What is a one-year ring? Detailed analysis

The article tells about what a year-old ring is, how it forms, where it can be found, which science is engaged in the study of rings.

Trees and life

Life on our planet has been formed and exists due to a variety of factors, and one of them is the appropriate gas composition of the atmosphere. Or rather, the presence of a sufficient amount of oxygen. They provide us with plants that absorb carbon dioxide, exhaled by most living things. Currently, most developed and civilized countries strictly monitor the state of their forests, including creating national parks where you can meet very old trees. They are interesting not only from the aesthetic point of view, but also because scientists, studying them, get knowledge of the long-past times, and the age of trees is determined with the help of annual rings. But what is an annual ring, why it is formed and where besides the trees there are more? This is what we'll look at in this article.

Definition

Annual rings, or annual layers, are called areas of cyclic tissue growth in plants and some other species of living creatures, for example, fungi and mollusks. Their appearance is due to the climatic temperature difference and some other factors. Now we know what a ring is.

But the most characteristic and pronounced annual rings are observed in woody plants of a perennial type. Especially those that grow in the temperate zone, when the periods of summer-spring growth of cambium alternate with the time of rest in the autumn-winter part of the year. If we talk about the appearance of the rings, then each of them is divided into two parts: dark and light. Coniferous trees are interesting in that their annual rings are seen most clearly, since the wood that was formed later has a pronounced dark shade. Now we know what a one-year ring is. They study such a science as dendrochronology.

Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology is a scientific discipline that deals with the dating of events, phenomena of nature and archaeological finds on the basis of studies of annual rings of wood or other biological remains that they possess.

For example, this method is most often used to determine the age of some objects or buildings made of wood on annual rings.

With what it is for science and what it does, we sorted it out. Now let's look at how the year rings are formed.

Education process

As we already know, they appear in those trees that grow in zones with pronounced seasonality. Simply put, in summer and winter they do not grow equally due to temperature changes and other conditions. This leads to the fact that the layer of wood, growing in winter, differs from the summer mass of features: color, density, texture, etc. If we talk about the visual manifestation, then on the transverse cleft of the tree trunk you can see a clear structure, which has the form of concentric rings.

What can be determined by annual rings?

Basically - it's age. Each ring corresponds to one year, its thickness and texture can be used to judge what was the year from the climatic point of view: the approximate temperature, the amount of precipitation, their frequency, and so on. Use this method to determine the age of some ancient wooden products: they saw, look at the number of rings, and then compare with the sample, whose age is known. Thus, you can find out when the wood was cut, which served as the material for the object.

Animal world

As already mentioned, annual rings are found not only in trees, but also in the animal kingdom. They can be found in those tissues or structures of the skeleton that grow continuously, but are subject to climatic influences, seasonal temperature changes. These are scales, bones and fins of some species of fish, shells of various types of mollusks, beaks and bones of birds, animal horns, bones of some mammals. So now we know what year rings are in biology. According to them, scientists define everything the same as in the case of trees: age, climatic features of that period, and so on.