Trees are everywhere and we owe them a lot. The air we breath, the shade we sit under. Even the soil we walk on would be blown away if it weren't for trees. But trees hide a secret underneath their bark, one they keep till their dying day. They hold a treasure trove of knowledge. If you take a slice out of a tree, you'll see the rings. That slice is called a tree cookie. And each ring stands for a year the tree has lived. In inner rings are the first years of life, the outer rings are the more recent years.
Maybe you knew this. But did you know you can tell the quality of the year based on the width of the ring? If the ring is skinny, that means it wasn't a great year for the tree. Drought, too much heat, not a lot of nutrients, etc. But if the ring is wide, that means it was a good year. These rings can even tell us when volcanos erupted. Scientists can use petrified trees to study the state of the planet millions of years ago. They can even find bugs from eras passed that got petrified along with the tree.
I guess the hint is in the descriptiong for this cache. Have fun and watch for muggles!
This cache has been placed with permission from Uwchlan Township Parks.
Here's a few other crazy tree facts:
Trees in a forest can 'talk' and share nutrients through an underground internet built by soil fungi (guess where Avatar got the idea from)
Adding one tree to an open pasture can increase its bird biodiversity from almost zero species to as high as 80.
There is a living tree in California that dates back to the era of woolly mammoths.
The single largest organism on Earth is a tree! An aspen tree, named Pando, has clones of itself spread out across more than 5 miles of forest.