"A new study is part of an emerging field of tree-ring science that found the West’s two-decade drought is inextricably linked to rising temperatures".
"For the past several summers, Karen King crisscrossed the western United States in search of trees.
Using a hand-cranked drill, she bored into towering spruces high in the Rockies, Sierra Nevada and other mountains to unsheathe blocks of wood. She wanted to learn about the region’s past dry spells — to understand the current “megadrought” gripping the region.
“Your left bicep is a lot larger than your right bicep by the end of the summer,” said King, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “I’m not kidding.”
All that hand-cranking paid off in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. She and her colleagues found the West’s two-decade drought is inextricably linked to climate change, adding to the evidence that human-caused emissions are reshaping the region in profound ways."
Dino Grandoni reports for the Washington Post January 24, 2024.
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