Where did he get a 40,000 year old tree?
Look up dendrochronology, it’s mostly not about living trees.
The oldest trees are about 2,500 years old. The tree ring research was begun in the twenties and thirties in Tucson at the UofA. One display slice is about 12 feet in diameter. I remember seeing it as a child and that experience left me with the belief that extrememe global changes have occurred naturally way before climate scare.
Where did he get a 40,000 year old tree?
Where did he get a 40,000 year old tree?
I asked the same question a while back and then learned how the research works for 'Dendrochronology' and it is quite ingenious.
Take a long-lived modern tree recently cored (core sample taken from living tree) or cut down. Examine the tree rings that reflect each year's growth and thus the corresponding growing conditions for that locality. Let us say that the tree is 300 years old, so you see a record of wide rings for good grow years and narrow for bad ones.
Now find the record of an OLD local tree from 250 years back, which is nowhere as impossible as it may sound. As an example, the "Bald Cypress Tree" of the Southeast USofA can live between 600 and 1,000 years. Additionally, even dead trees resist falling and when they do fall in the swamps, they can resist rot under the right conditions.
So you then match the current tree's rings at 250 years ago to one that was 600 years old THEN and now you are back 850 years. Repeat as possible and while the 'local' variable almost always has to expand, these tree 'records' are constantly being added to worldwide. An amazing resource for a study method that dates back to Europe in the mid-1700s. For North America, there is sufficient matches to go back to 10,000 BCE but NOT, obviously, for a single local area.
However, for research like this study of Supernovae (SN) effects, it matters little about the locality or continuity. So for older tree rings, the dating of the tree samples can be by isotopic O2 measurements matched to Greenland (& other) ice core samples. Also usable are catastrophic volcano eruptions that produce extremely small tree rings due to sunlight blockage. Thus you can get a good estimate of a tree's life dates from several cross-checks. Then looking at that tree's rings for a suspect year of a SN can be a data point of effects.
“Where did he get a 40,000 year old tree?”
There are lots of places to get old trees, although 40,000 years is probably pretty far back for that. On the other hand, they do find perfectly preserved mammoths and cave bears from sudden-onset ice ages. They get the trees from low oxygen environments like stagnant water bodies and peat bogs.
There was a study I read once about tree rings from submerged trees that were thousands of years old. I don’t recall the location, maybe Scandinavia, but they carbon dated each individual ring and found that some years the C-14 levels in the environment were multiple times the normal levels. If you didn’t know to look for that, a lot of artifacts would seem much younger than they actually were. It was quite an interesting study.
Are you questioning science?
Petrified? But then would the rings still be distinguishable for chemical analysis as they are literally transformed into stone?