Rachel Sussman has traveled around the world, photographing the oldest living organisms on the planet. The photographs were produced for a new book, full of stunning images.
"The Oldest Living Things in the World," contains photographs of trees, sea grasses, mosses, yuccas and even bacteria.
In Greenland, Sussman photographed a lichen, a composite organism that took 250 years to grow by one inch. Deserts shrubs in South America and Asia were also the subjects of the photographer's camera. Images include a colony of aspen trees in Utah and readers also get to see moss in Antarctica believed to be a relic from 5,500 years in the past.
Each of the organisms recorded by the photographer is at least 2,000 years old. That means the youngest lifeforms seen in the book were born just as the Roman Empire reached its height.
Starting in "year zero," the photographer brings readers back in time with examples of lifeforms still alive today. The $30 book has become the best-selling work of nature photography on Amazon.
Sussman worked with over 30 scientists to identify risks to the ancient lifeforms she documented in her book. Over the decade, the author spent assembling the book; two of her 30 subjects were wiped out by humans.
"The Senator," a 3500-year-old tree in Seminole County, Florida, was accidentally burned to the ground by a woman smoking methamphetamine in 2012. In Pretoria, South Africa, an underground baobab forest was destroyed, in order to construct a road.
One of the oldest organisms seen in the photos is sea grass which resides off the coast of the island of Ibiza. This first saw the light of day 100,000 years ago, about 10,000 years after the start of the last ice age.
A self-propagating shrub that is 43,600 years old and the last individual of its species was photographed in Tasmania. The oldest single living tree in the world has been alive for 9,950 years. This spruce is located in Sweden. The root system is so old and extensive that any time the trunk above the ground dies; another quickly takes its place.
In an effort to keep some of these organisms safe, their location is not publicized. Others are in such remote locations that human interference on their environment is rare.
"These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world's most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger," stated in the Amazon page for the book.
