Nature · Study 039
Tree Rings
A tree trunk cross-section grows one ring at a time. Wide rings mark good years, narrow rings hard ones, and every tenth ring is highlighted.
What you're looking at
Each ring is a slightly wobbly circle. Its distance from the last ring is that year's growth, drawn from a fixed random sequence so the same wide and narrow years return on every loop. The wobble comes from smooth noise that changes gradually from ring to ring, so irregularities carry outward as they do in wood.
The idea behind it
Dendrochronology reads these widths as a climate record. Because trees in a region share the same good and bad years, the sequence works like a barcode: overlapping samples from living trees, old beams and buried logs have been chained into records thousands of years long.
Try this
Restart for a different tree with its own run of good and bad years.
