Tree Ring Science

What do the trees tell you?

There is a secret history of the Earth, hidden inside of trees. Did you know that tree rings are as accurate as a calendar? That tree rings are better than a calender at tracing the weather patterns and climate changes of the past, based on how they affected the tree rings growth? We knew, in the back of our heads, that tree rings represented the age of tress, but that was about as far as our knowledge went, so we turned to Google.

How do scientists use tree rings to create accurate maps of history? Dendrochronology . We think it is fascinating to think about the fact that you can accurately date a tree based on the number of rings inside of it. You can tell how high or low a nearby river was year to year based on the rings characteristics. If there was a specific climatological event one year (say a drought, a flood, a fire), every tree that got through it will have a ring that shows that event.

Where are the 80's?

What is it good for?

Tree rings can be used to reliably date pieces of art from antiquity. Lots of old paintings were either painted on wood or at least the canvas was attached to a wooden frame. If either of those are the case, then dendrochronologists can x-ray the wood and study it to determine its age (this can also determine whether or not an art piece is a fake or not; if it dates to too early or late, then it may be an imposter).

Stradivarius violins are the most treasured violins in the world:

Stradivarius

Antonio Stradivari, an Italian instrument maker, was born in 1644 and died in 1737. His violins are famous as being THE violin to play, and so, countless imitations have been made by instrument makers wanting to capitalize on the Stradivarius name, some going as far as marking the imitation violins as Stradivarius. Dendochronology is one of the best ways to determine the authenticity of a Stradivarius. The tree rings can date and place the location of the wood used to make the violin.
  

The implications

Realizing that an exact year is so accurately measured by a tree growing in nature seems crazy at first, considering how chaotic we tend to think nature is (storms, drought, random dispersal of plants and animals), but if you really think about it, we get our idea and measurement of a year based on patterns we observe in nature: the planets travel around the sun, night and day, the growing and harvesting of plants, the change of the seasons, etc. So our concept of time (years, calenders, etc.) is literally a map of the change and passing of objects in space, and of the life cycle of birth, growth, and death. Like tree rings. The universe spins like a clock, life is born and dies as it should, dendrochronologists count the rings in trees. 

this is actually a guy's kickstarter project