Storm Debris Discovery Reveals 100+ Years Of North Texas History
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ARLINGTON (CBSDFW.COM) – An interesting discovery was made while sifting through storm damage debris. A storm, with winds of more then 90 miles an hour, roared through Arlington earlier this month. High winds turned over vehicles, ripped roofs off buildings, and tore trees right out of the ground.
Now one of those trees is at the center of a research project at the University of Texas at Arlington. This particular tree caught the eye of those in the area for a reason.
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Biology students see the world a bit differently. When a huge oak tree was knocked over on the UTA campus, most people only saw storm damage — not Sarah Mahon.
“Well at first I was like, ‘Oh my goodness! That is a huge tree!’” recalled the PhD biology student. “But my second thought was ‘let’s get this into the lab and learn from it.’”
Taking the whole tree was impossible, so UTA students cut a slice out of the trunk.
The average person might only see a slab of wood; the biology students saw a window through time.
Graduate teaching assistant Michelle Green said, “You can count all the dark lines, that are the winter growth, to see how many years old the tree is.” The students learned this particular oak is around 100 years old.
Knowing the age of the tree was not only important t those studying botany or dendrology, it will also allow students to study local weather patterns for almost a century.
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“You can see in some years there’s a lot of growth in the summer when there’s lots of water and the tree was rapidly growing,” Green pointed out. “Then, in other years there wasn’t as much water available, so the rings are smaller.”
Mahon said the tree is a window for what has already happened and perhaps for what is to come. “It can give a history of fires, the climate at the time and possibly predict climate for the future.”
And that’s not all – the tree can also give a history of when the area had great bug infestations.
According to Green the tree is basically a cornucopia of data. “You can get quite a bit of information about past environment, without knowing what was going on, just by looking at the rings.” It’s a detailed piece of North Texas history book that hasn’t been made into a book.
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