Donald Rusk Currey

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Donald Rusk Currey ( 1934 - June 6, 2004 ) was an American professor of geography . He is known in research circles for his research on the relics of prehistoric Lake Bonneville in the eastern part of the Great Basin in present-day Utah . He was best known in public for the controversial felling of the Prometheus tree, which he initiated as a graduate student . This specimen of the long-lived pine ( Pinus longaeva ) was considered to be the oldest living tree in the world, with an estimated age of around 4900 years until 2012.

Currey and the Prometheus Tree

Felling action

Prometheus' stump after the felling action.

In 1963 Currey was a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation , Currey studied climatic conditions during the Little Ice Age with the help of dendrochronological tools.

Among the populations of the awn pine ( Pinus aristata ), which at that time also included the long-lived pine ( Pinus longaeva ), which is now considered a local variety as a local variety , many tree specimens of old age were recognized that were older than all previously known tree individuals . In 1963, Currey became aware of a population of long-lived pine on Wheeler Peak , Nevada's second highest mountain in the Snake Range . Little did he know when he toured the area in the summer of 1964 that researchers before him had already explored the area. From the size and rate of growth of some specimens, he concluded that some very old specimens existed in the population. To test his suspicion, he began examining tree ring samples. When he found out that some specimens were over 3,000 years old, his attention turned to a special tree specimen, which he gave the working name WPN-114, but which had been named Prometheus before him .

Currey failed to obtain appropriately overlapping tree ring samples from WPN-114. In at least four attempts with a drill about 70 centimeters long, he broke two drills, but did not achieve the goal. He then asked the United States Forest Service for permission to cut the tree. Since he had relationships with officials of the Forest Service at the nearby Lehman Caves National Monument (now part of the greater Great Basin National Park ), he directed his application to the Forest Service ranger Donald E. Cox; in it he asked permission to fell the tree so that the whole stump could be examined. Cox considered the application to be scientifically well-founded and convinced superiors that the tree in question was not a notable landmark (such as a natural monument). Permission was then given.

Cox informed Currey that permission had been granted and sent Currey a team from the Forest Service to carry out the felling operation. The tree was felled on August 6, 1964 and cut into tree slice samples. These were studied by Currey and later by other researchers. It surprisingly found that the tree was older than any living non-clonal organism in the world.

Gleanings

It took a few years for the information about the felling of Prometheus to reach the public, whereupon critical voices rose. Above all, the decision of the US Forest Service to permit tree felling has been criticized. Some critics questioned the meaning of the felling action, since the research subject of Currey at the time, the Little Ice Age , did not begin until the 14th century. However, Currey himself states in his work from 1965 that he was from an extension of the Little Ice Age back to around 2000 BC. Chr. Had gone out. Currey also claims in this work that he had the tree felled not because of his research on the Little Ice Age, but rather to investigate whether the oldest awn pines (see the note in the section above on awn pines and long-lived pines) as was claimed by some dendrochronologists at the time, in the California White Mountains .

The incident led to a more restrictive handling of the felling permits for old tree specimens; The designation of the larger Great Basin National Park (which is supervised by the National Park Service ) can also be traced back to this incident. In response, the decision was made to keep the exact location of the Methuselah tree in the Inyo National Forest secret. This tree was believed to be the oldest living specimen of the long-lived pine. Currey himself lobbied to get the United States Congress to promote the area to a national park.

Live and act

Currey became a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He received his Ph. D. from the University of Kansas in 1969 and became a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Utah in 1970 .

For more than two decades, Currey researched relics from the prehistoric lake Lake Bonneville in the eastern part of the Great Basin . He published several papers on this.

After a sudden illness, Currey died at the age of 70.

Currey was honored during the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting in 2005 . The University of Utah's Department of Geography set up a grant named after him.

Works

  • Donald Rusk Currey: An Ancient Bristlecone Pine Stand in Eastern Nevada . In: Ecology . tape 46 , no. 4 , 1965, pp. 564-566 ( abstract ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research: Database of ancient trees (January 2013)
personal data
SURNAME Currey, Donald Rusk
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1934
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 2004