{"id":204249,"date":"2025-01-22T01:31:04","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T07:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/curious-blue-rings-in-trees-and-shrubs-reveal-cold-summers-of-the-past-potentially-caused-by-volcanic-eruptions"},"modified":"2025-01-22T01:31:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T07:31:04","slug":"curious-blue-rings-in-trees-and-shrubs-reveal-cold-summers-of-the-past-potentially-caused-by-volcanic-eruptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/curious-blue-rings-in-trees-and-shrubs-reveal-cold-summers-of-the-past-potentially-caused-by-volcanic-eruptions","title":{"rendered":"Curious blue rings in trees and shrubs reveal cold summers of the past\u2014potentially caused by volcanic eruptions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/curious-blue-rings-in-trees-and-shrubs-reveal-cold-summers-of-the-past-potentially-caused-by-volcanic-eruptions2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Trees need a certain number of warm days in their growing seasons to grow properly; otherwise, the cell walls of new growth don\u2019t lignify properly, creating blue rings that appear when wood samples are dyed.<\/p>\n<p>Since trees and shrubs can live for hundreds of years, identifying these blue rings allows us to spot cold summers in the past. By looking at pine trees and juniper shrubs from northern Norway, scientists identified two extremely cold summers in 1902 and 1877, possibly caused by the eruptions of Mount Pel\u00e9e on the island of Martinique and Cotopaxi in Ecuador.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBlue rings look like unfinished growth rings, and are associated with cold conditions during the growing season,\u201d said Dr. Agata Buchwal of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Plant Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trees need a certain number of warm days in their growing seasons to grow properly; otherwise, the cell walls of new growth don\u2019t lignify properly, creating blue rings that appear when wood samples are dyed. Since trees and shrubs can live for hundreds of years, identifying these blue rings allows us to spot cold summers [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}