This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher in Tagyatta.

One of the consequences of a warming world is that high mountain habitats, which used to be too chilly for trees, are heating up.

There is now sort of newly available real estate for trees above what we call tree line.

You know, the sort of literal line in the sand above which trees just can't grow because

it's too cold, but now it's not.

Brian Smithers is an ecologist at UC Davis and he compares this slow moving migration to land grabs back in pioneer times.

You know, they fired the guns and all the settlers just made a mad dash to claim their stake.

It's that, but, you know, if everybody were crawling on their bellies or something like that

instead.

Smithers is studying this upslope race among bristlecomb pines.

These trees can live for more than 5,000 years making them the oldest individual organisms on Earth. Many of them eke out a living

in dry rocky soils on wind-blown ridge lines around 11,000 feet in eastern California and Nevada.

They look like the worst bonsai tree imaginable.

I mean, they can, they just look gnarled and twisted,

something that looks like it's taken a beating for 5,000 years and

still living.

So as tree line rises, these giant bonsaies are following.

But Smither says the ancient trees now have a competitor,

a species called Limber pine.

The limbers are passing the bristle cones at tree line,

sprouting seedlings in that fresh real estate up slope more quickly.

Quickly being a relative term here.

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