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Let’s Talk Trash! SEPT/OCT 2018
©2018 The Keenan Group, Inc
DID YOU KNOW.... It took an Astronomer to discover the age of a TREE
For many of us, the name Andrew Ellicott Douglass will not be familiar, but perhaps you have seen his face, even without knowing it. In his most famous picture, Douglass is standing in front of a cross section of a giant sequoia tree trunk that’s twice his height, with labels indicating the thickness of the tree in certain historical periods. Douglass’s significant contribution to science, the dating of trees by the growth rings in their trunks, is well known today. What was less well known is the fact that the applications of these studies go beyond botanical curiosity to serve as paleoclimatic records and as calendars that, in their day, enabled major archaeological sites in the United States to be dated. All of this despite the fact that Douglass was indeed pursuing something very different that he was never able to prove. The annual nature of the rings acknowledged that their thickness depended on moisture conditions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other scientists advanced the study of the rings and their relationship with climate, starting to cross-date trees to effectuate dating. Meanwhile, Douglass was strengthening his career as an astronomer in Tucson, founding in 1916 the Steward Observatory on University lands where an ostrich farm had previously been located. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ the-astronomer-who-looked-inside- trees/ first appears in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci, who
A. E. Douglass was an American astronomer who founded the discipline of dendrochronology, which is a method of dating wood by analyzing the growth ring pattern.
paleoclimatic - the study of changes in climate taken on the scale of the entire history of Earth.
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