360° Giant Sequoias on a Changing Planet – Part 2 | National Geographic

[Music] One of the things that's so interesting about the giant sequoia trees is how long they can live: a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years. Although they are incredibly resilient, we've managed to change our climate so much. We just don't really know how they're going to deal with climate change.

In order to understand how those changes are affecting these trees, we need to get up into their crowns, get samples, and measure the conditions that they're experiencing. This way, we can get a better picture of how they're doing and how they might do in the future. Being such large organisms may make them more vulnerable as the planet warms.

If there's less water available, we've found that on a typical summer day, these trees can use two to three thousand liters of water in a single day. That's an enormous amount of water, especially when you take into context an entire forest of these trees.

As conditions continue to change, as temperatures continue to increase, and as snowpack continues to decline, it just may get too hot and dry for them. The rate that temperature is increasing on the planet is unlike anything that these trees have experienced in the past.

As tough and resilient as these trees are, every organism has a limit and a threshold beyond which they can't survive. If they're not able to continue to grow, then we're going to lose that irreplaceable forest that we love so much. [Music]