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	Podcast:		Local Features by WXPR
	Episode:		Northwoods Researcher Finds Tree Ring Sizes Match Historic Lake Levels, Giving Window Into Past
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:03:53
	Publish Date:		2019-11-07 06:02:00
	Description:		Records of water levels on many Northwoods lakes often only go back a few decades, if they exist at all. But one researcher has figured out a way to see the story of lakes going back hundreds of years. That history, and a clue about the future, is as simple as tree rings themselves. “We’re proposing using these trees as an Excel spreadsheet, as a way to get at [the history of] these lake levels,” said Dom Ciruzzi, a UW-Madison graduate student working at Trout Lake Station in Boulder Junction. Ciruzzi was looking at a slim cylinder of wood, the size and shape of a drinking straw, under a microscope. It was a core sample of a century-old red pine. Each tree ring in the sample corresponds with one year. The bigger the ring, the more growth that year. Ciruzzi’s research found the ring sizes of trees near lakes match almost perfectly with the water level in the lake that same year. “This relationship between tree growth and groundwater is so strong that you can reconstruct groundwater and
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