World's tallest tropical tree in Malaysia

A tropical tree on Borneo Island, Malaysia, set a record with the height of three stacked blue whales.

Researcher Gregory Asner of the Carnegie Institute of Science at Stanford University, USA, announced on October 10 that he found the world's tallest tropical tree in the center of Borneo island, Sabah state, Malaysia.

The world's tallest tropical tree in the Malaysian forest.(Photo: Robin Martin).

This tree has a height of 94.1m with 40.3m diameter tree canopy, breaking the highest tropical tree record in the world of a 89.5m high Yellow Meranti tree also in Malaysia, according to the International Business Times.

Unknown scientists of tropical plants set a new record of which species of the Shorea family. They saw this plant for the first time from a helicopter after spending a lot of time mapping Sabah forest with aerial laser scanning technology. Research not only helps to collect large amounts of data about stem height but also the canopy and biodiversity of animals.

"This technique scans 500,000 lasers per second from the belly of the plane, providing detailed 3D images of the distance from the canopy to the ground. We also use similar data to calculate the amount of carbon stored in the rainforest, " Asner said.

Despite being as high as 94.1m, the newly discovered tropical tree is still much lower than the tallest temperate tree, a sub-genus Hyperion in Redwood National Park, California, USA. Hyperion tree has a height of 115m.