In a world transfixed by the new, Rachel Sussman is obsessed with the old. Not just old–ancient. The Brooklyn-based photographer has frequent-flown all over the world the last few years documenting the planet’s oldest living organisms. It’s a quest that seems as much fueled by the imagination as the aesthete, because many of these life forms fall into the category of “faces only a lichen could love”.

That’s the first glance, anyway. But when the eye lingers, beauty is often teased out, followed by awe. You might be smugly satisfied with your superior humanoid shape, but then you take in the bread-loaf lines of a brain coral and understand that’s what it takes to live 2,000 years. Suddenly, round and blobby might be something to aspire to.

Sussman’s project requires the curiosity of a sleuth and the persuasiveness of a diplomat. Old as they are, these organisms are precious, sometimes fragile, oft times threatened by those who would love them to death (or worse), and frequently protected behind a shroud of secrecy by the biologists who measure them. Last September, Sussman traveled to Sweden in search of a 9,500-year-old clonal spruce tree; the scientist who’d discovered it just the year prior needed no small amount of cajoling (and perhaps a blood oath) before revealing the location.

So, how old are the oldest things? Sussman is following scientists who are working at the very edge, including Sarah Stewart Johnson, a Harvard researcher on Siberian bacteria, who is showing that “the bacteria were not lying dormant in the permafrost, but rather showed continuous DNA repair — an indication that these ancient cells have been continuously living. For how long?

“Folks, we have a winner,” Sussman writes. “400,000 to 600,000 years.”

Sussman, as it turns out, isn’t just an accomplished photographer with a sense of deep natural history. She is an adventure-travel writer of the first order. Her Oldest Living Things blog is absolutely chock-full of one charming turn of a phrase after another, and she paints pictures with words of places and events in ways that could turn magazine writers green. With wit, whimsy, and an ear for the moment, she brings her pursuit to life so viscerally that you find yourself asking, “What’s my quest and when am I leaving on it?”

Some examples. From Chile:

“The llareta might give the welwitchia a run for its money in terms of strange and interesting lifeforms thriving in inhospitable climates. First of all, it calls the Atacama Desert home. The Atacama is the most arid place on earth, referred to as “ABSOLUTE DESERT” at its center. (Philosophers: any possible relations to “absolute elsewhere?”) Some parts have not seen a single drop of rain since record keeping began. But lest we get too philosophical, the absurd comes to the rescue: The llareta is a member of the umbelliferae family, making it a cousin of parsley.

“So I’m going to find some 3,000-year-old parsley in the absolute desert.”

Or this, from Greenland: “There are names for everything in Greenland; you turn a corner and you’re somewhere else. If there’s any sort of structure or identifiable landmark, the place has a name. It reminded me of Namibia in that way; if there was an uninhabited shack, it was a town, properly named and marked on the national map. That’s how things are done in lands of few and far betweens. A lot of somethings are formed out of all that nothing. Or rather, once you know how to look, you start to see what’s been there all along.”

“…my water taxi now long gone, I strapped my camping backpack onto my back, my camera bag onto my front, and slowly made my way up the hill to the house. The door stuck, but was unlocked. People had been here, but I could see that they weren’t staying there now. It was probably 5 or 6 pm. A tattered and very scary doll stared at me from the corner. I was in fact alone in the middle of nowhere. No way to call anyone. Not sure of where to look for anyone. unsure if they knew I was coming or arrived.”

It’s well worth reading the entire account of what Sussman calls the strangest day of here life, this day in Greeland. And it’s also well worth seeing more of her very cool photography project on organisms to which we are just blips.

Clonal quaking aspens, 80,000 years old, Fish Lake, Utah

---

Spruce tree, 9,500 years old, Sweden

---

Underground forest, 13,000 years old, Pretoria, South Africa

---

Tagged as: environment