Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings
- Abhinav Kumar Gupta
- Nov 22, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 23, 2020
If someone had told me, before I found this book, that they count tree rings as their day job - I would have chuckled assuming it to be their attempt at humour. As it turns out, counting tree rings is a serious business - an entire field of research helping us understand our world better. This field has a serious-sounding name as well - dendrochronology.
There are trees still living, much older than steam engines, Monalisa, the great wall of china, the birth of Islam, rise and fall of the roman empire and even pyramids; just imagine what all fascinating events these trees have been witness to.
With their ages extending back several thousands of years, these trees have meticulously chronicled minute details of the weather patterns in their rings - growing thicker or thinner rings depending upon seasons, but also growing depending on how conducive or inhospitable the environment was. These trees have fascinating accounts to tell - of droughts, floods, extreme winters, summers, hurricanes, fires, volcanos, solar flares and so much more.
Valerie Trouet, the author of Tree story, has spent her life intently listen to these tree stories and compiled many of them into this wonderful book.
The first few chapters are about - how this entire field was first set up, by efforts of not some botanist or biologist, but surprisingly, an accomplished astronomer - A. E. Douglass, who was trying to find a record of 11-year sun-cycles in tree rings. Pretty soon, it was realised that tree rings from living and dead trees can be put together, to create millennia-long chronological scales to accurately date any tree or a piece of wooden archaeological artefact.
The obvious fun part is travelling the world, looking for really ancient trees. The book shares stories about how we came to establish the age of oldest trees across continents, and author's own association with finding the oldest living European tree, 1075-year-old, Bosnian pine, named Adonis.
The meaty part of the book is about the intense effort put in by tree ring scientists across the globe in capturing variations in temperature and weather patterns over past centuries. No surprise that all, tree rings are shouting loudly that human-caused climate change, has pushed our temperatures to never before seen extremes. It was this, analysis, gathered meticulously from Tree rings which formed the crux of IPCC's conclusion that climate change is being caused by human activity.
This book really brings forth the irony, that we as a human species are somehow smart enough to reliably figure out temperatures millions of year old - understand complex climate causalities, yet simultaneously stupid, to still pay heed to act on it.
What I never appreciated before was, that Tree rings are the best and most accurate measure we have of ancient temperatures and weather patterns - giving us a historical resolution down to every year and often even every season. So, we are very well able to date interesting climatic events, such as draughts, floods and match those against the written and archaeological records from history - and this is the basis of most interesting and unexpected tales from that tree rings have to tell us.
One story that stuck in my mind is that how counting tree rings from long-dead trees in Mongolian lava planes has helped us piece together the ancient environment in which reign of Genghis Khan thrived. These trees talk about the two-decade draughts that fractured & devasted existing tribes in the vicinity, making way for Genghis khan to unite them under his banner. This was followed by long wet decades, which enabled steppe grasslands across Asia to provide fodder for Mongolian cavalry, enabling them to move swiftly and conquer kingdoms.
Tree rings can also be matched from wood from shipwrecks - surprisingly giving us insights about ancient hurricane frequencies. Another application with a high commercial implication is how tree rings help in the dating of wooden violins and frames of artworks, helping catch art forgeries.
Let me just mention one last bit from the book, which stuck in my mind as this intersected with the crisis that we are facing in 2020.
No, not corona pandemic.
This year has had so many crises, that it is easy to forget that, we had history's worst forest fires this year. Tree rings have a very clear stipulation for us - on what we are doing wrong in our forest management which is making our forests susceptible to these enormous fires. Ancient, tree rings have marks of mini fires every 5-10 years before human interference started interfering in these forests. These mini fires cleaned up forest material of combustible wood and dry leaves. This periodic cleaning up avoided massive fires. But, with modern forest management, small fires are put out - which sets the stage for huge wildfires.
It's always humbling to know the extent of our own ignorance. I could never have imagined, that humble tree rings have so much to teach us. I had great fun reading through this book - do check it out.
You may buy the book from my amazon affiliate link here:
Comentarios