Tree rings tell a story of natural history.
The University of Arizona College of Science will feature a Valentine's Day lecture on the love for tree ring research.
University of Arizona dendrochronologist Charlotte Pearson will host the talk as part of the College of Science free lecture series. She says investigating tree rings can reveal an encyclopedia of events that has happened to a tree’s environment over thousands of years.
“It might be how much rainfall there was, it might be temperature, it might be the year for a very traumatic event for the tree like a forest fire," Pearson explained. "Or an insect outbreak or a volcanic eruption. All of these things can leave a permanent mark on the tree ring record.”
She adds conducting studies on tree ring samples is straightforward and uncomplicated because trees act as natural historians.
“They don’t have a political agenda, they don’t have a bias, they just take a sample. And then from that sample or series of samples of data rings we can reconstruct the past.”
Each ring on a tree stump marks a complete cycle of the seasons. Ring measurements taken from trees with overlapping ages can extend knowledge of past climate change.
“They don’t have a political agenda, they don’t have a bias, they just take a sample. And then from that sample or series of samples of data rings we can reconstruct the past.” (:09)
Each ring on a tree can mark a complete cycle of the seasons. Ring measurements taken from trees with overlapping ages can extend knowledge of climates back thousands of years.
Charlotte Pearson will discuss findings from her research next Wednesday evening at the College of Science lecture series.
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