Uncover the secrets of solar storms and ancient earthquakes

For years, Charlotte Pearson and her colleagues at the University of Arizona Tree Ring Research Laboratory have used tree ring science to travel through time, hoping that evidence of the past will help them better understand the present and perhaps predict the future.

Charlotte Pearson, assistant professor of dendrochronology, and Brian Black, professor of dendrochronology, use advanced TIME Lab technology to analyze and date tree rings.

Photo by Chris Hanning, Office of Research and Partnerships

By looking at living trees and centuries-old trees that have been alive for a long time, AU scientists have led the field of tree ring science since the early 1900s. Tree rings — rounded, incised ridges that indicate annual growth — can record and reveal what the tree and its environment have experienced, including impacts from climate, earthquakes, fires, insect infestations and even bursts of solar particles from the sun. These particles can eventually help form carbon-14, a radioactive version of carbon that can combine with oxygen to form the carbon dioxide that trees breathe.

“The pattern of tree rings forms a barcode through time that can be matched across regions controlled by a specific climate pattern,” said Pearson, an associate professor of dendrochronology (the study of tree ring dating). “Most of the work we do is dating and reconstructing the climate. We are constantly extracting new information.”

And ask new questions. With funding from the Big Idea Challenge, Pearson is leading a new team to study solar and seismic geohazards. The recently opened $4 million TIME Laboratory is a key part of the research. The laboratory uses state-of-the-art mass spectrometry techniques to analyze radiocarbon in tree ring samples in finer detail than was possible before.

“The power of tree ring data to uncover secrets of the past and help us better prepare society for today’s solar and seismic events exemplifies the innovative and interdisciplinary nature of the Big Idea Challenge,” said Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, senior vice president for research and partnerships at AU. “The program has provided new opportunities for experts in wide-ranging fields, from plant sciences and geology to space physics, to explore new collaborations aimed at solving complex problems.”

In the first part of the project, researchers are using tree rings to better understand patterns of ancient solar storms and perhaps eventually predict new solar storms.

The Sun generates a strong magnetic field that rises and falls strongly over an 11-year cycle. In solar storms, violent explosions of protons from the Sun collide with nitrogen in the atmosphere, creating a spike in carbon-14, or radioactive carbon. Pearson and her team want to help better prepare for the potential impacts such storms could have on satellite infrastructure, power grids and other critical technology.

“Carbon 14 enters trees through photosynthesis and is trapped in a series of radiocarbon time capsules,” Pearson explained. “These tree rings can be dated – we can put a calendar year on the tree ring. This gives us a way to access patterns of solar cycles and solar storms over long timescales that can be useful for space weather research.”

(From left) Pearson supervises radiocarbon scientist Chris Wood and research technician Gabriella Vanover as they prepare samples that began as single tree rings for radiocarbon analysis.

Photo by Chris Hanning, Office of Research and Partnerships

By analyzing radiocarbon levels, scientists have found evidence of periodic major solar storms over the past 14,000 years.

For Pearson, the most exciting part of the job is bringing together different people with different points of view. One of those people is Joe Giacalone, a professor in the College of Science's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Giacalone's research in heliophysics and space physics includes studying the origin of solar large particle events, or solar cosmic rays. He has written papers describing the propagation of solar flare particles from the Sun to Earth where they are detected by spacecraft.

“Tree ring science allows us to ask questions about solar storms that we cannot examine with current observational methods,” Giacalone said. “The tree-ring record contains a goldmine of information. The Big Idea Challenge opened new doors for us to talk to our colleagues at the Tree-Ring Lab to search for answers.”

Bringing ancient forests back to life

In the second part of the Big Idea Challenge, Brian Black, associate director of the Tree-Ring Lab and professor of dendrochronology, will use radiocarbon dating of tree rings to reveal new details about ancient seismic activity in the Pacific Northwest. The team hopes that reconstructing past earthquake patterns on existing fault lines will help better predict new and potentially destructive earthquakes and reduce their impact.

Black leads a team of researchers who are literally diving into ancient lakes and forests in the Pacific Northwest to trace the past life of earthquakes and fault lines. They hope to use the information they glean from dead and buried trees, many of which lie underwater in lakes, to understand how ancient earthquakes behaved. Part of the puzzle is how interconnected, widespread and active fault networks are along the Pacific coast.

New analysis techniques at TIME Lab allow researchers to improve the use of tree rings in determining the age of trees in forests buried under earthquake-triggered landslides and reconstructing seismic patterns.

“The goal is to better understand the time lag between earthquakes and the behavior of the Cascadian subduction zone,” he said. “We want to understand what happened in the past to see if a similar event is likely to happen in the present. The new laboratory allows us to address questions that cannot be addressed in any other way.”

Pearson and Black review data on activity in MICADAS, or Miniature Carbon Dating System, while running tree ring samples at the TIME lab.

Photo by Chris Hanning, Office of Research and Partnerships

The Cascadian subduction zone is an underwater marine fault line that extends from northern California to British Columbia. It is the longest contiguous fault line in North America. Black's team was already studying a more recent earthquake that struck the fault in 1700.

“There are questions about how an earthquake behaves that only trees can answer,” Black said. “Did it rupture all at once in a magnitude 9 earthquake or, in parts, in a series of magnitude 8 earthquakes over the years in what is known as the ‘Decade of Terror’ hypothesis?”

The team is currently exploring using a different dating technique to determine whether trees in California died a year or more earlier than those in Washington state. They are testing whether the southern part of the Cascadia ruptured first, followed later by the northern part of the rift.

Using support from the Big Idea Challenge, the team also wants to determine the exact year spruce trees were killed in two previous Cascadia earthquakes that occurred approximately 1,300 and 1,600 years ago. The researchers obtained samples of spruce wood along with bark from two different sites for each earthquake. If trees died at both sites in the same year, this indicates that the fault was ruptured simultaneously at both sites in one large earthquake. If the evidence suggests that the trees died in different years, this suggests two separate, smaller earthquakes occurred.

There are no tree-ring chronologies that go back this far in the region, so the TIME Lab team is harnessing patterns of solar activity in trees.

“Instead of matching climate barcodes in tree rings, which are limited to a particular region, we match patterns from the sun, which are present in any tree, anywhere in the world during the same years,” Pearson said.

A new approach to determining the age of tree rings based on solar cycles – the Pearson project – was made possible by the TIME Lab and feeds into both parts of the Big Idea Challenge project. For earthquake research, solar patterns in trees help scientists date trees — and earthquakes — that cannot be radiocarbon dated or tree-ring dating alone. The new dating method allows them to measure radiocarbon from solar activity recorded in Cascadia trees in such detail that they can then match patterns of solar activity recorded for a single year to trees in other parts of the world.

“No one had used single-year radiocarbon dating before,” Black said. “Now, we can make a long series of radiocarbon measurements of each tree ring and pair them with annual dating of trees for which we have continuous records.”

This is supposed to provide the exact year in which the earthquake occurred and the trees died. Both parts of the project have specific real-world applications.

“Large solar storms pose a threat to our near-Earth satellites,” Pearson said. “We need to understand whether what we think we see in this record actually represents that threat.” “With these single-year radiocarbon patterns, tree rings can show us the solar cycle and when the sun has a flare or mass ejection, and they can also provide patterns that are key to determining the timing of huge earthquakes – events that have catastrophic consequences for society.”

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