"Why would old timbers be of great interest to both Solomon and Rao? A lumber-company owner and a scientist might seem like an unlikely duo, but they are united by a passion for preserving historical record: Solomon through refurbished floorboards and furniture; and Rao, an assistant research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, as time capsules that indicate past climate conditions and details about centuries-old human history."
"After collecting samples from the timber at the demolition site, Rao brings them to his office at the Tree Ring Laboratory at the Lamont campus in Palisades, New York. (Lamont is part of the Columbia Climate School.) There, scientists will analyze the samples, racing against time to uncover the secrets of old-growth trees before they're lost forever. "Timber regenerates, but old-growth forests take a long time to develop," says Caroline Leland, a fellow dendrochronologist at the lab."
Alan Solomon of Sawkill Lumber and dendrochronologist Mukund Rao collaborate to rescue old timber beams from a New York City demolition before they are discarded. Rao transports samples to the Tree Ring Laboratory at Lamont for analysis to extract tree-ring data that record past climate and human activity. Rescued timbers serve both as reclaimed building materials and as scientific time capsules containing centuries of environmental information. Old-growth forests are scarce in the U.S., making recovered historical wood increasingly valuable for reconstructing past environmental conditions and preserving irreplaceable records.
Read at State of the Planet
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