Memory in the Rings

Tree rings don’t just mark age—they record droughts, fires, volcanic eruptions, and even solar flares. Trees are historians with wooden spines.

If a tree holds the past, what stories might it tell?

Sources

• Tree Ring Data — NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, on what rings record and how the record is read
• A signature of cosmic-ray increase in AD 774–775 from tree rings in Japan — Miyake et al. 2012, Nature, the carbon-14 spike that put solar events into the ring record

Sources checked 2026-08-12.