1 minute, 3 seconds

Dr. Chris Fastie says:

Almost through... This stump doesn't have any bark on it. It's silvery, gray, no bark anywhere. It's all fallen off. There's some lichens growing on the bark. And the wood has been eroded a bit. So the wind blasting in the winter has removed a little bit of wood on the outside of this stump. On the inside, it's very solid. It has one place that's rotten-- it probably was rotten before the tree died. Many of these white spruce trees have fungus growing in them while they're still alive. But the wood is solid enough that we can see 150 annual rings. And we'll have to sand this surface carefully and measure the rings and match them up against a chronology of ring widths before we know when this tree lived and the year it died.