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Goodygoody Girdwood
Friday, June 12, 2015 8:19
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Forest surrounding Girdwood, Alaska. Living mountain hemlock trees were cored from this site (Starr, 2014).
During the summer of 2014, the Columbia Bay team (Dr.Wiles, Nick Wiesenberg, Kaitlin Starr and Jesse Wiles) cored numerous trees near the town of Girdwood, Alaska. The collection is primarily made up of cores taken from living Mountain Hemlock trees from the surrounding forrest. In addition to the living forests a few cores were taken from subfossil wood at Turnagain Arm.
Kaitlin Starr coring a living Western Hemlock found in the forests surrounding the town of Girdwood (Starr, 2014).
The Girdwood living tree collection was brought back to the Wooster Tree Ring Lab where the cores were mounted, sanded, counted and measured. Students, Maddie Happ and Kaitlin Starr constructed a chronology out of 38 cores sampled. The chronology spanned 364 years, going back to 1650 to 2014.
Girdwood core sample illustrating both tight and normal growth patterns. Growth patterns may vary due to shifting climates. Tight growth often occurs during periods of distress, such as drought or storms.
Following the COFECHA process, we ran the raw data through a program called ARSTAN, which produces chronologies from tree ring measurements by standardizing and detrending the series. The data is graphed below as a standardized function.
Standardized Girdwood chronology. ARSTAN removed all growth patterns from the raw data to produce the desired climate signal. A slight upward trend exists as all growth patterns are removed.
Source: http://woostergeologists.scotblogs.wooster.edu/2015/06/12/goodygoody-girdwood/
