Heaven Sword - a whopping big tree
By Judy Evans
@JudyEv (383517)
Rockingham, Australia
June 28, 2026 9:17pm CST
The Taiwan Forestry Research Institute has been running a decade-long project to map the tallest trees in the country. They’ve now found a 1,000-year-old tree that measures 84.1 metres (276 feet). Called Heaven Sword, trees of this nature create mini-ecosystems of their own, providing support for orchids and flying squirrels. They also store as much carbon as a stand of mid-sized trees.
Heaven Sword is a genus of cypress (Taiwania cryptomerioides), once found across the northern hemisphere but now mostly in Taiwan’s mountainous regions with small numbers in China, Vietnam and Myanmar.
During COVID-19 lockdowns, some 400 volunteers worked from home to help verify data from light detection and ranging (LIDAR). There are just over 50,000 trees believed to be above 60m tall. I would get dizzy looking up at such trees.
The photo is of a stand of eucalypt trees.
11 people like this
10 responses
@FourWalls (87263)
• United States
9h
I wonder how they give us an accurate height measurement of those trees.
4 people like this
@JudyEv (383517)
• Rockingham, Australia
5h
@AliCanary @FourWalls I found this in another article. LiDAR is a sophisticated 3D scanning technique that transmits laser pulses from an aircraft toward the ground. By measuring how long it takes for the light to bounce back, the system generates a highly detailed 3D map of the landscape, revealing the height of the trees.
This is the article:
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-heaven-sword-crowned-east-asia.html.
2 people like this
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@Fleura (35399)
• United Kingdom
5h
It's actually very simple. You look at the top of the object you want to measure and use an instrument to measure the angle (you can make one using a piece of cardboard and a piece of string). Then you measure your distance to the base of the object (you can just estimate this in paces, for example, if you don't need to be exact). Then you can work it out. See here:
https://www.instructables.com/Using-a-clinometer-to-measure-height/
1 person likes this
@Tampa_girl7 (54762)
• United States
1h
@JudyEv It really is. Hopefully it stands for many more years.
1 person likes this
@Deepizzaguy (122738)
• Lake Charles, Louisiana
10h
I know what you mean since looking up at the height of trees is scary.
2 people like this
@AliCanary (4547)
•
7h
Sounds cool! We have trees in our country, sequoias, that are absolutely immense. They hollowed out a tunnel through the trunk of one that you could drive a car through.
2 people like this
@teamfreak16 (43875)
• Denver, Colorado
11h
Impressive, but you're right. I wouldn't want to be looking up at that.
2 people like this
@Fleura (35399)
• United Kingdom
5h
The huge trees that still exist in places like that and in parts of America and Australia are awe-inspiring to someone from a country where even the most venerable trees only reach about 30 metres. Imagine what the first Europeans must have felt when they saw them!
1 person likes this
@JudyEv (383517)
• Rockingham, Australia
5h
I hadn't thought about Britain not having really high trees. And the group settlers that came to the south-west of our state were expected to clear their land of such trees with an axe! So they were obviously felled with axes but expecting an inexperienced man to clear enough for a farm was ludicrous.
1 person likes this
@BACONSTRIPSXXX (18264)
• Torrington, Connecticut
48m
That’s incredible imagine a tree standing there for a thousand years, quietly surviving everything from storms to wars to entire civilizations changing around it. “Heaven Sword” is a fitting name.
