Trees over 200 years old in Russia. Why are forests in Siberia young? Average age of trees in Russia

Reader Epmak_1: as a comment to the article wrote:

"Somewhere I read that there are absolutely no relic forests in Siberia, and the average age of trees is the same, about 200 years. The question arises, how did they manage to defeat Hyperborea? Did they burn it?"

The article I cite here confirms legitimacy this question.

Yes, the legendary Hyperborea, which European cartographers drew in the north-east of Russia, could easily be burned by amateurs holocausts!

At least, no one has given a clear answer to the question why there are no relict forests in Siberia, which means that the version of the burning of Hyperborea in the north-east of Russia has the right to exist.

I understand your age-old sadness...

Most of our forests are young. Their age is from a quarter to a third of life. Apparently, in the 19th century, some events took place that led to the almost total destruction of our forests. Our forests hold great secrets...
It was precisely the wary attitude towards the statements of Alexei Kungurov about the Perm forests and clearings, at one of his conferences, that prompted me to conduct this study. Well, how! There was a mysterious hint of hundreds of kilometers of clearings in the forests and their age. I was personally hooked by the fact that I walk through the forest quite often and far enough, but I did not notice anything unusual.

And this time an amazing feeling was repeated - the more you understand, the more new questions appear. I had to re-read a lot of sources, from materials on forestry of the 19th century, to the modern "Instructions for conducting forest management in the forest fund of Russia." This did not add clarity, rather the opposite. However, there was confidence that it's dirty here.

The first amazing fact, which was confirmed - the dimension of the quarterly network. The quarterly network, by definition, is “The system of forest quarters created on the lands of the forest fund for the purpose of inventorying the forest fund, organizing and maintaining forestry and forest management”.
The quarterly network consists of quarterly glades. This is a straight strip freed from trees and shrubs (usually up to 4 m wide), laid in the forest in order to mark the boundaries of forest quarters. During forest inventory, cutting and clearing of a quarter clearing to a width of 0.5 m is carried out, and their expansion to 4 m is carried out in subsequent years by forestry workers.

In the picture you can see how these clearings look in Udmurtia. Image taken from Google Earth.

The quarters are rectangular. For measurement accuracy, a segment of 5 blocks wide is marked. It amounted to 5340 m, which means that the width of 1 quarter is 1067 meters, or exactly 1 way verst. The quality of the picture leaves much to be desired, but I myself constantly walk along these clearings, and I know well what you see from above from the ground. Until that moment, I was firmly convinced that all these forest roads were the work of Soviet foresters. But what the hell did they need to mark out the quarterly network in versts?

Checked. In the instructions, quarters are supposed to be marked with a size of 1 by 2 km. The error at this distance is allowed no more than 20 meters. But 20 is not 340. However, in all forest management documents it is stipulated that if block network projects already exist, then you should simply link to them. It is understandable, the work on laying the glades is a lot of work to redo.

Today, there are already machines for clearing clearings, but they should be forgotten, since almost the entire forest fund of the European part of Russia, plus part of the forest beyond the Urals, approximately to Tyumen, is divided into a verst block network. Of course, there is also a kilometer, because in the last century the foresters also did something, but mostly it was a verst. In particular, there are no kilometer clearings in Udmurtia. And this means that the project and practical laying of the quarterly network in most of the forest areas of the European part of Russia were made no later than 1918. It was at this time that the metric system of measures was adopted for mandatory use in Russia, and the verst gave way to the kilometer.

It turns out that it was made with axes and jigsaws, if, of course, we correctly understand historical reality. Considering that the forest area of ​​the European part of Russia is about 200 million hectares, this is a titanic work. The calculation shows that the total length of the glades is about 3 million km. For clarity, imagine the 1st lumberjack armed with a saw or an ax. During the day, he will be able to clear an average of no more than 10 meters of clearing. But we must not forget that these works can be carried out mainly in winter time. This means that even 20,000 lumberjacks, working annually, would create our excellent verst block network for at least 80 years.

But there has never been such a number of workers involved in forest management. According to the articles of the 19th century, it is clear that there were always very few forestry specialists, and the funds allocated for these purposes could not cover such expenses. Even if we imagine that for this they drove peasants from the surrounding villages to do free work, it is still not clear who did this in the sparsely populated areas of the Perm, Kirov, and Vologda regions.

After this fact, it is no longer so surprising that the entire block network is tilted by about 10 degrees and is not directed to the geographic North Pole, but, apparently, on a magnetic one (marking was carried out using a compass, and not a GPS navigator), which should have been located at that time about 1000 kilometers towards Kamchatka. And it is not so embarrassing that the magnetic pole, according to the official data of scientists, has never been there from the 17th century to the present day. It’s not even frightening that even today the compass needle points in approximately the same direction in which the quarterly network was made before 1918. It still can't be! All logic falls apart.

But it is. And in order to finish off the consciousness clinging to reality, I inform you that all this economy must also be serviced. According to the norms, a complete audit takes place every 20 years. If it passes at all. And during this period of time, the “forest user” should monitor the clearings. Well, if in Soviet time someone followed, then over the past 20 years is unlikely. But the clearings were not overgrown. There is a windbreak, but there are no trees in the middle of the road. But in 20 years, a pine seed that accidentally fell to the ground, of which billions are sown annually, grows up to 8 meters in height. Not only are the clearings not overgrown, you will not even see stumps from periodic clearings. This is all the more striking in comparison with power lines, which are regularly cleared by special teams from overgrown shrubs and trees.

This is what typical clearings in our forests look like. Grass, sometimes bushes, but no trees. There are no signs of regular maintenance.

The second big mystery is the age of our forest, or trees in this forest. In general, let's go in order. Let's figure it out first, how long does a tree live. Here is the relevant table.

* In brackets - height and life expectancy in especially favorable conditions.

In different sources, the numbers differ slightly, but not significantly. Pine and spruce should live up to 300-400 years under normal conditions. You begin to understand how ridiculous everything is only when you compare the diameter of such a tree with what we see in our forests. Spruce 300 years old should have a trunk with a diameter of about 2 meters. Well, like in a fairy tale. The question arises: Where are all these giants? No matter how much I walk through the forest, I have not seen thicker than 80 cm. They are not in the mass. There are piece specimens (in Udmurtia - 2 pines) that reach 1.2 m, but their age is also not more than 200 years.

In general, how does the forest live? Why do trees grow or die in it?

It turns out that there is a concept of "natural forest". This is a forest that lives its own life - it has not been cut down. He has distinguishing feature- low crown density from 10 to 40%. That is, some trees were already old and tall, but some of them fell affected by a fungus or died, losing competition with their neighbors for water, soil and light. Large gaps form in the forest canopy. A lot of light begins to get there, which is very important in the forest struggle for existence, and young growth actively begins to grow up. Therefore, the natural forest consists of different generations, and crown density is the main indicator of this.

But if the forest was subjected to clear cutting, then new trees for a long time grow at the same time, crown density is high, more than 40%. Several centuries will pass, and if the forest is not touched, then the struggle for a place under the sun will do its job. It will become natural again. Do you want to know how much natural forest in our country that is not affected by anything? Please, a map of Russian forests.

The map is clickable.

The bright colors indicate forests with high canopy density, i.e. they are not “natural forests”. And most of them are. All European part denoted by saturated blue color. This is, as indicated in the table: “Small-leaved and mixed forests. Forests with a predominance of birch, aspen, gray alder, often with an admixture coniferous trees or with individual sections coniferous forests. Almost all of them are derived forests that have formed on the site of primary forests as a result of logging, clearing, and forest fires.

On the mountains and the tundra zone, you can not stop, there the rarity of the crowns may be due to other reasons. But the plains and middle lane covers a clearly young forest. How young? Come down and check. It is unlikely that you will find a tree older than 150 years in the forest. Even a standard drill for determining the age of a tree has a length of 36 cm and is designed for a tree age of 130 years. How does forest science explain this? Here's what they came up with:

“Forest fires are a fairly common phenomenon for most taiga zone European Russia. Furthermore: Forest fires in the taiga are so common that some researchers consider the taiga as a lot of fires of different ages - more precisely, a lot of forests that have formed on these fires. Many researchers believe that forest fires are, if not the only, then at least the main natural mechanism for forest renewal, the replacement of old generations of trees with young ones ... "

All this is called "the dynamics of random disturbances." That's where the dog is buried. The forest burned, and burned almost everywhere. And this, according to experts, main reason small age of our forests. Not fungus, not bugs, not hurricanes. Our entire taiga stands on fire, and after a fire, the same thing remains as after clear-cutting. Hence the high density of crowns in almost the entire forest zone. Of course, there are exceptions - really untouched forests in the Angara region, on Valaam and, probably, somewhere else in the expanses of our vast Motherland. It's really fabulous big trees in its mass. And although these are small islands in the boundless sea of ​​the taiga, they prove that the forest can be like that.

What is so common in forest fires that over the past 150 ... 200 years they have burned the entire forest area of ​​​​700 million hectares? Moreover, according to scientists, in a non-chess order, observing the order, and certainly at different times?

First you need to understand the scale of these events in space and time. The fact that the main age of old trees in the bulk of the forests is at least 100 years suggests that large-scale fires, which have so rejuvenated our forests, occurred over a period of no more than 100 years. Translating into dates, for the 19th century alone. To do this, it was necessary to burn annually 7 million hectares of forest.

Even as a result of large-scale forest fires in the summer of 2010, which all experts called catastrophic in terms of volume, only 2 million hectares burned down. It turns out that there is nothing "so ordinary" in this. The last justification for such a burned past of our forests could be the tradition of slash-and-burn agriculture. But how, in this case, to explain the state of the forest in places where traditionally agriculture was not developed? In particular, in Perm region? Moreover, this method of farming involves the labor-intensive cultural use of limited areas of the forest, and not at all rampant arson. large arrays in the hot summer season, but with a breeze.

Going through everything possible options, we can say with confidence that the scientific concept of "the dynamics of random disturbances" is nothing in real life is not substantiated, and is a myth intended to mask the inadequate state of the current forests of Russia, and hence the events that led to it.

We will have to admit that our forests either burned intensely (beyond any norm) and constantly burned throughout the 19th century (which in itself is inexplicable and is not recorded anywhere), or burned out at the same time as a result of some incident, which is why the scientific world violently denies, having no no arguments, except that nothing of the kind is recorded in the official history.

To all this, one can add that there were clearly fabulously large trees in the old natural forests. It has already been said about the reserved surviving areas of the taiga. It is worth giving an example in part deciduous forests. AT Nizhny Novgorod region and in Chuvashia very favorable climate for hardwood trees. There are a lot of oak trees growing there. But you, again, will not find old copies. The same 150 years old, no older. Older single copies are all over the place. At the beginning of the article there is a photograph of the largest oak tree in Belarus. It grows in Belovezhskaya Pushcha.

Its diameter is about 2 meters, and its age is estimated at 800 years, which, of course, is very conditional. Who knows, maybe he somehow survived the fires, it happens. The largest oak in Russia is considered to be a specimen growing in the Lipetsk region. According to conditional estimates, he is 430 years old.

A special theme is bog oak. This is the one that is extracted mainly from the bottom of the rivers. My relatives from Chuvashia told me that they pulled huge specimens up to 1.5 m in diameter from the bottom. And there were many. This indicates the composition of the former oak forest, the remains of which lie at the bottom. This means that nothing prevents the current oaks from growing to such sizes. Did the “dynamics of random disturbances” in the form of thunderstorms and lightning work in a special way before? No, everything was the same. So it turns out that the current forest has not yet reached maturity.

Let's summarize what we got as a result of this study. There are a lot of contradictions between the reality that we observe with our own eyes and the official interpretation of the relatively recent past:

There is a developed block network over a vast area, which was designed in versts and was laid no later than 1918. The length of the glades is such that 20,000 lumberjacks, subject to manual labor, would create it for 80 years. Clearings are serviced very irregularly, if at all, but they do not overgrow.

On the other hand, according to historians and surviving articles on forestry, there was no funding of a commensurate scale and the required number of forestry specialists at that time. There was no way to recruit such an amount of free work force. There was no mechanization capable of facilitating these works.

It is required to choose: either our eyes are deceiving us, or the 19th century was not at all what historians tell us. In particular, there could be mechanization commensurate with the tasks described. What interesting could be this steam engine from the movie "The Barber of Siberia". Or is Mikhalkov a completely unthinkable dreamer?

There could also be less labor-intensive, efficient technologies for laying and maintaining clearings that have been lost today (some distant analogue of herbicides). It is probably foolish to say that Russia has not lost anything after 1917. Finally, perhaps, they did not cut through the clearings, but in the spaces destroyed by the fire, trees were planted in quarters. This is not such nonsense, compared to what science draws us. Though doubtful, it at least explains a lot.

Our forests are much younger than the natural lifespan of the trees themselves. This is evidenced by the official map of the forests of Russia and our eyes. The age of the forest is about 150 years, although pine and spruce under normal conditions grow up to 400 years, and reach 2 meters in thickness. There are also separate sections of the forest from trees of similar age.

According to experts, all our forests are burned out. It is the fires, in their opinion, that do not give the trees a chance to live to their natural age. Experts do not even allow the thought of the simultaneous destruction of vast expanses of forest, believing that such an event could not go unnoticed. In order to justify this ashes, official science has adopted the theory of "the dynamics of random disturbances." This theory proposes that forest fires are commonplace, destroying (according to some incomprehensible schedule) up to 7 million hectares of forest per year, although in 2010 even 2 million hectares destroyed as a result of deliberate forest fires were called a disaster.

It is required to choose: either our eyes are deceiving us again, or some grandiose events of the 19th century with particular impudence were not reflected in the official version of our past, as neither the Great Tartaria nor the Great Northern Way fit in there. Atlantis with the fallen moon did not fit either . The one-time destruction of 200...400 million hectares of forest is even easier to imagine, and to hide, than the unquenchable, 100-year-old fire proposed for consideration by science.

So what is the age-old sadness Belovezhskaya Pushcha? Is it not about those heavy wounds of the earth that the young forest covers? After all, giant conflagrations do not happen by themselves ...

Often there are reports of a very young age of trees in our forests. The trees are said to be no older than 150 years. Various versions are given as the reason for this state of affairs. For my part, I can offer my version.

Let's remember that almost from the beginning of the 19th century (that is, almost 200 years ago), a purposeful resettlement of the country's human resources began to develop land from the western provinces to Siberia and to the east. This was due to the state necessity. Therefore, starting over. like a small stream, the stream of settlers soon turned into a deep river. The bulk of the migrants were peasant families who occupied free land, cleared it and sowed the resulting fields. What Siberia was like before this migration of peoples and at its beginning, you can read in the written sources of that time, as well as look at paintings, drawings and maps. Not all settlers were able to immediately and finally settle in their chosen places. Simultaneously, there was an internal resettlement. They will begin to settle down in one place, then, for various reasons (for example, due to conflicts with old-timers), they find a new place and move there. Now, in order to understand what follows, let's turn to the materials of that time.

Ivan Ilyich Pushkarev "Historical, geographical and statistical description Russian Empire. Volume 1, book 4. Vologda province "1846 https://www.wdl.org/ru

In such an uncomplicated way, the peasants of that time "processed" new plots for sowing. You may notice to me that this took place in the Vologda province. Then we read excerpts from a book for Ukrainian settlers in Siberia, published in Kharkov in 1890:

As you can see, the method of developing and clearing the land is the same - burning and burning. Moreover, in this book it is especially noted that people who are accustomed to forests try to settle closer to the forests, and those for whom it is unusual to free up a place "under the sun" from forests, having toiled, move closer to the steppe. That is, forests were burned and eliminated by people with experience. Pay attention to the calculated rate of settlement in Siberia - 50 thousand people a year. If everyone has at least a hectare (he needs not only to sow for himself, but also hay land for livestock). that is 50 thousand hectares per year. We also need a forest for construction (which continues for more than one year), we need a forest for firewood ... So one should not be surprised at the rate of destruction of forests. As a result, the old trees were "harvested", and the new ones have not yet "matured". And now we marvel at giant stumps in old photographs and scan the skies for the area from which we flew.

Why in Russia all the trees are very young and in Siberia the average age of trees is only 150 years old, in America there are huge sequoias that are 2000 years old or more. Why such a huge difference? And why do we have coal in Russia and not in America?

stone forest

The pine lives 400 years and individual specimens in Siberia reach a little more and die, pines rarely survive longer, because now Siberia is very harsh conditions. But in Kemerovo, coal is mined in mines. Where did this Coal come from, which warms us, if not from pressed ancient huge trees, which for some reason mysteriously disappeared from us?

How was coal formed? This question will not be answered by any academician, let alone the Internet. Coal was formed only in a layer of 5-7 meters from old tree species, compressed and turned into coal - compressed forest. Some kind of plate fell from above and pressed it, heating them at the same time. What force lifted hundreds of tons of rocks into the air and covered these trees from above, if you need to go down into the mine quite deep? What is the origin of coal? Where did all our sequoias go, like in America? They obviously were! We apparently have compressed coal from these sequoias. But there is no coal in America, because there was a more favorable climate and all the Sequoias survived.

Maybe it's because of the Tunguska meteorite? The Tunguska meteorite fell on June 30, 1908 in the area of ​​the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, an event called the "Tunguska phenomenon" happened at 4 o'clock in the morning. But, if the Tunguska meteorite exploded during its passage over Europe, then its explosion would be capable of completely destroying a city like St. Petersburg. Thank God that this did not happen, but something happened, because there is no forest in St. Petersburg - everywhere young growth and the most ancient trees were clearly planted intentionally near the Peter and Paul Fortress - there were also a 300-year-old oak and linden
and Oranienbaum, ancient trees remain, but all the trees around are relatively young. No wonder they say that there was some unthinkable cataclysm in Nature in 1812-1814, and Napoleon lost to the Russians, because he froze in Russia.

The method of annual tree rings reflects the consequences of all major volcanic eruptions extremely poorly - the eruption of a tropical volcano in the territory of modern Mexico or Ecuador in 1258, the underwater volcano Kuwae in the vicinity of the Pacific islands of Vanuatu in 1458, the mysterious eruption of 1809 and the explosion of the Tambora volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 1815.

What kind of cold was it then? In 1812, when Napoleon went to Russia, he was stopped by the Russian Frost and Hitler was also stopped by the Russian frost. Just Santa Claus - Russian bodyguard. But I have a question: Where does this frost come from at the right time, in the right place, and where did the permafrost come from in Siberia, when it used to be warm in Russia, Russia is the homeland of elephants?

Everyone remembers the Palms in Astrakhan Strays, Jan Jansen:

17th century engraving from a book by Jan Streis. The excesses of the Cossacks of Stepan Razin in the captured Astrakhan.

Orange trees grew in St. Petersburg in Oranienbaum Lomonosov near St. Petersburg - this is the Orange City - On all the ancient engravings of the city - rows of orange trees, moreover, right in the ground, and not in the greenhouse.

Oranienbaum. Engraving by A.I. Rostovtsev, 1716

Oranienbaum. Engraving by A.I. Rostovtsev, 1716. Sailboats went straight to the palace, which already stood in 1716. Oraniybaum where at open field oranges grew before. #Peter #Lomonosov

Engraving. Grand Palace Oranienbaum. Middle of the 18th century.

Engraving. Grand Palace Oranienbaum. Middle of the 18th century.

Trees are very sensitive to the slightest changes in climatic conditions - an increase or decrease in temperature, solar energy and other factors. All these events are reflected in the shape and thickness of annual rings - layers of wood in the trunk, which is formed during the growing season. It is believed that dark rings correspond to unfavorable environmental conditions, and light rings correspond to favorable ones. and now, when trees are cut down, our entire core is completely dark - these were not favorable years for the growth of trees.

Michael Mann (Michael Mann) from the University of Pennsylvania at State College (USA) and his colleagues checked how accurately annual rings reflect the short-term temperature drop that occurs after the strongest tropical volcanic eruptions.

To do this, Mann and his colleagues compared graphs of seasonal temperature fluctuations from 1200 to the present, which were obtained using a "conventional" climate model and a technique that included analysis of tree growth rings. The traditional model tracks changes in the intensity of solar radiation and fluctuations in the energy balance of the planet, which is reflected in the increase or decrease in average temperatures.

The second method used, as input data, sections of trunks obtained in 60 high-mountain forest areas on the so-called "tree line" - maximum height on which ordinary trees can grow. Local climatic conditions only minimally satisfy the needs of woody vegetation, and abnormally high or low average annual temperatures well reflected in the rings.

Because of this, chronological errors can accumulate in slices as you move from relatively modern rings to more ancient ones.

And you know. What I think is easy in Russia because of the anomalous low temperatures our forest just didn't grow. And the dark cores of the trees are proof of this. Ice Age affected our trees.

The truth is somewhere near.

Adherents alternative history- very funny people, but the article is not about that. According to this pseudoscience, in the 19th century there was a worldwide flood that destroyed all the forests in central (and maybe not only) Russia. What prompted these wonderful "researchers" to such an idea? Everything turns out to be very simple: all forests in modern Russia- young!

Trees (spruces and pines) in the forests - no older than 150 - 200 years

The photo shows a pine tree (Udmurtia) over 300 years old. As you remember from your last trip to the forest, the pines in it are not at all like this giant winding pine. By the way, the maximum age of pines and spruces reaches 400 years, you can read about this in reference books or textbooks - no one refutes this fact.

Any sane person with a developed outlook, of course, will reject the theory of some kind of miraculous flood that destroyed all the forests, but the fact that the forests are young really makes anyone think. There are really few relic forests in Russia, and even in Siberia, which the hand of a woodcutter has not yet reached, one cannot meet old trees. How so?! Where did the old firs and pines go? Maybe almost all the trees died out 150-200 years ago?

In addition to the authoritative opinion of the “friend of the forester”, who certainly knows better how old the trees in his forest are and the exclamations: “even the foresters do not understand where the old trees in the forests have gone!”, lovers of alternative pseudo-history like to give one more argument in defense of their theory - photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky, a student of Mendeleev, who was the first in Russia to start taking color photographs. Prokudin-Gorsky, starting in 1909, traveled a lot around the country and took color photographs. Why are these photographs of alternative historians so attracted? There are very few trees in the pictures and no forests at all! For some reason, pictures and black-and-white photographs are not taken into account by these wonderful “researchers”, such a feature of this “science” is to reject objectionable facts. We will talk about Prokudin-Gorsky a little later, and now we will begin to explain where the old trees have gone in Russian European forests.

So where did all the old trees go? Exposing the myth!

If you turn to search engines for an answer, you will find heaps of informational garbage that has been bred by the labors of “alternatives”! All the links on the front pages about the flood that destroyed the forests, and not a single sensible page with answers! So - below I will finally reveal the secret of the disappearance of ancient forests.

Spruces and pines live up to 450 years, and this is a fact established real scientists. I will now ask you just one question, which will destroy the entire forest alternative theory and give the long-awaited answers. The maximum age of a person is about 120 years. So why on the street you will not meet a single person even a hundred years old? - yes, because they very little! If you look around, you will mostly see people from 20 to 50 years old - they are the most among the population. So why should trees live according to other laws? Where did the trees older than 300 years go? — died out! Yes Yes! Well, now let's turn to reliable sources and consider this issue in more detail.

Natural thinning of forest plantations

Trees, like all life on Earth, fight each other for vital resources: sunlight, moisture, the area in which they grow. But unlike people, they cannot move in search of new resources, no matter how trite it may sound! Quote from an authoritative (unlike any foresters) site:

Among foresters it is considered axiom that the forest normally develops to some certain age(not maximum); after reaching the age of ripeness, it begins fall apart, while losing not only the stock of wood, but also all its environment-forming and environmental properties.

In the forest, as the age and size of trees increase, their number per unit area decreases due to the death of weaker trees, that is, natural thinning or self-thinning of the forest occurs. This phenomenon should be considered as a process of self-regulation forest plantation, i.e., bringing the needs of the entire plantation into line with the available vital resources of the environment and how natural selection the fittest trees.

As individual trees grow in size, their need for crown space, food, and moisture increases. In this regard, the total need for the listed factors for the entire forest is also growing. I'll try to explain further plain language. When the trees in the forest are still young, they require much less resources to sustain life, so the number of trunks per unit area is greater. As the trees grow, they need more and more resources, and at one point the trees begin to "conflict" with each other and "fight" for living space. Natural selection comes into play - some trees begin to die already in early age. Self-regulation of the number of trees in a plantation creates conditions for normal growth and long-term existence of a forest plantation due to the death of individual, usually the weakest trees.

Overmature stands - "retirement" age of trees

When the trees reach the age of 100 - 140 years, the forest becomes ripe. At the same time, conifers stop growing in height, but can still grow in width. Overmature - a forest stand that has stopped growing in height, is destroyed by old age and disease (more than 140 years) - coniferous and hardwoods of seed origin. All in all: how older forest- the fewer trees in it.

It is not economically profitable to let the forest grow old - why let nature destroy such a valuable material for humans? Therefore, the overmature forest must be cut down in the first place! In forestry, all forests in the central part of Russia (and not only) are registered and planned for their cutting and planting with new trees. Trees are simply not allowed to live up to 150 years and are cut down in "the prime of life."

If about 200 years ago all the forests were destroyed, then what were the sleepers made of for railways, buildings, ships, heated stoves? My relatives live in the Oryol region - a region not rich in forests, so they have practically no wooden buildings!

Fiction and painting

What about the mention of forests and logging in literature and paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries? Just ignore? Or are these masterpieces created by order of the secret world government in order to erase these events from people's memory? Seriously? Damn, this theory is so delusional that it’s hard to find words from amazement: global catastrophes, nuclear war- and no traces of these events, except for "young forests" and "covered with soil" of the first floors of houses ...

Prokudin-Gorsky photos of the forest

Let us return to Prokudin-Gorsky, so dearly loved by the alternatives. Thanks to their efforts, it's hard to find "normal" photos of the early 20th century forest on the Internet, but I found it to be a pleasant viewing.

Conclusions and results

The main mistake of the inventors of alternative history lies in establishing an incorrect causal relationship. If now in a modern forest you cannot find trees older than 200 years, this does not mean at all that all forests were destroyed 200 years ago, it also does not mean that in 100 years our forests will be full of 300-year-old pines! Trees do not appear and die at the same time! In nature, almost everything obeys the normal statistical law of distribution: most of the trees are of average age, the oldest trees are a minority, and the older they are, the less they are. It is surprising that people are unwilling to understand the issue, look for answers, and instead run headlong to tell everyone that humanity is being deceived, because the trees are young! If you doubt something or don’t understand something, don’t sow ignorance, try to figure it out at least a little first. Write comments, I will be glad!

Most of our forests are young. Their age is from a quarter to a third of life. Apparently, in the 19th century, some events took place that led to the almost total destruction of our forests. Our forests hold great secrets...

I understand your age-old sadness ...

It was the wary attitude towards the statements of Alexei Kungurov about the Perm forests and clearings, at one of his conferences, that prompted me to conduct this study. Well, how! There was a mysterious hint of hundreds of kilometers of clearings in the forests and their age. I was personally hooked by the fact that I walk through the forest quite often and far enough, but I did not notice anything unusual.

And this time an amazing feeling was repeated - the more you understand, the more new questions appear. I had to re-read a lot of sources, from materials on forestry of the 19th century, to the modern "Instructions for conducting forest management in the forest fund of Russia." This did not add clarity, rather the opposite. However, there was confidence that it's dirty here.

The first amazing fact that was confirmed is the dimension quarter network. The quarterly network, by definition, is “The system of forest quarters created on the lands of the forest fund for the purpose of inventorying the forest fund, organizing and maintaining forestry and forest management”.

The quarterly network consists of quarterly glades. This is a straight strip freed from trees and shrubs (usually up to 4 m wide), laid in the forest in order to mark the boundaries of forest quarters. During forest inventory, cutting and clearing of a quarter clearing to a width of 0.5 m is carried out, and their expansion to 4 m is carried out in subsequent years by forestry workers.

In the picture you can see how these clearings look in Udmurtia. The picture was taken from the program "Google Earth".

The quarters are rectangular. For measurement accuracy, a segment of 5 blocks wide is marked. It amounted to 5340 m, which means that the width of 1 quarter is 1067 meters, or exactly 1 track verst. The quality of the picture leaves much to be desired, but I myself constantly walk along these clearings, and I know well what you see from above from the ground. Until that moment, I was firmly convinced that all these forest roads were the work of Soviet foresters. But why the hell did they need to mark the quarterly network in versts?

Checked. In the instructions, quarters are supposed to be marked with a size of 1 by 2 km. The error at this distance is allowed no more than 20 meters. But 20 is not 340. However, in all forest management documents it is stipulated that if block network projects already exist, then you should simply link to them. It is understandable, the work on laying the glades is a lot of work to redo.

Today, clearing machines already exist (see Fig. rice. above), but they should be forgotten, since almost the entire forest fund of the European part of Russia, plus part of the forest beyond the Urals, approximately to Tyumen, is divided into a verst block network. Of course, there is also a kilometer, because in the last century the foresters also did something, but mostly it was a verst. In particular, there are no kilometer clearings in Udmurtia. And this means that the project and practical laying of the quarterly network in most of the forest areas of the European part of Russia were made no later than 1918. It was at this time that the metric system of measures was adopted for mandatory use in Russia, and the verst gave way to the kilometer.

It turns out made with axes and jigsaws, if, of course, we correctly understand historical reality. Considering that the forest area of ​​the European part of Russia is about 200 million hectares, this is a titanic work. The calculation shows that the total length of the glades is about 3 million km. For clarity, imagine the 1st lumberjack armed with a saw or an ax. During the day, he will be able to clear an average of no more than 10 meters of clearing. But we must not forget that these works can be carried out mainly in the winter. This means that even 20,000 lumberjacks, working annually, would create our excellent verst block network for at least 80 years.

But there has never been such a number of workers involved in forest management. According to the articles of the 19th century, it is clear that there were always very few forestry specialists, and the funds allocated for these purposes could not cover such expenses. Even if we imagine that for this they drove peasants from the surrounding villages to do free work, it is still not clear who did this in the sparsely populated areas of the Perm, Kirov, and Vologda regions.

After this fact, it is no longer so surprising that the entire quarterly network is tilted by about 10 degrees and is directed not to the geographic north pole, but, apparently, to the magnetic one (marking was carried out using a compass, not a GPS navigator), which should have been, in this time to be located approximately 1000 kilometers towards Kamchatka. And it is not so embarrassing that the magnetic pole, according to the official data of scientists, has never been there from the 17th century to the present day. It’s not even frightening that even today the compass needle points in approximately the same direction in which the quarterly network was made before 1918. It still can't be! All logic falls apart.

But it is. And in order to finish off the consciousness clinging to reality, I inform you that all this economy must also be serviced. According to the norms, a complete audit takes place every 20 years. If it passes at all. And during this period of time, the “forest user” should monitor the clearings. Well, if in Soviet times someone followed, then over the past 20 years it is unlikely. But clearings are not overgrown. There is a windbreak, but there are no trees in the middle of the road. But in 20 years, a pine seed that accidentally fell to the ground, of which billions are sown annually, grows up to 8 meters in height. Not only are the clearings not overgrown, you will not even see stumps from periodic clearings. This is all the more striking in comparison with power lines, which are regularly cleared by special teams from overgrown shrubs and trees.

This is what typical clearings in our forests look like. Grass, sometimes bushes, but no trees. There are no signs of regular maintenance.

The second big mystery is the age of our forest, or trees in this forest. In general, let's go in order. First, let's figure out how long a tree lives. Here is the relevant table.

* In brackets - height and life expectancy in especially favorable conditions.

In different sources, the numbers differ slightly, but not significantly. Pine and spruce should survive under normal conditions up to 300…400 years. You begin to understand how ridiculous everything is only when you compare the diameter of such a tree with what we see in our forests. Spruce 300 years old should have a trunk with a diameter of about 2 meters. Well, like in a fairy tale. The question arises: Where are all these giants? No matter how much I walk through the forest, I have not seen thicker than 80 cm. They are not in the mass. There are piece copies (in Udmurtia - 2 pines) that reach 1.2 m, but their age is also no more than 200 years.

In general, how does the forest live? Why do trees grow or die in it?

It turns out that there is a concept "natural forest". This is a forest that lives its own life - it has not been cut down. It has a distinctive feature - low crown density from 10 to 40%. That is, some trees were already old and tall, but some of them fell affected by a fungus or died, losing competition with their neighbors for water, soil and light. Large gaps form in the forest canopy. A lot of light begins to get there, which is very important in the forest struggle for existence, and young growth actively begins to grow up. Therefore, the natural forest consists of different generations, and crown density is the main indicator of this.

But if the forest was subjected to clear cutting, then new trees grow at the same time for a long time, crown density is high over 40%. Several centuries will pass, and if the forest is not touched, then the struggle for a place under the sun will do its job. It will become natural again. Do you want to know how much natural forest in our country that is not affected by anything? Please, a map of Russian forests.

The bright colors indicate forests with high canopy density, i.e. they are not “natural forests”. And most of them are. The entire European part is marked in deep blue. This is as stated in the table: “Small-leaved and mixed forests. Forests with a predominance of birch, aspen, gray alder, often with an admixture of coniferous trees or with separate areas of coniferous forests. Almost all of them are secondary forests formed on the site of primary forests as a result of felling, clearing, forest fires..

On the mountains and the tundra zone, you can not stop, there the rarity of the crowns may be due to other reasons. But it covers the plains and the middle lane clearly a young forest. How young? Come down and check. It is unlikely that you will find a tree older than 150 years in the forest. Even a standard drill for determining the age of a tree has a length of 36 cm and is designed for a tree age of 130 years. How does this explain forest science? Here's what they came up with:

“Forest fires are a fairly common phenomenon for most of the taiga zone of European Russia. Moreover, forest fires in the taiga are so common that some researchers consider the taiga as a multitude of burnt areas of different ages - more precisely, a multitude of forests formed on these burnt areas. Many researchers believe that forest fires are, if not the only, then at least the main natural mechanism for forest renewal, the replacement of old generations of trees with young ones ... "

All this is called. That's where the dog is buried. The forest was on fire, and burned almost everywhere. And this, according to experts, is the main reason for the small age of our forests. Not fungus, not bugs, not hurricanes. Our entire taiga stands on fire, and after a fire, the same thing remains as after clear-cutting. From here high crown density almost throughout the entire forest zone. Of course, there are exceptions - really untouched forests in the Angara region, on Valaam and, probably, somewhere else in the expanses of our vast Motherland. There are really fabulously large trees in their mass. And although these are small islands in the boundless sea of ​​the taiga, they prove that forest can be.

What is so common in forest fires that over the past 150 ... 200 years they have burned the entire forest area of ​​​​700 million hectares? Moreover, according to scientists, in some checkerboard pattern respecting the sequence, and certainly at different times?

First you need to understand the scale of these events in space and time. The fact that the main age of old trees in the bulk of forests is at least 100 years, suggests that large-scale fires, which so rejuvenated our forests, occurred over a period of no more than 100 years. Translating to dates, for one only 19th century. For this it was necessary to burn annually 7 million hectares the woods.

Even as a result of large-scale forest fires in the summer of 2010, which all experts called catastrophic in terms of volume, only 2 million. hectares. It turns out that there is nothing "so ordinary" in this. The last justification for such a burned past of our forests could be the tradition of slash-and-burn agriculture. But how, in this case, to explain the state of the forest in places where traditionally agriculture was not developed? In particular, in the Perm region? Moreover, this method of farming involves the labor-intensive cultural use of limited areas of the forest, and not at all unrestrained arson of large areas in the hot summer season, but with a breeze.

Having gone through all the possible options, we can say with confidence that the scientific concept "dynamics of random disturbances" nothing in real life not justified, and is myth, designed to mask the inadequate state of the current forests of Russia, and hence events leading to this.

We will have to admit that our forests either burned heavily (beyond the norm) and constantly burned throughout the 19th century (which in itself is inexplicable and is not recorded anywhere), or burned down at the same time as a result some incident, which is why the scientific world furiously denies it, having no arguments, except that nothing of the kind is recorded in the official history.

To all this, one can add that there were clearly fabulously large trees in the old natural forests. It has already been said about the reserved surviving areas of the taiga. It is worth giving an example in terms of deciduous forests. The Nizhny Novgorod region and Chuvashia have a very favorable climate for deciduous trees. There are a lot of oak trees growing there. But you, again, will not find old copies. The same 150 years old, no older. Older single copies are all over the place. There is a photo at the beginning of the article the largest oak tree in Belarus. It grows in Belovezhskaya Pushcha.

Its diameter is about 2 meters, and its age is estimated at 800 years which, of course, is highly arbitrary. Who knows, maybe he somehow survived the fires, it happens.

The largest oak in Russia is considered to be a specimen growing in the Lipetsk region. According to conditional estimates, he 430 years.

A special theme is bog oak. This is the one that is extracted mainly from the bottom of the rivers. My relatives from Chuvashia told me that they pulled huge specimens up to 1.5 m in diameter from the bottom. And these were a lot of.

This indicates the composition of the former oak forest, the remains of which lie at the bottom. This means that nothing prevents the current oaks from growing to such sizes. What, before "dynamics of random disturbances" in the form of thunderstorms and lightning worked somehow in a special way? No, everything was the same. And so it turns out that the current forest has not yet reached maturity.

Let's summarize what we got as a result of this study. There are a lot of contradictions between the reality that we observe with our own eyes and the official interpretation of the relatively recent past:

There is a developed block network over a vast area, which was designed in versts and was laid no later than 1918. The length of the glades is such that 20,000 lumberjacks, subject to manual labor, would create it for 80 years. Clearings are serviced very irregularly, if at all, but they do not overgrow.

On the other hand, according to historians and surviving articles on forestry, no funding of a commensurate scale and the required number of forestry specialists then did not have. There was no way to recruit a similar amount of free labor. There was no mechanization capable of facilitating these works.

It is required to choose: either our eyes deceive us, or The 19th century was not like that at all as historians tell us. In particular, there could be mechanization commensurate with the tasks described. What interesting could be this steam engine from the movie "The Barber of Siberia".

Or is Mikhalkov a completely unthinkable dreamer?

There could also be less labor-intensive, efficient technologies for laying and maintaining clearings that have been lost today (some distant analogue of herbicides). It is probably foolish to say that Russia has not lost anything after 1917. Finally, perhaps, they did not cut through the clearings, but in the spaces destroyed by the fire, trees were planted in quarters. This is not such nonsense, compared to what science draws us. Though doubtful, it at least explains a lot.

Our forests are much younger than the natural lifespan of the trees themselves. This is evidenced by the official map of the forests of Russia and our eyes. The age of the forest is about 150 years, although pine and spruce under normal conditions grow up to 400 years, and reach 2 meters in thickness. There are also separate sections of the forest from trees of similar age.

According to experts, all our forests are burned out. It is the fires in their opinion, do not give the trees a chance to live to their natural age. Experts do not even allow the thought of the simultaneous destruction of vast expanses of forest, believing that such an event could not go unnoticed. In order to justify this ashes, official science has adopted the theory of "the dynamics of random disturbances." This theory proposes that forest fires are considered commonplace, destroying (according to some incomprehensible schedule) up to 7 million hectares of forest per year, although in 2010 even 2 million hectares destroyed as a result of deliberate forest fires were named catastrophe.

It is required to choose: either our eyes deceive us again, or some great events of the 19th century with special impudence did not find their reflection in the official version of our past, as neither ]]> Great Tartaria ]]>, nor the Great Northern Route fit there. ]]> Atlantis ]]> with ]]> the fallen moon ]]> and even that did not fit. lump sum destruction of 200…400 million hectares of forest to imagine, and even to hide, is even easier than the unquenchable, 100-year-old fire proposed for consideration by science.

So what is the age-old sadness of Belovezhskaya Pushcha about? Is it not about those heavy wounds of the earth that the young forest covers? After all, giant conflagrations do not happen by themselves ...

Izhevsk

]]> ]]>