Wollemi Pine

Andrew Peters (Australia)

Ninety million years is not a long time. It is merely the amount of time in which great mountain ranges are built, and subsequently eroded. It is merely the amount of time in which continents complete epic voyages across oceans. No, ninety million years is not a long time; it is an eternity. An eternity is the amount of time that one species of tree has confronted the myriad forces of nature, and survived to tell its tale. That tree is the Wollemi Pine, Tree of the Ages.  

Out beyond the western fringes of Sydney, beyond the hustle and bustle of that big city, there lies an area of Australian bush. The Wollemi, as this world heritage listed wilderness area is known, is a place of dramatic contrasts, indescribable beauty, and heartbreaking, rugged terrain. Within its gaping bowels lay rocky peaks that soar skywards to one thousand two hundred metres, and cavernous canyons that slice wounds half a kilometre deep into sandstone plateaux. It is a place where shrubs struggle to exist on barren, windblown ridges only metres from where verdant temperate rainforest thrives in the sheltered cool of a Wollemi Canyon. The ubiquitous creatures of the Australian bush, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, koalas, platypuses, echidnas and emus all chug away in happy isolation from the world at large, in the timeless landscape that is the Wollemi.  

Although it lies just one hundred kilometres from the towering skyscrapers of Sydney's central business district, the Wollemi is an isolated and pristine wilderness. Its pristine state, maintained for two hundred years in close proximity to Australia's largest city is testament to the treachery of its landscape, a landscape that destroys hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Roadworks, coalmining, forestry, and hydroelectricity have, over the years, all been planned for the Wollemi. None have eventuated. To this day, not one road traverses the Wollemi, an area one hundred kilometres long and seventy kilometres wide. Today, as in the past, the only method by which it is possible to venture into the Wollemi by is on foot. It was into this wild, innaccesable and pristine landscape that three intrepid men, led by David Noble, set off into during a weekend in September 1994. Little did know what an extraordinary discovery they would make.  

David Noble, a New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service Ranger, has been described by many as a latter-day explorer of the Wollemi wilderness. His passion is the exploration of canyons. There are thought to be 500 canyons in the Wollemi wilderness, but of those, only 400 have been visited by non-Aboriginals. Of those 400, Noble has journeyed into 375, many of which he has been the first non-Aboriginal to enter. Some canyons are so remote, rough, and perilious that many scientists doubt wether even the skilled and resourceful Aboriginals, who spent their entire lives in the canyons of the Wollemi, visited them. It is no coincidence that the local Aboriginal word for the Wollemi canyons, wollumnii, from which Wollemi is derived, means "look around you", or "watch your step". Noble indulges his passion for the exploration of the immense Wollemi wilderness frequently. During most weekends he can be found, or not found, somewhere, out there, in the enormity of the Wollemi. On this particular weekend in September, he was accompianed by two friends, Michael Castelyn and Tony Zimmerman, also avid bushwalkers. The trio planned to visit a canyon which they had discovered a few months earlier during a prior expedition. Up until that time, the canyon, like so many others Noble had visited, had not felt the weight of a bushwalking boot pressing into its base at any time during its existence. But this canyon, its location a closely guarded secret, was unlike the others Noble had visited, it was to yield something astonishing, something unique among the pantheon of the world's great trees. During the walk, as the trio were battling through the thick rainforest and precipitous drops within the canyon, Noble found himself in an area more open than the average Wollemi rainforest. Noble looked ahead and saw big, strange trees. Noble said later of this experience, "I had seen thousands of these gullies, and it looked totally different to the coachwood and sassafras rainforests that you normally find." The trees that stood before him were incongruent to anything that his memory could recall. They were wrapped in a bark that looked like Coco Pops Breakfast Cereal, and held up leaves of the like he had never seen before. Thinking that he may have possibly hit upon something rare or even unknown, Noble collected a leaf from one of the trees, shoved it into his backpack, and continued on his walk with his companions. 

After returning from his walk, Noble sought to identify the tree that he had plucked such an unusual leaf from. Noble enlisted the help of a number of organisations including the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service and Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. It was only after months of research by these organisations that the true extent of Noble's discovery was realised. The tale of the Wollemi Pine, a story that has been in the making for ninety million years, had been uncovered. Its tale is of an exuberant childhood, a stately adulthood, and a tormented old age. This is the tale of the Wollemi Pine. 

Ninety million years ago, a tiny seedling thrust its way through a choking mat of leaf litter to emerge into the gloom of a Gondwanan forest. The young seedling had been lucky to make it to this early station along the journey of life. The millions of particles of pollen that had issued from his pollen cone had almost all been scattered afar by the wind. He was one of the few lucky ones to find himself drifting on the wind in the direction of a seed cone. With time, he had developed into a seed, a tiny capsule of life ready to explode into a profusion of leaves at the slightest chance given to it. When the cone was ripe, it split, and he gracefully floated down to the forest floor upon the column of air created by his encircling wings. There he had soaked up the moisture typical of the forest floor, and promptly found himself sporting leaves beneath the canopy of a great forest. His chance of surviving in such a situation was, at best, almost non-existent. But he enjoyed an early break in life. Soon after germinating, the tree that had cast such gloom over his leaves was toppled in a storm, missing him by centimetres. Such is the luck that determines life, or death. Immediately light began to pour through the gaping hole left in the canopy, and the young tree began its inexorable climb upwards towards the canopy. He was an exception, he would survive. But, the young seedling was an exception in more than one way. While he was being created, a freak genetic mutation had occurred. It was a mutation that had scrambled the young one's genes, as if its constituent parts had been poured into an electric blender, and the switch flicked to on. Then, like now, the overwhelming majority of such mutations resulted in a deformed organism that was speedily committed to summary execution by the unjust jury of the ultra competitive Gondwanan forests. But the young one was an exception, he was part of a new jury, but not a new order. 

It may have been in a scenario similar to the one imagined above that a new species, the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia Nobilis) burst forth onto the world stage. The first few million years of the Wollemi Pine's existence were merry ones for the vigorous young tree. It expanded its range throughout the supercontinent of Gondwana in dramatic fashion. Gondwana in the Cretaceous was a mere shadow of its former self. During the Jurassic, a period which had ended approximately fifty million years earlier, Gondwana had extended from the south pole to beyond the equator, and incorporated the continents of South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and the Indian sub-continent. But by the evolution of the Wollemi Pine, only Antarctica and Australia remained.  

The Wollemi Pine expanded into a Gondwana that was already cloaked in exotic, ancient forests. Conditions for growth were far more favourable than the forests of today experience. At the time, the whole world was baking in a huge greenhouse. Carbon dioxide levels were between 1000 and 1500 parts per million of the atmosphere, 3 to 5 times the amount that it currently constitutes in our air. Sea levels had risen 250 metres (275 yards) , and rainfall throughout most of Gondwana was 2 500 mm pa (100 inches ). In short, the Gondwanan forests were on steroids. The Wollemi Pine had evolved a supreme adaption to this greenhouse environment, evidenced by its explosive expansion. If conditions were to stay the same, it would be a superb strategy to follow, but if they were ever to change, it would spell disaster for the Pine. 

The Wollemi Pine was by no means the only significant player in the Gondwanan forests of the Cretaceous period. Its close relatives, members of the Araucariaceae family like itself, ruled Gondwana and most of the Earth's continents in coalition for millions of years. The Araucariaceae family, commonly known as the family of the Monkey Puzzle trees, was, and continues to be, a truly bizarre family. Other members of the Monkey Puzzle family, like the Wollemi Pine, have managed to defy nature and continue to exist today. The members of the Monkey Puzzle family that have not passed into oblivion are nowadays isolated to small strongholds almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. The South Pacific island of New Caledonia boasts 18 of the 40 species that are known to still exist. An especially peculiar member of the family is the deadly Bunya Pine. The Bunya Pine is a tall, dome shaped monkey puzzle notable for its aesthetic symmetrical structure and ancient appearance. The Pine grows in south east Queensland, but is almost exclusively confined to a single mountain range, the Bunya Mountains. The bizarre aspect of the Bunya Pines is the incredible size and weight of their cones. Bunya Pine cones often grow to a diameter of 40 cm (15 inches) and a weight of 11 kilograms (25 pounds). These astonishing cones create the sound of a unexploded bomb when they strike the ground. The cones strike the ground with such tremendous force, that to be retrieved, they often have to be excavated by shovel. It is of course no surprise that the Bunya forests are closed for months each year while the trees rid themselves of their fatal loads of ordnance. The Norfolk Island, Hoop, and Kauri Pines are other members of the Monkey Puzzle tree family that continue to exist in Australia. As the millions of years drew so slowly onwards, the Wollemi Pine continued to expand its range, until it could expand no more. At this point, the pine had finally passed from its exuberant childhood, to its stately adulthood. There was no more expansion to be done, just the maintenance of a vast kingdom. In a greenhouse, that was to be no easy task. The Monkey Puzzles, on the whole, acquitted themselves admirably in the defence of their kingdom. For most of the late Cretaceous period the Monkey Puzzles retained their dominance over the world's forests. Inroads were inevitably made into their supremacy, but the Monkey Puzzles had reached the top, and when you are at the top there is no place to go but down. Nothing lasts forever. As the Cretaceous drew to a close, and a new era dawned, a number of remarkable events were to take place that would change the face of the world, forever. The Wollemi Pine was beginning to age rapidly.  

Sixty five million years ago, in a lush, ancient forest, animals stood transfixed at the sight of a brilliant streak of light. It raced across the sky, emitting a thunderous roar, and then it was gone. A few seconds later, a gigantic noise was heard. A while after, a tsunami of fire, wind, and debris swept across the landscape, destroying all that lay in its path, forests, their inhabitants, everything. It was as if Armageddon, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Hiroshima, had been unleashed on the world of the dinosaurs at once. It was the meteorite that caused the extinction of the dinsoaurs. Like Hiroshima, this catastrophe produced fallout, but it was not of the radioactive kind. Copious quantities of dust were blasted into the atmosphere and beyond by the impact of the meteorite. It did not promptly submit to the forces of gravity, stubbornly clinging to its dream of flight, preventing the sun from granting its precious gift of light and life to the beleaguered plants and animals below. Climate was thrown into dissaray. The surface became a dark, dry, freezer. With no light or water, entire forests shrivelled and died. Herbivorous dinosaurs and animals simply starved, and died. The carnivores soon shared in their fate.  

The tragedy that had befallen the world was a mass extinction, one of a number that have wreaked havoc on the Earth's ecosystems throughout history. But it was not a total catastrophe, small numbers of hardy plants and animals survived the tragedy. The mass extinction created a rare opportunity for these plants and animals to improve their standing in the ecosystem, and fill the gaping holes that had been created. The dinosaurs had been destroyed, their era had passed forever. But mammals had survived, ultimately giving rise to the human race, arguably evolution's greatest achievement. Another survivor had been the Wollemi Pine. The Wollemi Pine's survival, as hypthosised by scientists, was due to good luck more than any evolutionary superiority. The meteorite that had wreaked such destruction on Earth had struck the Northern Hemisphere, during its summer. The Monkey Puzzle forests of the Northern Hemisphere were decimated by the impact, and destroyed by the deficiency of sun and water that they needed during their growing period. On the other hand, the Southern Hemisphere Monkey Puzzles were lazing in their winter dormancy, far from the impact. They were not decimated by the impact, and in all likelihood dozed through the worst of the climatic problems. The Wollemi Pine had suffered greatly, but it had not been destroyed. Today, only in Japan are Monkey Puzzles found outside the Southern Hemisphere. Such is the difference between life, and death. 

The cataclysmic meteorite impact and its aftermath was not the only incident to effect the Wollemi Pine and the Monkey Puzzles. The world had again been captured by a mammoth greenhouse, allowing copious quantities of carbon dioxide and water to be made available to the forests of the world. It was a situation that encouraged ecological diversity. As the number of species increased dramatically, the size of ecological niches was compressed, again and again and again. The Wollemi Pine and the Monkey Puzzles were no exception. Indeed, the entire Gymnosperm family, the family of woody plants whose ovules and seeds are open to the environment, was beginning to look increasingly jaded. The vigorous, young Angiosperms, the family of plants that produce flowers, were beginning to outcompete the Gymnosperms. It was good news for biodiversity, but bad news for the Wollemi Pine and other Monkey Puzzles that had been dominant for so long. The Wollemi Pine's range was beginning to decrease, its dominance of its remaining habitat curtailed. The Wollemi Pine had indeed aged. But its circumstance was about to take a further turn for the worse. Deep within the subterranean bowels of Gondwana, rumblings were taking place. Soon, the continent was to be irrevocably torn into two. The greenhouse was about to be smashed, heralding the beginning of a tormented old age. The times, they were a changing. 

Thirty five million years ago, the Cretaceous a distant memory and the Tertiary an immediate reality, the Gondwanan supercontinent was torn apart in a series of violent convulsions. Australia farewelled Antarctica to the sound of cheer as it embarked on its epic voyage to the tropical latitudes of Asia. Antarctica stood dejected as it was banished to the desolation of the south pole. For the while, not a lot changed for the forests of the newly seperated continents. But within a few million years things changed, dramatically. A current of freezing water began to circulate in the ever broadening Southerly Oceans. This occurence wrought enormous changes to the regional, and global climate. It shattered the greenhouse, and replaced it with a frigid freezer. Carbon dioxide levels plummeted, temperatures plunged and rainfall crashed. For almost fifty million years the Wollemi Pine had lived in a world where carbon dioxide, warmth, and rainfall had been plentiful. It now found itself in a world where absolutely everything had changed. The beginnings of a great struggle had begun. Slowly, but surely, the Wollemi Pine and the Monkey Puzzles were being deposed from the evolutionary jury. 

The reconfiguration of the worlds climate, driven by the inexorable drift of Australia to the north and Antarctica to the south, was not a sudden one. The current did indeed put in a place a set of climatic conditions that were to transform the facade of the continents of Australia and Antarctica forever. It was to ultimately replace their luxuriant, verdant forests with a parched, barren desert and an inhospitable ice cap several kilometres thick. But, like the pace of continental drift, it was stultifyingly slow. An old man's struggle for existence, his home and authority destroyed, was to be long and protracted. It was a struggle, like that against mortality, that could not possibly be won.  

The demise of the Monkey Puzzles, and with it the Wollemi Pine, is enshrined in a set of data collected from fossil sites throughout Tasmania. Araucarioides, oides meaning looks like, was a Monkey Puzzle tree that is now thought to be extinct. It, like the Wollemi Pine, once grew for a period of many tens of millions of years in the part of Gondwana and Australia now known as Tasmania. Araucarioides was, once, a tree of immense stature. Fifty million years ago, Araucarioides leaves measured, on average, 7 cm (2.75 inches) long. Ten million years later, after a period of ecological compression, they had shrunk by a staggering 40 per cent to a mere 4 cm (1.6 inches). Following another five million years of ecological compression, and the onset of Australia's desertification, they shrunk by a similar percentage, to a tiny 2.5 cm (1 inch). Two million years ago, their leaves had shrunk to a miniscule 1 cm (0.4 inches). They soon vanished, banished from the earth forever. It cannot, of course, be proven that the Wollemi Pine was forced to inflict such a round of self-injury in order to survive. But what it does show is that Monkey Puzzles were struggling. They were struggling to such an extent that some were forced to reduce their size dramatically, or confront a rapid extinction. The Wollemi Pine could not struggle by retaining a set of characteristics adapted to another time. Its response may have been similar, it may have been not, but importantly, the Wollemi Pine was struggling, somehow, to perpetuate its very existence. Its range had been decimated, and its stranglehold on its remaining habitat slackened. If the Wollemi Pine's and the Monkey Puzzle's of temperate Australia thought their predicament was deplorable, they only had to look south, to a frigid Antarctica, to see life on the very edge. 

Until a mere three million years ago, the forests that had been so unlucky to find themselves on the Antarctic side of the Gondwanan divide had managed, somehow, to exist in an ever intensifying polar environment. At that time, the last Antarctic forests succumbed. Battered by katabatic winds of many hundreds of kilometres per hour, frozen by temperatures approaching -100 degrees C (-148 degrees F),and starved of precipitation, exclusively snowfall, of at best five hundred millimetres per annum, they had reached the very limit of plant endurance. Forest is probably not the correct term to describe these last vestiges of the Antarctic forests. Perhaps a bonsai field is more apt. The last trees of the Antarctic, the hardy Southern Beech, were ankle high apparitions of their once glorious ancestors. In the end, the Southern Beech became so stressed that they simply stopped reproducing. The Wollemi Pine is known from pollen records to have frequently co-existed with the Southern Beech. Presumably the Wollemi Pine perished in Antarctica sometime soon before the Southern Beech finally succumbed. But, regardless of when, and how, the Wollemi Pine had dissapeared from the Antarctic continent, it had been banished, never to return. The Wollemi Pine was now confined to a single continent. Banished from a continent, in severe decline in another, and at risk of extinction. At the time when the predicament of the Wollemi Pine appeared it could deteoriate no further, it did. An event that had not occured for hundreds of millions of years was about to return in all its vile ugliness from the dark depths of history. It would cause the greatest ecological upheaval in sixty three million years. The world was about to freeze. 

Two million years ago, a truly extraordinary number of consecutive cold winters occured. Prolific quantities of highly reflective snow piled up at the poles and beyond, setting into motion a train of events that plunged the world into a grave circumstance. It was the dawn of an ice age. For a tree that was still longing for the heady days of the Gondwanan greenhouse, the advent of an ice age in an already cold, dry world was an utter catastrophe. The ice age brought with it gargantuan changes to the global and regional climate. Temperatures throughout the world plunged, by seven degrees celsius over the Australian continent, and five degrees celsius in the Southern Ocean. In Australia, rainfall halved. Carbon dioxide levels plunged to 180 parts per million of the atmosphere. But, most importantly for the Wollemi Pine and the remaining Monkey Puzzles, a new, potent wind began to monopolise the Australian air space. The new wind, a south-westerly, was a frigid, parched hell. It originated in the Antarctic, by now a barren wasteland, traversed the uninterrepted waters of the bitterly cold Southern Ocean, and promptly presented itself with great gusto to the Australian mainland. It then proceeded to gleefully dash across the Australian landscape, annihilating whatever warmth or moisture that had somehow managed to accumulate, with it. It was a terrible, terrible wind and it produced equally terrible effects. Change was about to rid the Wollemi Pine and the Monkey Puzzles of their lowly bench on the evolutionary jury. 

If you were to peer out from atop a high Australian mountain top two million years ago, the spectacle that lay before you would have been strikingly similar to what you would have observed ninety eight million years earlier. Generally, you would have beheld vast forests of ancient trees, Monkey Puzzles, Southern Beech and others. But if you were to look out from an Australian mountaintop two hundred and fifty years ago, what you would have seen would have be radically different. You would have seen vast eucalypt forests if you were located on parts of the coastal fringe, or dry, arid or semi arid ground. It is almost certain your view would not encompass one Monkey Puzzle, and unlikely that it would include a single Southern Beech. Such was the dramatic effect of Australia's ice age climate, a climate that changed Australia's landscape forever. Like the rest of the world, the Australian landscape was profoundly altered by the ice age. The great, ancient forests of pre-ice age Australia were simply blown away on the freezing, thirsty wind. Indeed, there have been times during the past two million years when the Australian landscape would have appeared unrecognisable. At the height of the ice age, almost all of Australia that lies west of the Great Dividing Range, was covered in a sea of rolling sand dunes. This boundless sea penetrated the Great Dividing Range to, in some cases, within 10 km (6 miles) of its watershed. If it had broached this formidable barrier, and unbroken sand dune sea would have stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Glaciers covered the remaining areas of the Great Dividing Range, whilst on the east coast, grasslands spilled down to the coast. At the time only ten percent of Australia was capable of supporting woody vegetation, mainly shrubbery. Australia at the height of the ice age was literally a land of sand, ice, grass, and shrubs, exploding with fire and flood. There were few, if any, forests. 

Where did the Wollemi Pine hide during these times? How could a tree so far removed from its optimal climate survive? These are the questions that have been asked by scientists throughout the world. The first question is a riddle that no one has yet solved. The answer to the second is explained by the only thing that the Wollemi Pine could do, it adapted. The Wollemi Pine developed just one adaption during the ice age, yet this adaption served it admirably. It developed the ability to coppice. Being able to coppice meant, that provided its roots survived, the Wollemi Pine was able to reshoot after disaster. The ability to coppice enabled the Wollemi Pine to tolerate, if barely, the extremes of the Australian ice age climate. It was a climate where a ferocious fire was often followed by freezing floodwaters. The trunk and branches of a Wollemi Pine could, theoretically, have been destroyed by fire, flood, or adverse weather tens of times, but its ability to coppice meant that it was able to reshoot and survive. This adaption enabled the Wollemi Pine to endure the worst of the Ice Age. It is probably the reason why the Wollemi Pine remains with us, whilst other Monkey Puzzles such as Aracaurioides have long since passed into oblivion. 

Approximately ten thousand years ago, the veil of coldness that had cloaked Australia and the world for so long, at long last lifted. The Wollemi Pine, perhaps by now confined to the its single canyon in the Wollemi wilderness, lived to see the veil lifted. The Pine had searched Australia far and wide, and concluded that the canyons of the Wollemi wilderness enjoyed the climate that most resembled the Gondwanan one. Protected from the bitter winds, insulated from the cold, and standing at the bottom of a vast drainage system, the Wollemi canyons were indeed akin to Gondwana. Yet, the canyons did not provide a Gondwanan climate, that climate had perished along with the continent, and nothing could replace it. The Wollemi Pine emerged into the glorious glow of the post ice age world, certainly not unscathed, indeed greatly diminished, but alive. The Wollemi Pine is not a sclerophyllic tree, it did not evolve with the moisture retention or fire susceptibility reduction characteristics required to survive an Australian ice age. It had evolved to suit the humid warmth of a Gondwanan greenhouse. It could not possibly endure the freezing winds, the bone dry soil, the low carbon dioxide, of an ice age. It could not possibly endure a landscape that was continously throwing snow, sand, and other inclement weather at it. It could not, it simply could not be done. But it did it, it triumphed over adversity to find a way through the hell of an ice age. As they say, life will find a way. It had been lucky, or resourceful, so many other relics of the ancient Gondwanan continent had fell by the way side.  

Ninety million years ago, the Wollemi Pine embarked upon a journey that would span an eternity. An exuberant child, it burst forth onto the Gondwanan continent in a furious expansion. As a stately adult, it ruled over a vast Gondwanan kingdom, keeping its foes at bay. Its stately adulthood inevitably turned into a tormented old age. Dethroned by vigorous newcomers, forced into retreat by incredible climatic events, and almost annihilated by a world of snow, sand, and fire, it limped into the Holocene Epoch barely alive. But it had survived, if only 50 members strong. As you read this article, Wollemi Pines are being propogated by nurseryman throughout Australia. In five to ten years time, when we will all be able to buy a Wollemi Pine, hundreds upon thousands, perhaps even millions, of these beautiful trees will once again grace our planet. Who knows? Maybe at some indeterminate time in the future, once we have long since moved on, we may be remembered by the Wollemi Pines as the race that helped them out of a canyon out the back of Sydney, and returned them onto the the world stage. This is the tale of the Wollemi Pine. It is an epic that is still unfolding. The Greenhouse is Returning.