Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us

Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Studying the historical data stored in centuries-old trees is a burgeoning field, with labs around the world learning more about historical patterns of weather and climate and the effects on humans.

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Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times Kiyomi Morino, a research associate at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, during a field sampling on Mount Bigelow, in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Trees, it seems, are giant organic recording devices that contain information about past climate, civilizations, ecosystems and even galactic events, much of it many thousands of years old. In recent years, the techniques for extracting information from tree rings has been honed and expanded. New technologies and techniques are able to pry a much deeper and wider range of information out of trees.

The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research here at the University of Arizona was founded in the 1930s by A.E. Douglass, an astronomer who turned to trees to better understand the connection between sunspots and climate.

The lab has helped establish other labs around the world, which in turn has rapidly increased the number of studied trees. There are now roughly a dozen large labs globally and data from 4,000 sites on all continents except Antarctica. The information is stored in the International Tree Ring Data Bank, a library open to all researchers. As more tree data becomes available, a much richer picture forms of the nexus of past climate, ecosystems and human civilization.