Blog post: swansont: As Old as Methuselah

<a href="http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/ross-andersen-bristlecone-pines-anthropocene/">The vanishing groves</a><br /><br />Bristlecone pines, dendrochronology, and climate change.<br /><br /><blockquote>The chronology tells a familiar tale about what is happening to the Earthâs climate. In 2005, a researcher from Arizonaâs tree-ring lab named Matthew Salzer noticed an unusual trend in the most recent stretch of bristlecone tree rings. Over the past half century, bristlecones near the tree line have grown faster than in any 50-year period of the past 3,700 years, a shift that portends âan environmental change unprecedented in millennia,â according to Salzer. As temperatures along the peaks warm, the bristlecones are fattening up, adding thick rings in every spring season. Initially there was hope that the trend was local to the White Mountains, but Salzer and his colleagues have found the same string of fat rings â the same warming â in three separate bristlecone habitats in the western US. This might sound like good news for the trees, but it most assuredly is not. Indeed, the thick new rings might be a prophecy of sorts, a foretelling of the treesâ extinction.</blockquote><br /><br /><br/><a href="http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/12830">Read and comment on the full post</a>