00:00War is the loudest thing humans do. But the most powerful weapon ever built does not explode.
00:06It simply floats. Look up at a redwood. 200 feet of bark, wood and water, standing in silence.
00:14The tallest living thing on earth started as a seed smaller than a grain of rice.
00:18The champion is a coast redwood called Hyperion. It rises more than 115 meters.
00:24That is taller than the Statue of Liberty, and taller than most buildings in a small city.
00:29Its cousin, the giant sequoia, goes a different way. It does not reach as high. It grows fat.
00:36The largest tree on the planet by volume is a sequoia named General Sherman.
00:40Roughly 1,500 cubic meters of wood. If you loaded it onto trucks, you would need dozens of them.
00:47Think about the absurdity of that. A single trunk holding more wood than a whole forest of ordinary
00:52trees. A living column that was already old when Rome was young, and may still be standing after
00:57every city we have built is gone. Now the question that matters. How does water climb?
01:03115 meters of water inside a pipe is heavy. Physics says it should not rise, yet it does,
01:09every minute of every day. The answer is a chain of tiny pulling forces. Water molecules cling to each
01:15other in a thin thread inside the tree's plumbing, and as water evaporates from the leaves, it hauls the
01:20next molecule up behind it. That thread can fail. If the water is pulled apart, an air bubble forms,
01:26the column breaks, and that branch dies of thirst. Which reveals the real weapon. Redwoods do not rely
01:33on rain. They harvest fog. On the coast, cold air meets a layer of warm air, and fog forms. The
01:40tree's
01:41needles are built like tiny combs. Fog droplets hit them, gather, and run down the trunk. Some of that water
01:47drips to the ground and soaks the roots. Some is absorbed straight through the bark and needles.
01:53One large redwood can pull gallons of water out of thin air in a single foggy night. A whole forest,
01:59working together, can shift a serious amount of water out of the sky. And it makes the fog, too.
02:05Rain forests are said to make their own weather. On this coast, it is almost literally true. As the
02:11canopy releases vapor and particles, it feeds the very fog that waters it. Here is the strange part.
02:17These giants have been losing their world. Logging took most of the old trees. A hotter
02:23climate dries the coastline and weakens the fog, and without fog, the tallest trees on earth start
02:27running out of water while standing in the sea mist. Two trees stand for two strategies. Hyperion
02:33reached for height. General Sherman reached for mass. Both were built to win time. Both took thousands of
02:40years to perfect. And both are still here, quietly doing the thing no weapon can do. They turn fog into
02:47life. So next time you see mist on a hillside, look again. That is not weather. That may be a
02:53tree
02:54drinking. Every seed they drop is a small bed on the next thousand years. And the trees are still collecting.
03:03Underwood, the trees, the trees are still laying out of water. And the trees are still
03:10in water. And the trees are still in water. In the water. So next time you see mist on a
03:30hillside,
