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.

Tree trunks are more than just wood—they’re living records of everything a tree’s been through. From growth spurts to natural ...

You may be familiar with counting tree rings to see how old a tree is, but the thickness of tree rings and other patterns in the wood, like fire scars, can reveal how quickly a tree has grown and ...

Researchers can count the number of rings in samples of wood extracted from living specimens and precisely determine a tree’s age. That practice has spawned an entire subfield of scientific ...

If you cut down a tree, you can read in the wood an environmental record. Now climate change is complicating the narrative. In a basement in Tucson, Ariz., slices of tree trunks stand on shelves ...

Dendrochronologists count these rings and can assign a ring to a specific year. This helps them determine a tree's age and make observations about the environment they live in each year.