March 14, 2019

BC3 Lunch Seminar: How do trees “handwrite” and manage to communicate with us?

Handwriting is a human attributed characteristic, being widely accepted that the oldest writing dates around 3400 BC. But actually trees “invented handwriting” first … about 390 million years ago when conifer trees appeared, and they have been writing ever since. Each year trees form new wood cells that arrange in concentric circles forming what we call annual tree-rings, which is their way of “handwriting” and communicate with us. It was in the early 1900s when the astronomer Andrew E. Douglass managed to cipher tree-rings “handwriting”.




María de Maeztu Excellence Unit 2023-2027 Ref. CEX2021-001201-M, funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033

©2008 BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change.