In the first three seconds after the Allied powers dropped the “Little Boy” nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, temperatures soared to 7,000°F from ground zero to a distance of two miles.
Any life forms within the radius of the detonation succumbed to death instantly. Even buildings melted and the city turned to ashes as the fire raged in Hiroshima, according to Forbes.
However, what survived the explosion is a resilient story of six Ginkgo biloba trees that grew about a mile away from the center of the explosion. For them, it was one more thing to overcome and continue living.
Despite being stripped of charred leaves and branches due to the explosion, the six trees came back to life within months.
Trees, also known as “living fossils,” have withstood the ice age, mass extinctions, and thousands of environmental changes the Earth has experienced.
The reason for calling Ginkgo biloba a living fossil is that the trees date back more than 290 million years, to the Permian period, and have withstood mass extinctions, according to National Geographic.
It was a mass extinction event so severe that it left 96% of all marine species dead and about three in four land species dead, forests were wiped out, and they did not return to life until 10 million years later.
Of the five mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic is the only one that left a large number of insect species extinct. The evolution was so severe that it took four to eight million years for marine ecosystems to recover.
This period even predates the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Ginkgo biloba survived and remained the same for millennia with its fan-shaped leaf structure.
They thrived in Laurasia (the northern subcontinent) for millions of years until the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Many species were exterminated, but the Ginkgos remained strong. At the end of the Pleistocene, they were isolated in populations in China. They could have faced extinction, but they were saved by their resilience and surprisingly, humanity helped them meet the challenge.
Living fossils were thought to be extinct in the wild until the early 20th century, but were found to be thriving when small populations were rediscovered in remote China.
Researchers have even speculated that they were preserved by Buddhist monks.
Today, Ginkgos are widespread on city streets, parks and other places around the world. They are resistant to pollution, pests and the inclement weather of urban life.
