The Tree That Hits the Moon
There's a tree in Taiwan so tall that the Indigenous Rukai people have a poetic name for it: "The tree that hits the moon."
And honestly? After learning about this discovery, I think they might be underselling it.
In 2023, scientists announced they'd found the tallest tree in Taiwan — and in all of East Asia. It's an 84.1-meter-tall Taiwania fir, a species of ancient conifer that has been around for millions of years. To put that in perspective, that's roughly equivalent to a 25-story building standing on its end. In a forest. Just... growing.
But here's what really caught my attention: this wasn't some well-documented tourist attraction. This tree had been hiding in plain sight, and finding it took an entire community of scientists, climbers, and ordinary citizens working together for nearly a decade.
Taiwan: Nature's Best-Kept Secret
Before we get into the hunt for these giants, let's talk about why Taiwan is so special in the first place.
This island — roughly the size of Switzerland — is one of the most ecologically diverse places on Earth. It has 258 peaks over 3,000 meters tall, ranging from steamy tropical rainforests at sea level to cold alpine tundra at the highest elevations. About 60% of the island is still covered in forest, with an estimated 950 million trees growing across its mountains and valleys.
For much of the 20th century, industrial logging chewed through Taiwan's primary forests. But the steepest, most rugged terrain acted as a natural fortress, protecting pockets of old-growth forest from the chainsaws. These hidden refuges became the last strongholds for ancient trees — including some that have been standing for over a thousand years.
The Taiwan Tree Seekers
Since 2014, a team called the "Taiwan Tree Seekers" has been on a mission to find, measure, and document the island's most extraordinary trees. Their team is pretty remarkable: professional tree climbers, ecologists, geologists, and remote sensing specialists all working together.
Their first big breakthrough came in 2014, when they investigated a famous group of giant Taiwania firs known as the "Chilan Three Sisters." Local communities had known about these trees for generations, but no one had ever scientifically measured them. When the researchers got their instruments out, they found the tallest of the three stood 69.3 meters high, with a trunk nearly three meters wide.
In 2017, professional climbers from Australia came to photograph the Three Sisters, and suddenly the world started paying attention to Taiwan's hidden giants.
Why Finding Giant Trees Is Harder Than It Sounds
You might think finding the tallest tree in East Asia would be straightforward. Just... look up, right?
Oh, if only it were that simple.
Here's the thing about old-growth forests: they're incredibly dense. Multiple layers of canopy create a tangled green maze where visual estimates from the ground can be wildly off. During an expedition near Great Ghost Lake — a place considered sacred by Indigenous peoples — researchers climbed a tree they estimated at around 80 meters. It turned out to be "only" 71.7 meters.
From the ground, everything looks impossibly tall. But how do you know which tree is the tallest when they're all competing for the same patch of sky?
Enter LiDAR: Laser Eyes in the Sky
The team knew they needed a better approach. Searching through 950 million trees scattered across mountains and deep valleys was genuinely impossible with traditional methods.
So they teamed up with remote sensing specialists at National Cheng Kung University and started using LiDAR.
LiDAR is incredibly cool, if you're into that sort of thing (and I absolutely am). Basically, you attach a laser scanner to an aircraft, fly it over the forest, and shoot millions of laser pulses down toward the ground. By measuring how long each pulse takes to bounce back, the system builds a detailed 3D model of the terrain and — crucially — can estimate the height of individual trees.
Suddenly, what seemed like searching for a needle in a haystack became theoretically achievable.
The Citizen Scientists Who Saved the Day
Here's where things get really interesting.
Even with LiDAR, there was a problem. Taiwan's terrain is so steep and irregular that automated software kept making mistakes — incorrectly identifying trees as much taller than they actually were, especially when they stood near cliffs or sharp elevation changes.
How many mistakes? The automated system misidentified 93% of the trees it flagged.
That's where hundreds of ordinary Taiwanese citizens came in. Starting in 2020, they began examining LiDAR profile images and helping researchers eliminate false candidates. People, it turned out, were much better than algorithms at recognizing when a "tree" was actually just a cliff edge playing tricks with the data.
By the end of 2022, this citizen science army had helped create the "Taiwan Giant Tree Map," documenting 941 individual trees taller than 65 meters.
The Discovery of a Lifetime
In January 2023, during the Lunar New Year holiday, the team finally made their way to the tree they'd nicknamed "Heaven Sword" — a Taiwania fir growing somewhere in the remote mountains.
When they climbed it and took their measurements, the numbers came back: 84.1 meters. Not just the tallest tree in Taiwan, but the tallest in all of East Asia.
The Indigenous name for these ancient firs came to mind: "The tree that hits the moon."
And you know what? For once, the poetry matches the reality.
What This Means
I've been thinking about this discovery a lot since I first read about it. There's something profound about the fact that in 2023 — with satellite imagery, global positioning systems, and more technology than we know what to do with — we can still discover something genuinely new and extraordinary in the natural world.
But what strikes me even more is the human story. This discovery wasn't made by a lone genius scientist or a high-tech drone. It was made possible by a diverse team working together, by ordinary citizens volunteering their time, and by Indigenous knowledge that kept these sacred places protected for generations.
The tallest tree in East Asia had been hiding in plain sight, protected by its remote location and the cultural respect of local communities. All the technology in the world couldn't find it alone — it took people working together across disciplines and backgrounds to bring it into the light.
Sometimes I think that's the most beautiful part of the story.
Source: ScienceDaily