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.
“Our findings now demonstrate that the record high temperatures driving recent ‘hot droughts’ are indeed unique and the human fingerprint on these events implicates us in their intensity and their consequences,” said Kevin Anchukaitis, a professor at the University of Arizona who co-authored the paper with King.
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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.
The study is part of [an emerging field of tree-ring science](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/global-heat-record-arizona-trees-rings/?itid=lk_inline_manual_8&itid=lk_inline_manual_9) squeezing more information than ever out of wood to understand past climates and prepare for what is to come as human keep pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
“Our findings now demonstrate that the record high temperatures driving recent ‘hot droughts’ are indeed unique and the human fingerprint on these events implicates us in their intensity and their consequences,” said Kevin Anchukaitis, a professor at the University of Arizona who co-authored the paper with King.
Read the full story here, and skip the paywall with email registration: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/24/west-drought-trees/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/24/west-drought-trees/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)