The tales trees tell – from history to climate change
For generations, essential clues to the earth’s climate sat underneath the stadium at the University of Arizona, piled into stacks and crammed into plastic bins. There were slices of ancient redwood trees, charcoal pieces from historic ruins, and carefully extracted cores from some of the oldest living trees on earth – all holding information about fires, floods, droughts, and patterns of extreme weather.
The scientists who studied these samples would stay home on football game nights, recalls Valerie Trouet, now a distinguished scholar at the university’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. The stomping on the bleachers above them was just too loud for the delicate task of counting tree rings, or for finding the patterns that could reveal a climate timeline stretching thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.
Besides, there wasn’t any parking.
But the working
