OUR NEWEST AND OLDEST TREES

What has until now been Dame Nature's most mystifying and jealously guarded secret -the tantalizing enigma of tomorrow's weather is about to come a cropper under the penetrating and inquisitive eyes of a scientist who has a passion for home-baked bread and mountain climbing. An astronomer not content with peering through weird gadgets and muttering a confounding jargon abundantly puncutated with rows of "astronomical figures." Doctor Andrew Ellicott Douglass has taken fifty years to nullify Mark Twain's remark that "the weather is something everybody talks about and nobody ever does anything about." About the time the irrepressible Mark cracked his now-classic witticism, Douglass stuffed a newly-classic sheepskin into his New England trouser's pocket and set out on a life-time career of doing pugnacious and vigorous battle with the weather. The outcome of the ensuing slugfest is still (even as the weather) unsettled, and which has suffered the more is a matter of open debate,

Our Newest and Oldest Almanac . TREES

This but the most recent round went hands down to the deftly sparring doctor and there are those who will give you six, two and even that he will win.

This latest encounter, which will serve admirably to give you some idea, centered around Boulder Dam, a pretty formidable thing in itself. Piled behind this massive steel-and-concrete chunk which effectively stems the Colorado River are some 230 square miles of water. Backed by tremendous pressure, it spills through pipes 50 feet across to spin the largest electrical power producing machinery in the world. It was planned to put out 663 thousand horsepower every hour, twenty four hours a day. This, anyone will tell you, is a considerable amount of power.

But it wasn't enough. Production experts, pressed by the necessity of making more goods than the world had ever seen, said they needed more much more. Hydro-electric engineers replied that they couldn't furnish more not without dangerously depleting the reserves of water behind the dam. You can only use so much wa-ter, they said, and then there isn't any more. And if it doesn't rain more than it has in the last twenty years or so, what then? Millions of people depend on this water for their lives. How can we be assured that it will be replaced?

The engineer's objection was a sound one and the situation brought considerable anguish and gnashing of teeth to the production chiefs who already had surmounted impossible obstacles. The water was there. The power-giving engines were there. Vast stores of latent energy were straining at the gates, ready to course through the giant spillways at the touch of a button. There was a war going on and we were getting a licking, and the very manufacturing plants we needed to help us out-aircraft, magnesium, ship-building, aluminumwere being held up because no one could say whether it would rain. The forces of nature itself seemed against us. With all our fame as a nation of science and scientific advancement, after all the money and years of energy we had spent in developing these resources, wasn't there anyone in all the length and breadth of America who could say whether it was safe to push the button?

Oddly enough, there was.

Behind a little grey door modestly labeled "Tree Ring Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson" Douglass was holding last-minute consultations with associates. A station wagon and driver and the then-miraculous thing, an unlimited supply of gasoline had been dispatched to the one institution in the United States capable of answering the engineer's query. A ten-thousand mile whirlwind tour of the Colorado Basin was to be made. The possibility of a war prolonged by months, perhaps years, was in the balance. Survey over, laboratory work completed, a report turned in said, in effect: Nearly twenty dry years have just passed. That drought pe-riod is very unusual in the last 500 years. It may be that it will continue. The indications are that it will not.

The button was pushed, the water coursed, machinery hummed and the war was undoubtedly shortened.

The next year the rainfall in the Colorado basin was unusually heavy. It was the first time in history that man, through science, had a real basis for foretelling the trend of our weather for more than a few days in advance.

At the present time we do not actually “pre-dict” the weather, we outrun it. Existing weather forecasts may be likened to the train schedule blackboard in a railroad station. This schedule is reasonably accurate because the telegraph, being faster than the train, brings news of its progress far in advance of the train itself. In much the same manner the progress of storm fronts and low pressure areas are charted day-by-day and the information relayed to the areas soon to be affected. This system has been reduced to near-simplicity and functions almost mechanically, with but a min-imum of error. But the field of long-range prediction involves the necessity of knowing just what causes the inconstancies of our weather something no living man knows and less than a handful are qualified to guess. One of these is Dr. A. E. Douglass and his ap-proach is unique, remarkable and practical.

The report on the Colorado Basin was not only astounding, but to many it smacked of witchcraft. In it was a 500-year record of the area's weather. It purported to give the history of the basin's rainfall as far back as the time when Columbus was a toddler. Man in any country had been interested enough to record rainfall for only about 80 years. And here, in authoritative, accurate terms, this record had magically been extended to antiquity.

What miracle, then, had brought forth this information? To Douglass and his associates it had been relatively simple: they had been doing it in other localities for years. The rainfall records had been picked up from “secret” weather stations scattered in profusion throughout the basin. Trees: Nature's index to her weather.

Douglass, in finding this index, neatly trip ped up Nature and sent a goodly portion of her secrets sprawling for all who had wits to see. For it was he who reduced the reading of tree-rings to an exact science a new science, it is already equipped with the imposing scientific title, dendrochronology. This, simply put, means Tree Time. And to understand it one must consider the composition of the amazing structure which man has dubbed “tree.” It is of little consequence that no one knows just how a tree is able to grow. The present laws of physics hardly allow it to grow at all, like the little bee which aeronautical engineers have only recently allowed to fly. Somehow however, the tree overlooks this embarrassing fact and each year becomes larger by the curious process of burying its dead heartwood by enclosing it in a thin but effective envelope of living cells. By far the greater part of a tree is dead, inert, without life, and only its outer covering contains the mysterious little bags of protoplasm which gives it life.

Known academically as the cambium layer, this sheath of life is a circlet of long, slender live cells. But every year, with the mathematical precision of astronomical time, these living gobs change into an inactive seed-like condition, leaving behind another dead layer to enshroud the generations that have grown before and the cycle begins anew.

If we cut through a tree and expose its naked cross-section, we see ring upon ring of death and year upon year of history. At the beginning of its new year of life, the cambium layer grows with the astounding and prodigious energy of adolescence. Its individual cells are large, with much open space, light in color, and the infant grows apace. But as the year wears out, the cells become smaller, harder, tighter and darker in color until finally the wizened old man of one year is dead. It is this difference in appearance between infancy and old age that sets one layer, or ring, off from its neighbor and makes the annual rings apparent. Hence: a ring for a year. (This is common in cold-climate trees like pines and firs that are compelled to live in a warm and dry climate or perish in the attempt.) With the optical advantage of a miscroscope and the perspicacity of a Doctor Douglass these rings reveal their secret. Row on row, layer on layer, they form the fingerprint of weather and the mark of time. From them may be read the history of sunshine and rain, warmth and cold, for all of the centuries during which the tree has grown, and their evidence is as ir-refutable as the smudge of fingertip ridges which entrap the unwary criminal.

tubes that carry a tree's chief food-waterupward. It is teeming with untold millions of Some trees consume about 65 gallons of water daily for normal growth. Although it is of little consequence to our tree ring story, it is interesting to note that the mysterious manner in which this water is conveyed upward to all parts of the tree by the cambium layer it feeds has stumped the scientists. Just as water is pulled up by a hand pump, an upper branch, newly cut from a tree, its end sealed in an air-tight tube, will draw water from the tube with such tremendous force as to pull a column of mercury up after it. But the laws of physics will not allow even a complete vacuum to pull water to a height of more than 33 feet. And this height, of course will not supply even a small sized tree, let alone the towering giants. The principle of absorption-capillary attraction, the method whereby oil is raised to the top of a lamp wick-will not even begin to answer the question. So the physicists will have to do some advancing before their laws will allow a tree to grow. But grow it undoubtedly does, and it grows by flooding the cambium layer with water.In ruthlessly dry sites of our Southwest, the amount of water this layer receives in a year is far less than the amount mentioned above and its actual quantity largely determines the ring's thickness. A tree starved by a year of intense drought will produce a ring for that year so thin as to be difficult to see or be completely absent in many part of a tree, while in a year of plenty the ring will be wide

and fat. A tree artificially irrigated or one growing near a running stream or body of water, so that it can drink all of the water it desires, will reveal an even series of rings with almost identical widths. But if we take for our examination a tree that does not have an imported water supply and relies entirely on nearby scanty rainfall for its growth, we see a far different pattern. Looking at the cross section of this tree with its irregular pattern of wide and narrow rings, we are reading what the weather has been throughout the tree's life normally from two to five hundred years for pine or fir.

Weather records for the area in which the tree was found will agree year for year with the wooden calandar. The width of an individual ring and the number of inches of rain for that year, as measured by the weather bureau, may be reduced to a mathematical proportion and the centuries long weather index of the tree may be read.

To those of us who are sometimes more frank than thoughtful, all of this is quite likely to bring forth a profound So What? So now we know what the weather was thousands of years ago, and so the Indians in 1542 couldn't raise much corn because it was a dry year. What I want to know is, how about next winter's supply of snow and rain that will raise crops in the Salt River Valley of Arizona?

The answer to this question Douglass believes to be linked inseparably with tree rings and the fascinating phenomenon of solar activity. The connection between the two is a mystery without equal, and the astronomer who turned naturalist to prove his theory and, in the doing created a new science, is treading upon the heels of its solution. The secret's hiding place is the sun whose heat maintains the circulation of our atmosphere as all agree. Ninety-three million miles away, 300 thousand times the mass of Earth, the sun is a tremendous globe composed of all the elements to be found on Earth. All of them are so hot they have been turned into gases. Through its vaporous surface sweep cold hurricanes huge enough to engulf a dozen orbs the size of the moon. These are known as sun spots, and the exciting riddle they pose has always tickled the public imagination. Naturally, but unfortunately, many flamboyant and pseudo-scientific reports have been made concerning them. They have been called responsible for everything from the number of rabbits in Canada to the vintages of wines in France and the ferocity of the strikes in Detroit. Any statement now made concerning them is apt to be met with skepticism.

Scientists do not like to be misunderstood and are loath to make broad statements. Too many times they have been made the butt of some fantastic tale on the basis of a generality and so have become cautious. As yet Doctor Douglass will admit to seeing only the faintest glimmer of what is actually taking place. But the same man who many years ago foresaw the possibilities in tree rings is now turning his attention to sun spots and other activities of the sun and the indications are that Nature had best be looking to her secrets.

The curious rhythm of sun spots from the 17th century has intrigued man's fancy. Their weird activity since then has been carefully recorded. The average sun-spot cycle lasts about eleven years. At the beginning of its life this solar twister appears with a few small spots about halfway between the sun's equator and its poles. The spots increase slowly in numbers, then rapidly, and spread widely towards the sun's equator. That is their maximum. Then they disappear from the higher latitudes, leaving at the last of the cycle a few spots close to the sun's equator. Then with a remarkable regularity, the cycle begins again. Over and over, endlessly as though heaving to the beat of some dominant celestial harmony, the spots appear, grow as they whirl toward their destiny, and vanish at the end of their mad dance. This eery cosmos Douglass has found related to the cycles of the world's weather as evidenced by the patterns of tree rings.

This does not mean that the antics of our weather will soon be charted for years in advance like the periodic rise and fall of the ocean tides drawn by the attraction of the moon and the sun. It does mean that there is the inkling of a possibility that the tides of weather may some day be known. The value of being able to tell what the weather will be for the next week, month or season is becoming increasingly apparent. The vital struggle of the farmer fighting both drought and storm is but too well known. The war brought out striking evidence that weather knowledge is imperative. Lack of it delayed D-day. Lack of it hid von Rundstedt's push until it was a deadly menace. Not the most profound strategy nor the most brilliant tactics can overcome an unexpected adversity in the weather.

vance like the periodic rise and fall of the ocean tides drawn by the attraction of the moon and the sun. It does mean that there is the inkling of a possibility that the tides of weather may some day be known. The value of being able to tell what the weather will be for the next week, month or season is becoming increasingly apparent. The vital struggle of the farmer fighting both drought and storm is but too well known. The war brought out striking evidence that weather knowledge is imperative. Lack of it delayed D-day. Lack of it hid von Rundstedt's push until it was a deadly menace. Not the most profound strategy nor the most brilliant tactics can overcome an unexpected adversity in the weather.

The day this Utopia can be realized is coming rapidly nearer. Says Doctor Douglass: "When we have available enough tree-ring weather records from all parts of the world to get an accurate picture of what weather has been for centuries I have great hopes that we will be able to derive from them more definite indication of what it will be for scores of years in the future. "Of course, I do not mean to say that this will happen immediately. It is possible that it will take many, many years before we can make reliable long-range forecasting. But I have no doubt that in some future time we will be able to estimate the weather more accurately and for a longer period of time in advance than it is now possible for us to do." Today there are a score of scientists scattered around the globe who are making use of this tree-ring science. Ten years ago there were but three. With the growth of this new science and its spreading throughout the world will come age-old records of weather-indisputable and accurate-which will tell man more than he has ever known before about the world's weather. Seventy-eight year old astronomer and physicist Douglass has travelled the world, boring into typical forests. Single handed he developed his theory into a science. Scientists and their institutions have praised his work unstintedly and have given him invaluable assistance and encouragement. Today he has retired from his academic duties and devotes his time to the study of the problems of solar radiation to try to discover the causes of the antics of our weather. Hand picked associates have been trained to continue the work, and the knowledge of the tree-ring sun-spot connection is becoming more and more widespread, and is daily better understood. The day when we can plan for a plentiful water supply and big crops in semi-arid regions a half year or even three years in advance is not quite at hand. But it is on the way.