Photos of the World’s Oldest Living Things

In 2004, Rachel Sussman, a Brooklyn-based photographer who is a mere 37 years old, visited a Japanese cedar rumored to be 7,000 years old. Imbued with a sense of the fragility and persistence of life, she began a mission of researching and photographing individual organisms that were at least 2,000 years old—“a way of putting human timekeeping in perspective,” she says.

Sussman has now photographed more than 30 ancient organisms as part of her Oldest Living Things in the World project; she will publish a book of her work in the spring of 2014. She traveled to Western Australia to photograph these stromatolites, layered structures built by microorganisms in shallow water, which are roughly 2,000-3,000 years old.

This Antarctic beech has been living in Queensland, Australia, for about 12,000 years. It can reproduce clonally, sending up new shoots that are genetically identical, which helps account for its multiple trunks and longevity. “The Oldest Living Things are a striking contrast to the ever-increasing speed of the present,” Sussman says.

The llareta (also known as a yareta) a small flowering plant native to South America, grows just half an inch annually—but can live for up to 3,000 years. Sussman photographed this one in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

“Some of them have obvious physical grandeur,” she says of her ancient organisms, “whereas others are so diminutive that it’s only by taking into consideration their place in an extended timescale that their profundity starts to take hold.”

Some of the oldest organisms live in the world’s most fragile ecosystems. This 2,200-year-old Antarctic moss (green, in the background) was photographed at Kanin Point, on South Georgia Island off of Antarctica. Climate change threatens local ecosystems around the globe, especially those at the poles. “The thing I am most concerned with is that even in these tucked away corners of the world, we are seeing signs of climate change,” Sussman says. “That’s the scary part.”

The oldest organism Sussman has photographed is a bacteria sample from the Siberian permafrost (not pictured) that has survived for 400,000 to 600,000 years. But the permafrost is thawing as the climate changes, so the world’s longest known survivor, she says, “may also be the most vulnerable.”

Welwitschia mirablis, a plant endemic to Namibia and Angola, thrives in the extreme aridity of the Namib Desert, reaching ages upwards of 2,000 years.

“One commonality between these organisms is their tendency to live in some of the most extreme environments on Earth—deserts, polar regions and places of high altitudes or low nutrient availability,” Sussman says. “They tend grow slowly, as opposed to fast and furious.”

This colony of quaking aspen trees, which covers roughly 106 acres near Fish Lake, Utah, has some 47,000 individual stems. It is one single organism, connected by an enormous underground root system. Named Pando—Latin for “I Spread”—it weighs an estimated 6,600 tons, making it the world’s heaviest organism; with an age upwards of 80,000 years, it is also one of the oldest.

The Glencoe baobab, located in Limpopo Province, South Africa, is one of the stoutest trees in the world—its trunk was 154 feet around before being split in two by lightning in 2009. The dates “1893” and “1896,” carved into its trunk, merely hint at its age: it is an estimated 2,000 years old.

“One of my challenges was, ironically, lack of time,” Sussman says. “For certain of my subjects I only had an hour, or sometimes even a matter of minutes, to spend with them. I couldn’t always wait for the weather or light to change even if I didn’t like what I was seeing.”