The Rings on the Trees Go Round and Round....

Tapping into tree wisdom

- Smt. Sujatha Rao

... all the way to the Sun. If you think it's preposterous and impossible, please read on.

Dendrochronology (the study of tree rings - yes, there is such a thing and there are people who study them) highlights that a tree's growth changes in response to seasonal as well as climate changes. During the growing season, early wood grows between the older wood and the outer bark, and as the growth slows towards the end of summer, smaller, thicker-walled latewood is produced, appearing darker in colour. Normally these two cell types compose one annual ring. Broad rings reflect a good growing year and narrow rings reflect a bad year, due to some trauma or environmental stress.

Thus, the tree rings can end up being important data banks, considering the fact that they live for hundreds of years. Matching tree ring patterns in living as well as well-preserved dead trees can lead us to chronicle hundreds or even thousands of years of environmental data, hitherto unknown. This process is known as cross-dating.

While for people like us, the term “ring” conjures up the images of those diamond or platinum rings, for Dendrochronologists “wood” is the treasure more valuable than anything in the world and they are perpetually on a treasure hunt of sorts, trying to unravel the mysteries encoded in the ‘rings’ of the wood.

Now, let's ring-in three specialists or dendrochronologists.

Ring, ring, ring.

Specialist number One - Grant Harley - Paleoclimatologist, working as the Associate professor of geography at the University of Idaho. He uses tree rings to study past and future climates

Specialist number Two - Marta Domínguez-Delmás,