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.

By analyzing the tree rings from the timber used to build the ship, they establish that the ship’s planks were cut in the winter of 1448-1449. Photograph by Marc Steinmetz, VISUM/Redux.

Researchers rely on tree rings, glaciers, and fossil records to put our current climate in context. This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive ...

Tree rings provide evidence for what he calls mega-droughts, more intense and long-lasting than any of the 20th century — worse even than the devastating Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s.

Tom Swetnam says tree rings tell the tale of how climate, fire and people interacted hundreds and thousands of years ago. Today that interaction continues, and Swetnam says climate change is ...

Valerie Trouet, professor at the University of Arizona, spoke about how she studies tree rings to see how they relate to the climate, specifically the frequency of hurricanes.

Tree rings aid study of climate change and weather conditions 03:54. Scientists are studying tree rings to learn about changes in climate over hundreds of years.

Last year, we wrote about a real climate science debate taking place between researchers who look at tree ring records of past climate. Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, well-known for ...

Barbara Gregory of Kentucky found her late husband Glenn's wedding ring near the tree the two had planted on their property when they got married 61 years earlier.

Other studies have also used tree rings to track mercury levels, but not in gold-mining regions of the tropics. “While the technique itself is not new,” Gerson adds in another statement, “we ...

Some of those events can be linked to historical records — for instance, the avalanche that appears in tree rings dating to 1963 is probably a documented event that occurred on Feb. 12 of that year.