Written in the Wood | What one pine tree on an Arizona mountaintop can tell us about the hottest year on record — and what lies ahead

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1. Thanks for sharing! Here’s an excerpt:

   *Deep in the Sonoran Desert, high on a mountain’s wind-swept peak, there lives a tree known as Bigelow 224.*

   *With its stout orange trunk and long, graceful needles, the tree looks like any other ponderosa pine growing on Mount Bigelow. But a sliver of its wood, taken amid* [*Earth’s warmest year on record,*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/11/30/earth-hottest-year-wmo/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) *shows that this tree has a story to tell — and a warning to offer.*

   *Bigelow 224 germinated nearly 200 years ago — a spindly sprout rooted in meager soil. Yet the pine has grown taller and wider each year by adding another ring to its trunk.*

   *Amid the balmy temperatures and lengthening days of the spring and summer, the newly formed tissue — known as earlywood — was the pale gold of morning sunlight. When autumn arrived, the tree switched to denser and darker latewood, signaling the beginning of the end of the growing season.*

   *All that the tree experienced — the winds that shook its branches, the rain that soaked its roots — was recorded in the rings. An extra-wide band attested to the prime growing conditions of 1856.*

   *A thin line bisecting the following year’s ring is the relic of a springtime drought that ended with the arrival of a summer monsoon.*

   *For centuries, Bigelow 224 stretched sunward while history unfolded below. The tree witnessed the rise of industrialization and the devastation of Native communities. It watched Arizona become the nation’s 48th state in 1912. Generations lived and died, wars were lost and won, humans walked on the moon and transformed Earth. Still, the tree has survived.*

   *But then came 2023, the hottest year that humanity — and Bigelow 224 — had ever seen. All around the planet, temperature records fell like dominoes. Up on Mount Bigelow, an unrelenting heat wave made the air feel like an oven and sucked moisture from the thin soil.*

   *The toll of those unprecedented conditions was etched into Bigelow 224’s trunk. Scorched by relentless heat and parched by a delayed monsoon, it appeared to stop growing midway through the season. The ring for this year is barely a dozen cells wide.*

   ***It is a silent distress signal sent by one of Earth’s most enduring organisms. A warning written in wood.***