On 01/06/2016 10:22 AM, dpb wrote:
On 01/06/2016 9:55 AM, Electric Comet wrote:
On Tue, 05 Jan 2016 16:15:26 -0800
wrote:

Did you know that tree rings do not show years, but show rainy
seasons?

it is not that simple
some can be decades and longer

An individual growth increment? I'm certainly not aware of anything that
shows such a pattern. Reference????
....

Or perhaps are you simply referring to a period of time such as a
prolonged drought or the like that can bring a period of growth to near
standstill for as long as the particular event lasts and sometimes for
sometime thereafter before the specimen really fully recovers (presuming
it survives and does do so eventually, of course)?

That sort of thing certainly happens for any number of reasons, weather
patterns being the most notable for a given specimen. Over a longer
period of time over a number of generations one may see other more
longer-term trends although one may have to have some additional help in
that the forest was uprooted in a devastating event such a a flood,
buried in an anerobic environment and became fossilized or otherwise
preserved in order for us to find rings to count and ponder over their
meaning...a few thousand years for individual trees is their lifetime, a
mere blink of the eye in geologic time.

The bristlecone pine is, afaik, the longest-lived single tree, reaching
into the 5-6,000 yr neighborhood. The giant sequoias are mere
youngsters in comparison in the 3-4,000 range.

What's really unusual is that the Pando quaking aspen grove is the
oldest overall by a wide margin (80,000 to to perhaps as much as
1,000,000 by some estimates) but it's not the part you see; it (they?
) is a clonal colony of a single male quaking aspen. Individual stems
are more like only 100-130 years in age but they come up from the
underground root system, not by flowering/seed production. The whole
grove of some 100 acres and 40-50,000 "stems" are identical clones
genetically.

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