What are tree rings?

Question

What are tree rings?

Answer 1

every year a tree supposedly grows another ring

Answer 2

they represent the trees age

Answer 3

Tree rings are indicators of the age of the tree.  The cambial tissue of the vascular bundle adds growth to the girth of the tree stem. This happens every growing season. This growth  forms a prominant ring which is used to count as one year. The number of such rings = age of the tree in  number of years

Answer 4

I believe they are the rings.... on the inside of a tree's trunk...... that show the years or age of a tree....am I correct? xoxo

Answer 5

Hey Jim

If you cut down a big tree and looked at the stump there will be rings on it.  Each ring represent a year of growth, count the rings and that will tell you old the tree was before you cut it down...

I hope that was the answer you were looking for....

Take care and Keep the Faith....PEACE....cya....

Answer 6

If you sliced through a tree, there are rings in the wood, this tells you the age of the tree, so the bigger the girth of the tree the more rings it will have and the older it will be.

Have a good evening hun ;-)

Answer 7

Dendro-chronology

When a tree is cut down, or a branch is cut off, we can see a pattern of concentric rings in the wood. The study of these rings is called dendro-chronology. The rings are the result of the annual seasonal growth of trees in temperate climates. Each ring represents one year of summer-growth in a tree. The rings are so clearly visible because growth tends to be denser towards the end of the season than it is in spring and early summer and also of course because it stops all together in the winter. This means that most tropical tree species have no rings because they grow evenly throughout the year.

Slow growing trees, like the oak, have much narrower rings than a fast growing tree like the poplar. Poplar rings can be as wide as 13 mm, whereas an oak ring might only be 2 mm thick.. Once you know the average thickness of rings in a particular species, you can also tell if a tree grew in more or less favourable circumstances. For example: An Ash growing in a fertile valley bottom will be able to produce more growth each year than an Ash growing on top of a hill in relatively poor soil. Often you can also tell the prevailing wind direction in a particular location by looking at the rings. All along the exposed west coast of Britain you will trees, which have a narrowed band of growth towards the south-west, where the wind has battered them, and a wider band of growth on the north-east side, which was more sheltered.

Answer 8

rings that show the age of the tree how old it is can only see these when tree has been cut down.

Answer 9

they r actually a series of cambium rings which form in spring and winter...the one that forms in winter is dark and the other is light in colour...these both set of rings constitute an annual ring and so u can know a tree's age by counting the number of annual rings...

Answer 10

if u cut a tree in half it would have a series of circular rings in it and it represents the age of the tree.

Answer 11

These are alternate dark and light cambium rings formed in the wood and seen as rings when cross section is taken. These rings point to the age of tree and also the seasons effect stamped on a tree.

Answer 12

Good evening Jim :-)

hope you are very well??

Growth rings, also referred to as tree rings or annual rings, can be seen in a horizontal cross section cut through the trunk of a tree. Growth rings are the result of new growth in the vascular cambium, a lateral meristem, and are synonymous with secondary growth. Visible rings result from the change in growth speed through the seasons of the year, thus one ring usually marks the passage of one year in the life of the tree. The rings are more visible in temperate zones, where the seasons differ more markedly.

The growth rings of an unknown tree species, at Bristol Zoo, EnglandThe inner portion of a growth ring is formed early in the growing season, when growth is comparatively rapid (hence the wood is less dense) and is known as "early wood" or "spring wood" or "late-spring wood". The outer portion is the "late wood" (and has sometimes been termed "summer wood", often being produced in the summer, though sometimes in the autumn) and is more dense. "Early wood" is used in preference to "spring wood", as the latter term may not correspond to that time of year in climates where early wood is formed in the early summer (e.g. Canada) or in autumn, as in some Mediterranean species.

In trees like white pines there is not much contrast in the different parts of the ring, and as a result the wood is very uniform in texture and can be said to have a mild grain (visually).

Pinus taeda Cross section showing annual rings, Cheraw, South CarolinaMany trees in temperate zones make one growth ring each year, with the newest adjacent to the bark. For the entire period of a tree's life, a year-by-year record or ring pattern is formed that reflects the climatic conditions in which the tree grew. Adequate moisture and a long growing season result in a wide ring. A drought year may result in a very narrow one. Alternating poor and favorable conditions, such as mid summer droughts, can result in several rings forming in a given year. Trees from the same region will tend to develop the same patterns of ring widths for a given period. These patterns can be compared and matched ring for ring with trees growing in the same geographical zone and under similar climatic conditions. Following these tree-ring patterns from living trees back through time, chronologies can be built up, both for entire regions, and for sub-regions of the world. Thus wood from ancient structures can be matched to known chronologies (a technique called cross-dating) and the age of the wood determined precisely. Cross-dating was originally done by visual inspection. Nowadays, computers do the statistical matching.

To eliminate individual variations in tree ring growth, dendrochronologists take the smoothed average of the tree ring widths of multiple tree samples to build up a ring history. This process is termed replication. A tree ring history whose beginning and end dates are not known is called a floating chronology. It can be anchored by cross-matching either the beginning or the end section against the end sections of another chronology (tree ring history) whose dates are known. Fully anchored chronologies which extend back more than 10,000 years exist for river oak trees from South Germany (from the Main and Rhine rivers).Another fully anchored chronology which extends back 8500 years exists for the bristlecone pine in the Southwest US (White Mountains of California). Furthermore, the mutual consistency of these two independent dendrochronological sequences has been confirmed by comparing their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages. In 2004 a new calibration curve INTCAL04 was internationally ratified for calibrated dates back to 26,000 Before Present (BP) based on an agreed worldwide data set of trees and marine sediments.

[edit] Sampling and dating



Pine stump showing growth ringsTimber core samples measure the width of annual growth rings. By taking samples from different sites and different strata within a particular region, researchers can build a comprehensive historical sequence that becomes a part of the scientific record; for example, ancient timbers found in buildings can be dated to give an indication of when the source tree was alive and growing, setting an upper limit on the age of the wood. Some genera of trees are more suitable than others for this type of analysis. Likewise, in areas where trees grew in marginal conditions such as aridity or semi-aridity, the techniques of dendrochronology are more consistent than in humid areas. These tools have been important in archaeological dating of timbers of the cliff dwellings of Native Americans in the arid Southwest.

A benefit of dendrochronology is that it makes available specimens of once-living material accurately dated to a specific year to be used as a calibration and check of radiocarbon dating, through the estimation of a date range formed through the interception of radiocarbon (BP, or 'B'efore 'P'resent, where present equals 1950-01-01) and calendar years. The bristlecone pine, being exceptionally long-lived and slow growing, has been used for this purpose, with still-living and dead specimens providing tree ring patterns going back thousands of years. In some regions dating sequences of more than 10,000 years are available.

The dendrochronologist faces many obstacles, however, including some species of ant which inhabit trees and extend their galleries into the wood, thus destroying ring structure.

Similar seasonal patterns also occur in ice cores and in varves (layers of sediment deposition in a lake, river, or sea bed). The deposition pattern in the core will vary for a frozen-over lake versus an ice-free lake,and with the fineness of the sediment. These are used for dating in a manner similar to dendrochronology, and such techniques are used in combination with dendrochronology, to plug gaps and to extend the range of the seasonal data available to archaeologists.

While archaeologists can use the technique to date the piece of wood and when it was felled, it may be difficult to definitively determine the age of a building or structure that the wood is in. The wood could have been reused from an older structure, may have been felled and left for many years before use, or could have been used to replace a damaged piece of wood....

♥Midnight~Angel♥

(¯`v´¯)

.`·.¸.·´

¸.·´¸.·´¨) ¸.·*¨)

(¸.·´ (¸.·´

Answer 13

a tree rings is the growth of a tree over a season if the the season was good ie good water and fertelizer then the stem of the tree will grow rapidly if  it was a bad season then the stem will grow slowly, when u cut the stem  in half u will see rings each ring represnts a season( a season is a year) that way u will be able to tell how the climate was at a given ring and u can count how old a tree was by the number tree rings