Answer card
How tall can a tree get?
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Write a guess down before you look, and you will notice what surprises you. You can’t get it wrong.
What we know
- True: A ruler for your guess: a football pitch for international matches is 100 to 110 metres long. IFAB Laws of the Game, Law 1 — The Field of Play
- True: The tallest living tree anyone has measured is a coast redwood called Hyperion, in California. Its finders, Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor, came across it on 25 August 2006, and Stephen Sillett measured it at 115.55 metres with a laser and a long tape. Wikipedia — Hyperion (tree)
- True: It has grown since: measured again in 2019, it had reached 116.07 metres. Wikipedia — Hyperion (tree)
- True: In 2004 a team led by George Koch worked out that redwoods could reach about 122 to 130 metres before lifting water to the top leaves gets too hard. Koch et al., “The limits to tree height”, Nature 428, 851–854 (2004)
What we made simpler
We say “tallest living tree measured”, because nobody has measured every tree, and some trees cut down long ago were said to be taller. The 122–130 metre limit comes from a calculation, not from a tree anyone has seen.
Still open
Whether any tree, now or long ago, ever grew as tall as the limit — and other scientists have argued about how the limit was worked out.
Next why
How does water get to the top of a tree?
BioForge — Plant Biology →Try it
Written by people and checked against the sources named beside each line. All answer cards