Scientists are excited to discover a cache of swamp kauri found in West Auckland is more than 45,000 old, and say it could help us better understand climate change.
Photo: Supplied
The ancient wood was unearthed from about 4m deep at the site of a Nido furniture store in Henderson earlier this year.
NIWA principal scientist Dr Andrew Lorrey said they initially expected the swamp kauri to be 10,000 years old, but it was now believed it is to be more than 45,000 years old.
"Because of their longevity, they actually provide a really valuable record of climate variability and climate change long before instruments were ever installed in New Zealand," he said.
"We know during that time, there was some really wild oscillation of global climate."
Dr Lorrey said if the swamp kauri was as ancient as they believed, the data may yield important information about the global climate system.
"Let's be clear, we are going into a changing climate, we have a changing climate.
"We have already seen some dramatic changes over human time scales, and we have to better understand what our experiences are going to be like in an environment that could change quite rapidly on us.
"If we look into the past and these windows, it gives us several opportunities to assess previous events where the climate changed within decades quite rapidly and quite starkly."
Understanding those past lessons are a good natural base line for understanding what might come in the future, he said.