00:41 Africa’s Oldest and Largest Baobab Trees Dying Off Mysteriously A mystery is unfolding in Africa after some of its oldest and biggest trees suddenly died.

At a Glance A recent study suggests climate change is contributing to the death's of Africa's massive baobab trees.

Some of the largest trees have died over the last 12 years.

The iconic trees can reach nearly 2,000 years of age.

Africa’s massive "trees of life" have been dying off and researchers aren’t sure what is happening to the iconic greenery.

A recent study suggests climate change has been playing a role in the deaths of the continent's native baobab trees . The towering trees are the largest flowering trees and the longest living, reaching nearly 2,000 years of age.

“We report that nine of the 13 oldest and five of the six largest individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died over the past 12 years,” wrote the international team of researchers. Researchers even went so far as to call the deaths "an event of an unprecedented magnitude."

“These trees are under pressure by temperature increases and drought ,” study co-author and Babeș-Bolyai University chemist Adrian Patrut told NPR.

Southern Africa, where the researchers cataloged the trees, has already been heating up faster than the global average, and researchers with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say the region will see some of the most intense temperatures hikes and reduced rainfall on the continent.

Patrut and his team first noticed the die-off of the trees during a 2005 research study focused on gauging their ages and studying their architectures.

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Their recent findings revealed that the trees grow from multiple stems in their cores and can grow these stems the way other trees grow branches. This can throw off the tree’s rings with new wood growth and make it hard to determine the oldest part of the tree.

Their growth system also allows the trees to form giant gaps in their trunks.

“One ancient hollow baobab tree in Zimbabwe is so large that up to 40 people can shelter inside its trunk ," officials with South Africa’s Kruger National Park wrote on its website. “Various baobabs have been used as a shop, a prison, a house, a storage barn and a bus shelter."

The park added that baobab trees are “difficult to kill.” Even if one were to strip or burn bark from the tree, it would just form more and continue to grow.

“When they do die, they simply rot from the inside and suddenly collapse, leaving a heap of fibers, which makes many people think that they don't die at all, but simply disappear,” states the website.

Researchers have also suggested human interaction played a role in the trees’ demise.

“It is very likely that human actions, whether by changing the local landscape or altering global climate, have contributed to the death of so many large baobabs,” University of Wisconsin-Madison ecologist David Baum, who was not involved in the study, told NPR.

The Sunland Baobab, also known as the Platland tree, was the continent's biggest baobab, standing more than 60 feet high and more than 100 feet across. Its massive hollow was once home to a cocktail bar with enough space for 15 people, NPR reports. In November 2017, heavy rainfall triggered rot that took it down. It first began to split apart in the spring of 2016.

The baobab tree is native to the African savannah. They look as though they were planted upside down thanks to their thin branches and the thick, root-covered stems crawling up their trunks.

The scientists say more research is needed to determine the cause of the distinct trees’ deaths.