Research specialist Rex Adams looks through sections of giant sequoias and bristlecone pines at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. A climate-controlled facility for the archives is planned, thanks to a $9 million donation from Agnese N. Haury, a longtime benefactor of the program.

Greg Bryan / arizona daily star

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A climate record of the world over thousands of years is written in the 2 million tree specimens collected by the UA's tree-ring laboratory, an archive now boxed away and stacked floor to ceiling in the cramped bowels of Arizona Stadium.

With a $9 million donation the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research will formally announce Friday, the collection is on the verge of moving from its ignoble home to a new climate-controlled facility that will expand its accessibility to researchers and the public.

The collection — unparalleled in the world — is itself the very foundation of the field of dendrochronology, the science of tree-ring dating that arose at the University of Arizona out of the work of laboratory founder A.E. Douglass, said Thomas W. Swetnam, who has directed the lab since 2000.

"It's a world legacy and a world resource of inestimable value," Swetnam said. "The history recorded here is not going to happen again."

The archive building will be the first new facility for the tree-ring lab, which has spent its entire 70-year history in offices and research space crammed underneath the west side of the football stadium, where researchers have made profound discoveries about climate change and wildfire history and used tree rings to calibrate carbon-dating methods.

The $9 million donation is from Agnese N. Haury, a longtime benefactor of the program and wife of the late Emil W. Haury, a UA pioneer in anthropology who helped build the Arizona State Museum into a pre-eminent research facility and himself studied dendrochronology under Douglass.

The archive will be named for Bryant Bannister, who directed the lab from 1964 to 1982 and remains a professor emeritus. Bannister, who came to the UA for graduate studies in the late 1940s, served as an assistant to Douglass.

Bannister recalls how Douglass' early research on dating Indian ruins around the Southwest using tree rings made waves among scientists.

"The University of Arizona was basically put on the world map because of that discovery," Bannister said. "Prior to that time nobody really knew for certain when those were originally built. It seriously changed the entire viewpoint, not only of the profession of American archaeology, but the public as well."

Douglass' world famous work in the 1920s was published in an article he wrote for the December 1929 National Geographic titled "The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings." Swetnam said the work is still considered one of the top discoveries in North American archeology and the tree-ring dating methods have been used on everything from Viking ships to Stradivarius violins.

"It's a little like matching fingerprints or DNA sequences," Swetnam said.

Douglass' original collection forms the core of the tree-ring lab's archive, which has grown into the world's largest collection of ancient timbers, with more than 2 million specimens ranging from core samples smaller than a pencil to giant- sequoia cross-sections nearly 10 feet in diameter. It takes up 10,000 square feet of storage space, mostly in cramped, overflowing rooms in the stadium's underbelly, along with two other locations.

The UA has wood from all continents but Antarctica, from cliff-dwelling beams to wood from Egyptian sarcophagi to a sample from the oldest tree ever found, a 5,000-year-old bristlecone pine. Most of it is analyzed, but not all.

"You can think of tree rings like time capsules. Each ring has embedded in it information about the environment when it was growing," Swetnam said.

The Bannister archive building should be finished in about three years and though no location has been picked, Swetnam hopes to locate the three- or four-story building as close to the stadium's west side as possible.

"I think of the archive as something analogous to a library. The cross sections are books and the tree rings are the pages, just waiting to be read," Swetnam said.

The lab will hire a new curator for the collection, essentially a tree-ring librarian, who will work to catalog the archive, with an eventual goal of digitally scanning the samples and make them available online. The archive will also feature a "mini-museum" to publicly showcase some of the most interesting specimens, Swetnam said.

The archive's new home and $3 million in renovations for its football stadium office and research space are a testament to the long history of discoveries made by the lab, Swetnam said.

After Douglass' breakthrough work dating Southwestern ruins, lab scientists discovered that bristlecone pines in California are the world's oldest trees at more than 4,000 years old and revolutionized radiocarbon dating methods by calibrating them with tree-ring data.

The last 20 years have seen greater attention to environmentally focused research, with tree-ring scientists at the UA studying drought history in the Colorado River basin, reconstructing temperature history and examining changes in fire behavior over time using tree rings.

"It was a review of the tree-ring records going back many millennia that gave us our first real clue of the sign of global climate factors," Bannister said.

The lab is well-positioned to continue its contributions to understanding the world's climate and will expand significantly in coming decades,Swetnam said.

"Our sense is in the future there will be all kinds of new methods for measuring the chemistry of the wood and maybe even the genetics," he said. "The opportunities are there from a scientific standpoint and a societal need."

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