ABOVE: ©istock.com, Mehmet Gökhan Bayhan
To tell the age of a tree, you count its rings. Most people know that. But few people know that the rings in trees can tell us much more than just a tree’s age. And perhaps even fewer know that there is a field of science dedicated to the study of tree rings. Dendrochronology, from the Greek words for “tree” (dendros) and “time” (chronos), uses tree rings to study the histories of forests, the climate, and human civilizations, as well as the links among them. My upcoming book, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, explores the insights generated by dendrochronology.
Trees in temperate regions, where growth during summer months is followed by dormancy in winter, form a ring in their stems each and every year. The reliability of the yearly ring formation yields an opportunity to estimate a tree’s age from ...
