds before midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe, stating: “Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster” (Mecklin, 2025).

The Climate Clock, established by two New York artists during Climate Week in 2020, explores the same theme: countdown to apocalypse. But the Climate Clock also shows “what we need to do by when” in order to transition to a safe and just climate future. The goal is to avoid catastrophe by preventing a global  temperature rise of more than 1.5 degrees centigrade, the tipping point beyond which the worst climate impacts become inevitable.

The original Climate Clock was displayed in New York’s Union Square. Climate Clock teams have since organized in countries and cities across the globe: Korea, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Berlin, Rome, Glasgow, Seoul.

According to the Climate Clock, we have a window of fewer than eight years. In cosmic time, that is an infinitely small interval. In geologic time, it is perhaps enough to settle several grains of sand. In the life of a tree, a few centimeters are eroded from dry soil, the beginnings of a root exposed. Also enough to grow eight rings, possibly revealing a pattern. For a child, eight years see the enormous changes from birth to third grade; in my life, from vigorous middle age to acute awareness of time’s personal end.

Oxygen, the grace and gift of plants, existed in our atmosphere for almost 2.4 billion years before we arrived to accept it. The trees arrived 347.7 million years before us. And the old Bristlecone, 4,788 years before me. Yet we are on this slope together, the air is high and thin, the sky—save the smoke-rimmed horizon—mostly blue. I breathe the tree-breathed air. And the tree breathes mine. The rhythm of my breathing in, then out, and the tree’s stomata opening and then closing with the mornings and evenings of its life calibrate to this moment we call now. The breath of our linked and limited time together is the most elemental of steps in the reciprocal dance we call life. We have a choice, and a little bit of time, while the earth spins under the far heavens and the trees that remain, wait.

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Notes

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. n.d.. “About the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.” Retrieved April 29, 2025. From https://thebulletin.org/about-us/

Gammon, K. 2022. “’Fire-breathing Dragon Clouds’: A Wildfire-fueled Phenomenon Explained.”  The Guardian.  August 6, 2022.Retrieved April 29, 2025. From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/05/pyrocumulonimbus-clouds-wildfire-mckinney-fire

Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. 2015. “The Jantar Mantars of Northern India: Noguchi As Photographer.”  The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.  Retrieved April 29, 2025. From https://www.noguchi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The_Noguchi_Museum_Jantar_Mantars_Brochure.pdf

Mecklin, J., ed.  2025. “Closer than ever: it is now 89 seconds to midnight.” 2025 Doomsday Clock Statement. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Retrieved April 29, 2025. From https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/

Yngvason, Hafthor, Kate Wiener, and Matthew Kirsch. 2022.  Looking Up: The Skyviewing Sculptures of Isamu Noguchi.  D. Giles Ltd.