Dr. Mark Abbott and his graduate students Cole and Adeel visited the Wooster Tree Ring Lab with portions of white oak beams from a historic cabin in Pittsburgh. The mission was to tree ring date the outer ring of the samples to determine which calendar year the timber was cut for the structure. Here the Pitt team in the sample prep. lab with the two samples where they polished them for analysis.

Nick Wiesenberg oversaw the dating, which started with a tour in the west wing of the Wooster Tree Ring Lab.

Adeel measured one of the samples – understandably he is amazed with the anatomy of the white oak rings.

Cole measured the other sample measuring ring widths from the screen using CooRecorder. The Pitt group are exports in lake core analysis and both Adeel and Cole are analyzing lake varves, they are also thinking about using this measuring setup for varve analyses (see below).

Nick takes the controls and analyzes the measurement data against our tree-ring database and reveals the date of cutting for the cabin.

The crossdating with our master series shows that the outer ring of the samples were both 1834, at least for the two samples both were cut in the

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Imagine a world with larch trees in the uplands and dawn redwoods in the flats, and bald cypress trees in the wetlands. This existed in the Eocene (~40 million years ago) when the world was warmer, the treeline was at higher latitudes and altitudes, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was more than two times Earth’s preindustrial levels. In fact, in the high Arctic where no trees can survive today, deciduous conifers were as lush in terms of carbon sequestration and bioproductivity as today’s rain forests.  Now, imagine a world that is sliding back into the greenhouse after millions of years of relative icehouse conditions.
How can we better understand the role of deciduous conifers in the biosphere and their utility in a warmer world. One “natural” experiment is to use dendroclimatology to infer the response of deciduous conifers to a warmer and wetter world. Secrest Arboretum in Wooster, Ohio has two species of larch trees (Siberian and European) as well as bald cypress and dawn redwood trees. These species are all exotic to Ohio and have been growing in the arboretum in some cases for over 100 years. How do they grow in their new homes? This is the subject

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The global tree-ring community is racking up the papers investigating the utility of the relatively new proxy using blue intensity of annually-dated tree rings. This latest effort is a blue intensity investigation followup of a recent study on ring widths also led by Dr. Santosh Shah of Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences in Locknow, India. Blue intensity is a proxy that has added a new dimension to thermal histories across the globe including efforts at the The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab. Shah et al. (2025) used cores extracted from three sites of the Western Himalayan Fir (Abies pindrow) from the Kashmir Valley.

Map from the study showing the location of the three tree-ring sites and the meteorological station (Srinager). The centrally-located Srinager climate station has records of precipitation and temperature spanning 1901-2024, one of the longest in the region.
A figure from the paper showing the beautiful images of earlywood (above) and latewood (below) blue light reflectance for individual rings from the Western Himalayan Fir (Abies pindrow). 

The upshot of the work is that time series of blue intensity values from the latewood of A.Pindrow are strongly correlated with monthly average and maximum temperature series  from nearby climate station (Srinager).  Ring-width are

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Guest Blogger Keck SEAK25: We bookended our time in Alaska with hiking, tree coring, and fish consumption in Juneau.

Starting off strong with a hike to see Herbert Glacier.

We were lucky enough to stay at the University of Alaska Southeast’s housing right on Auke Lake. The daily dips and wades that happened here will be dearly missed!

To cap off the first portion of our time in Alaska before heading to Angoon, the group hiked up Mt. Roberts.

Once we returned from Angoon the group split up to enjoy a day off. Lynnsey, Lev, Landon and Izzy enjoyed 360 views at the top of Mt. Juneau. Dexter and Nick caught rockfish and halibut (not pictured, but thoroughly enjoyed) at Tee Harbor.

The team then got creative on a hike up to Salmon Creek Reservoir.

Finally, we spent a beautiful last day in Alaska taking Mountain Hemlock cores at Mt. McGinnis (the MT site) overlooking the Mendenhall glacier. The MT tree ring site is a classic published by the Wooster Tree Ring Lab and many others – the group will update the efforts of Gordon Jacoby, Nicole Davi and Greg Wiles who originally sampled the site in 1997. 
The work of Keck SEAK25 is funded

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