1 minute, 16 seconds

Dr. Andrea Lloyd says:

(Core sounds) So, I've now got the increment borer screwed into the tree, and I take this little metal thing called a spoon, and I put it in, and... in theory... out comes a core. There are two major things that you can learn from coring a tree. One is it's age, and that's really the thing that we are most interested in is knowing how old this particular tree is. And we learn that by counting the rings. The other thing that we will do is measure each of these rings and we would then know how much the tree grew in every year of its life. And this tree looks like it's probably 70 years old or so, so we would have a record of how much this tree has grown in each year for the last 70 years. And we can use that information to learn things about how tree growth rate might have changed, we can look at how tree growth rate is affected by climate, by comparing the width of these growth ring to the meteorological data. There's a lot of different cool things you can do with the growth rate, so those are the 2 basic pieces of information we get out of this.