Standing in Smith Creek, a tributary of the Cape Fear River, a bald cypress has weathered nearly nine centuries of change. The tree is at least 871 years old, making it the oldest documented tree in the Wilmington area, and it may even be older.
But the ancient tree and the old-growth stand around it could face the same fate as trees downstream: death from saltwater intrusion, leaving behind what researchers call a ghost forest.
To uncover the tree’s history, researchers extracted narrow cores from living bald cypresses at an upstream section of Smith Creek, where salinity remains relatively low. Using an increment borer, a tool that removes a pencil-thin cylinder of wood without killing the tree, they studied the rings that mark each year of growth…