This week’s new post on the Yale Forum (I’ll post it here next week) got me to thinking about the process of collecting tree rings for paleoclimate studies. There are lots of interesting videos on this topic, here are two.
——
Dendrochronologist Lisa Graumlich, of Montana State University, uses tree rings as a living record of where Earth’s climate has been, and where it is going. Smith joins Graumlich on a sample-gathering expedition into the serene highlands surrounding Yellowstone National Park, where the rings of ancient trees provide a sterling historical record of climate change. Graumlich then enters the scientific laboratories of the Big Sky Institute, where she is able to show graphic evidence of human activity’s effect on our climate.
Below – More on the hardware of dendrochronology
Talk about your typical white-coat, labchair-glued, eco-fascist, alarmist scientists who wilfully ignore past climate change and who are in it for the grant money! I look into their eyes and see: conspiracy! greed! evil!
Sorry Arne, didn’t realise you were being ironic and voted you down :/
Difficult job sounding sillier than some people really are!
Excellent!
I felt an bit envious watching this. The sort of painstaking work like this I used to do concerned experimental textiles, and I was stuck inside the lab. Do they have as many frusrating experimental glitches as I used to, I wonder?
It would have been nice to see how they collate all the data. The excitement of this sort of work comes when you see a pattern emerging as you plot the graphs or whatever, and in the statistical analysis.
Wonder if there’s a chance to take the samples in a voluntary capacity in the UK in my retirement….Looks easy to break one of those cylinders while extracting it! :/
“Looks easy to break one of those cylinders while extracting it!”
I suspect that the “sharpened tip” would qualify as an extremely lethal weapon, or at least an edge that would satisfy the fussiest chef or fish filleter. That cylinder probably didn’t feel a thing as the blade end slid through and parted it from the neighbouring cells. With no disruptive trauma, the greenwood cylinders would be pretty stable until they dry out. Not so sure about the deadwood, they could be a bit brittle.
I noticed how smooth and easy it looked to simply turn the handle and the screw end just bit into the core. ‘Hot knife through butter’ springs to mind as an apt analogy.