In this gee-whiz science and great outdoors piece, an expert in tree-ring research shares some of the details of what trees can tell us — and whether or not their rings can reveal their age.

The tree-ring lab’s Connie Woodhouse is a great observer of the Colorado River, carver of the Grand Canyon, irrigator of the Southwest, feeder of Los Angeles.

Tree-ring increment cores collected from bigcone Douglas fir trees growing on Mount Pinos in Southern California. Each growth ring is a couplet of light colored spring wood and dark colored ...

She pulled in detailed tree ring growth records of 12 individual evergreen trees growing throughout Arizona — six Pinus edulis, three Pinus ponderosa and three Pseudotsuga menziesii — that had ...

This tree formed a ring only a few cells thick. It survived that drought, and many more like it over the next 400 years. Recent years have brought scant precipitation.

Tree rings suggest the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2023 was the hottest in 2,000 years, with temperatures exceeding those of the coldest summer in the same period by 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3.9 ...

By analyzing the rings of two long-lived tree species, Ponderosa pine and limber pine, “we found that climate data alone did a pretty poor job of predicting population growth. We needed to include ...