The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab

Climate Change 2017 is pleased to have been asked to date the Tracy House, Apple Creek Ohio. The log house/cabin is now stored in the soon to be Apple Creek Community Center and Library will be reassembled this coming summer. The date is unambiguous and most of the timber was cut after the growing season of 1826 and it is likely that the house was originally constructed in 1827, one of the first to be built in the East Union Township. A copy of our report can be found here.

Maddie cores an old growth living tree to help assemble a calendar dated tree ring chronology.

Dean extracts a core from a beam of the Tracy House under the watchful eye of Annette – the TA, as Conner looks on.

Extracting a core being careful to preserve the outer ring of the core (don’t bend the extractor John).

Originally posted to the Wooster Geologists blog.

Two class projects kick off the Climate Change 2017 course. The first deals with tree-ring dating (dendrochronology, blog post coming soon) of historical structures and then analyzing the tree-rings for their climate significance. The second is is shown below and it concerned with analyzing sediment cores from Browns Lake Bog that document climate variability since the last Ice Age. Below are some photos of the bog coring – great thanks to Dr. Tom Lowell and his Glacial Geology class from the University of Cincinnati – the folks who did most of the work.

Setting up the coring rig at Browns Lake – early in the day snow covered the ground by 4 pm it was gone (albedo feedback in play).

The core boss (Dr. Tom Lowell) oversees the extraction of another meter of mud from the bog.

Extracting peat – the upper 5 meters or so are peat (significant amount of sphagnum moss and carbon). Note the trees, it is not a sphagnum bog now here.

Setting up the production line and assigning teams and tasks.

Coring a tree to determine the recruitment time – the hypothesis is that these trees moved into the bog recently (past 200 years) – the first trees here since the Ice Age. This nutrient limited bog was fertilized by wind blown dust during European Settlement allowing these vascular plants to obtain a foothold in the previously sphagnum moss dominated bog.

Hey there is a Wooster student – good job Ben. This white oak is growing on the top of a kame and it has witnessed the changes in the climate and land use for the last 300 years.

Nick samples the bog water for its isotopic composition. This is work done in collaboration with isotope geologists at the University of Cincinnati.

Post originally published on the Wooster Geologists blog.

Dating the Tracy House (Apple Creek, OH)

Coring Brown’s Lake Bog

Learning about environmental change from tree rings