The Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, thought to be 800 to 1,200 years old and linked in legend with Robin Hood. Every point is a laser measurement taken from the ground around the tree, about 1.4 million of them here, thinned from more than 46 million. The warmer points low in the crown are the steel props that held up its heaviest limbs.
The Major Oak was declared dead in June 2026, after it failed to come into leaf. This is the tree as it stood when it was scanned.
Measured: the trunk, the limbs, the props and the ground around them.
Imagined: the roots. A laser cannot see underground, so the roots are drawn by the computer, spread a little wider than the crown. The falling discs and the coloured storm are also artistic: they move the real points, but they do not show a measurement.
SCATTER project (Scanning Ancient Trees with Terrestrial LiDAR): data captured and processed by Dr Phil Wilkes and Dr Cecilia Chavana-Bryant, funded by the Woodland Trust Conservation Research Programme. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11658042, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Inspired by the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast; this is an independent piece and not affiliated with them or with the SCATTER team.
"Symmetry" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).
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