It’s here that Allyson Carroll strung together the information from hundreds of thousands of tree rings to build a coast redwood timeline, a critical key to deciphering the historical climate information contained inside Sequoia sempervirens. Humboldt State sits tucked between the northern California coast and the redwood groves of Arcata Community Forest. Highway 101, appropriately known as the Redwood Highway, heads to the heart of redwood country, punctuated by roadside attractions (“World Famous Grandfather Tree!” “Trees of Mystery!”) that testify to the longevity and size of redwoods.
(Photo by Lucy Kang)įrom the Bay Area, the route to the redwoods is straightforward. Dendrochronologist Allyson Carroll points to “wedging” in a redwood slab, where rings pinch together and seem to disappear. Yet the tiny spaces between the rings – spaces so small scientists peer at them with microscopes – tell big stories about the past that no human alive has seen, and a future we have yet to understand. Redwoods shoot up hundreds of feet into the air and hail from another age, their ancestors arriving in the fossil record over 200 million years ago. Rings will be counted, measured, and combusted into vapor, and their elemental origins will be tallied, all in an effort to peer into the deep history of the earth.Ĭoast redwoods ( Sequoia sempervirens) are famous for being the tallest trees in the world. In the labs of scientists, cores like this will have another life. She does it because these little rings have immense power.
And not just this sample, but hundreds more in all, Carroll has counted more than a quarter of a million coast redwood tree rings. In this compact package, exposed to the air and sitting on a table in front of me at the Humboldt State University Institute for Redwood Ecology, lies 1,500 years of history from a tree dating back to 328 CE.ĭendrochronologist Allyson Carroll hand-counted each of the 1,498 minuscule rings in this core. The core sample from the oldest coast redwood tree ever found is a thin rod of wood the width of a pencil, a couple feet long, and densely scored at irregular intervals by dark brown stripes.
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