By Linda Wang
Fifty millennia ago, volcanic ash and mud buried a forest of conifers along a Pacific shoreline in what is now southern Chile. In 1960, an earthquake loosened these sediments, and erosion then exposed the long-entombed trees. Now, by examining the tree rings of the remaining stumps, an international team of scientists has reconstructed the earliest year-to-year record yet of climate variation.
The stumps of the tree species Fitzroya cupressoides are roughly 50,000 years old, says lead scientist Fidel A. Roig of the Laboratory of Dendrochronology at IANIGLA-CONICET, an earth-sciences research center in Mendoza, Argentina. Roig notes that there’s a virtual forest of these stumps, which are still woody and well preserved.