Imablog

From the Earth System Processes 2 meeting comes an interesting method of tracking past hurricanes using tree growth rings.

Centuries of hurricane records have been discovered in the rings of southeastern US pine trees. This arboreal archive may contain critical information about how the Atlantic hurricane factory responds over the long term to natural and human-induced climate changes, say researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Apparently a record of past tropical storms and hurricanse can be gleaned by looking at the O-18 concentration in tree growth rings.

What makes drops in oxygen-18 so telling is that it matches up with a little known talent of all hurricanes: they are very good at depleting the air of oxygen-18, Mora says. Consequently, there are unusually low concentrations of oxygen-18 in the water that rains out of hurricanes. So when shallow roots of Southeastern trees like the longleaf pine and slash pine suck up that low-O-18 hurricane rain water, the same unusual isotopic signal is preserved in the woody tree cells that start growing as soon as the sun breaks through the storm clouds.

Neat stuff. Who knew trees could store all this interesting information.

Found via ScienceDaily.

I just happened to be browsing around Nature‘s website and noticed that they were going to be launching Nature Physics in a few months. But, more interesting than that (I thought anyway) was that they’ve made available (for free) PDF copies of the articles from a 1921 issue celebrating GR.

Many of the articles make for interesting reading and provide a neat look back into history.

In 1921, Nature published a special issue celebrating Einstein’s general theory of relativity, with contributions from Eddington, Weyl, Lorentz and Einstein himself, among many others. Nature Physics is making that special issue available online for the first time.

Einstein had published his general theory of relativity in 1915, a decade after the special theory. In 1919, observations of a solar eclipse – from expeditions led by Eddington and Dyson – offered some of the first evidence in support of the theory.

Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for physics – not, of course, for his theory of relativity, but for his work on the photoelectric effect. Publication of that work in 1905, with papers on special relativity and brownian motion, marked the annus mirabilis of the Swiss Patent Office clerk. The centenary is now celebrated in World Year of Physics 2005.