Watching the Mountain: Long Science and Tree Time at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve
The Long Now Foundation
The Long Now Foundation stewards a grove of some of the oldest trees in the world on Mount Washington, in the Great Basin of eastern Nevada. Few people ever get there. Host Andrew Warner described a remote site at about 11,500 feet, reached by roads bad enough that "every time we go out there, we get a flat," where walking half a mile feels like walking five. Long Now first came to the land because it was considering the mountain as the site for its first monument-scale 10,000-year clock. That plan didn't work out, but in the process the foundation "fell in love with the mountain" and the trees. It chose to stay on as steward and began supporting long-term science and long-term art there.
This evening at The Interval in San Francisco brought three people together to make the case for that work. Anne Heggli, a hydrometeorologist, maintains and curates a 15-year record of ten-minute weather data from the mountain. Jonathon Keats, an artist and experimental philosopher, made Centuries of the Bristlecone, a land art installation and clock that keeps time by the trees' growth. Adam Csank, a paleoclimatologist and dendrochronologist, explained what tree rings can and cannot tell us, and why pairing them with continuous monitoring opens questions nobody can answer yet. Their shared argument was that some of the most important questions about climate and ecosystems can only be answered by people who keep watching, patiently and for a very long time.
Warner opened by thanking two people who did not speak but whom he credited as essential. Scotty Strachan was Long Now's partner in long-term science from the beginning; Warner said he doubted anything on the mountain would have happened without Strachan's guidance. Colin Robertson, director of the Institute of Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, was in Warner's account essential to turning Centuries of the Bristlecone from an idea into reality.
An Observational Scientist Who Was Found by Her Field
Heggli described herself as, above all, an observational scientist: someone who studies "by watching, measuring, and recording." Much of her work is physical. She goes out with a shovel and a sensor and thinks about exactly where an instrument should go to capture the data that's needed. She has also invented sensors when she found, by studying the data, that observations necessary to understand processes such as how snow moves off a mountain and into the water supply could not be captured with existing tools. Her work, as she put it, is about how water arrives as rain and snow, how it sits, and how it leaves.
She said that in her life "the work that I need to do has found me and not the other way around." Her father was a meteorologist who began by studying snow crystal formation and cloud microphysics and later managed the California Department of Water Resources' statewide monitoring network. He first took her into the field when she was 11, which she remembers mostly as playing in the dirt, and which she says turned out to describe a lot of her fieldwork today. In college she studied international relations and Spanish at San Francisco State, unrelated to weather and water. Later she worked alongside her father as his translator while he worked for the World Bank modernizing Peru's hydrological monitoring network. She was translating between Spanish and English, but she said she was also learning what it really takes to keep a mountain observational network running over the long term, with people maintaining it.
From that experience she took a lesson that frames everything that followed: the most useful weather and water data span time scales from ten minutes to decades. Ten minutes captures a thunderstorm. Three decades is the start of a climatology. Very few places on Earth observe both at once, and she learned that one of them sits in the center of the Great Basin.
Arriving at the NevCAN Transect
Heggli made her first trip to Mount Washington in September 2022, as a graduate student, brought out by her mentor Scotty Strachan to meet the Long Now Foundation and see the transect stations. Around the campfire that first night she absorbed what she called "the vibe": a crew she described as kind, inclusive, wildly intelligent, curious, and clearly in love with the place. The next morning, riding up in the caravan, she watched the ecosystems change from sagebrush to piñon-juniper to mixed conifer and finally, near the top, to bristlecone.
Set across that same landscape is NevCAN: a transect of eight stations that starts in Spring Valley, climbs Mount Washington, crosses to Wheeler Peak, and descends the other side into Snake Valley. The stations have collected data every ten minutes since 2011.
She described the landscape as calm and peaceful but also extreme. Driving up with the window down, you feel temperatures drop with elevation. On the summit, the sun ducks behind a cloud and gives brief relief before it comes back out and stings the skin. She recalled eating lunch at the montane station while a thunderstorm moved up the valley. Later, back at her desk writing quality-control procedures, she was trying to set a threshold for the maximum plausible air temperature change in ten minutes. Zooming in on one timestamp, she found a 23°F change in a single ten-minute interval. Every other variable told the same story: wind rose, solar radiation dropped, precipitation began. It was a thunderstorm. For her, the episode showed how the station data match what people physically experience on the mountain.
Cold Pools, the Banana Belt, and Wind-Shaped Trees
The transect is designed to capture structure that a single station would miss. Heggli explained that the coldest air temperatures sometimes occur on the high ridges, but the valley floors can be colder still. Especially in winter, cold air drains downslope and pools in the valley, creating an inversion. That pool is only so deep, which leaves a more temperate middle zone on the mountainside: a "banana belt." With the transect, researchers can ask how long cold pooling persists, whether it is moving or changing over time, and how long it takes for daytime sun to warm and mix the air.
She tied this back to the trees. In the Snake Range, some bristlecones are twisted into low, matted, wind-beaten forms called krummholz, with branches all bent in the same direction. The reason, she said, is "written into the same wind and air temperature records" the stations are collecting.
She also recalled the bristlecone on Wheeler Peak that was for a time believed to be the oldest living thing, and that was mistakenly cut down in 1964 after being dated at just under 5,000 years old. For people who work on the mountain, she said, that story is not forgotten. The oldest record can be lost in a single afternoon. She noted that other protections are now in place, but said the story is part of why she takes stewardship of the stations so seriously: if the network isn't kept running, the record simply ends. After about 15 years of data, she said, there is still a long way to go before the longer-term questions can be asked and answered.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Infrastructure
Heggli borrowed the phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants and said that on this mountain she stands on the shoulders of giants "and of giant infrastructure." The scientists who designed NevCAN chose the sites carefully, invested in high-quality instruments, and built radio links to get data off a mountain with no cell service. When funding cycles ended, as they do, two people in particular, Scotty Strachan and Greg McCurdy (as the name was transcribed), kept the network alive largely on their own time, unfunded, for years. That was the part of the story that amazed her most, she said, and the part that told her she had found a community that truly cared about the data.
She then listed what the towers measure, saying that "the list of instrumentation is the argument for these stations." The towers record wind speed and direction; net radiation, meaning incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave; snow depth; precipitation; air temperature; relative humidity; barometric pressure; soil heat flux; and soil moisture and soil temperature at multiple depths. Higher, snow-dominated stations also measure snow water equivalent, and a handful carry phenocams. By her count, that adds up to more than 120 million data points and counting.
She described this combination as rare at several levels. Few places anywhere have a full energy-balance suite of instruments. Fewer still have an entire transect making those measurements. It is "preciously rare" for such a transect to sit in the Great Basin, one of the least-monitored regions of the United States, in the driest state, among some of the oldest living things. The rarity, she argued, is not because nobody wants this kind of data. It is because research systems aren't built for it. Grants run on two- to three-year cycles, which makes it very hard to ask slow questions or invest in answering them. Here, she said, a university, a research institute, and a foundation each held a piece of the network long enough to keep it alive. She joked that there must be a punchline in "a university, a research institute, and a foundation walked out onto a mountain," but she hasn't found it. Measured against Long Now's time scales, she added, the transect is still in its infancy and hasn't yet reached the three decades that mark the start of a climatology.
The Unglamorous Work of Quality Control
Heggli spent part of her talk on what she called the slow, unglamorous work that she usually skips because it isn't exciting. Since 2022 she has been turning 15 years of raw ten-minute data into quality-controlled data that a scientist can trust. She works station by station, year by year, and sensor by sensor. Some instruments contain multiple sensors at multiple depths. Then she repeats the process at all eight stations.
Most of this, she said, is expertise applied at a desk. Data spike, drift, and flatline, and the way a sensor fails tells her what went wrong. A radiation sensor reading low at midday might mean clouds, or it might mean snow sitting on the sensor. To tell the difference, she checks the precipitation gauge, the air temperature, and the snow depth to see whether they tell a consistent story. Diagnosing problems remotely from Reno tells the team what to pack before the six-hour drive out. She showed one month of data from a single station, not even every parameter: solar radiation, air temperature and relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, precipitation, soil temperature, and volumetric water content. She said a trained eye can glance at it and see exactly what is happening.
The fieldwork can be fun with the right group, she said, but it also means things like cleaning dead ants out of a rain gauge. The goal is to keep the instruments so well tuned that office quality control becomes minimal, because bad data never leaves the station in the first place. The data teach the team about the mountain, and the mountain teaches the team how to make the stations more robust.
Why Observations Still Matter in an Age of Models and AI
Heggli argued that all this care produces a "model-ready" dataset, which she said is the same thing as an "AI-ready" dataset. The old rule of garbage in, garbage out doesn't disappear when AI is involved. In her account, an AI system doesn't make the same kind of mistake as an individual running a model at a desk; it can make the mistake "confidently at scale and for who knows how long." If we are going to hand climate questions over to such systems, she said, we had better give them the best data possible.
She added a caution about what long records can and can't do. Even 30 or 50 years of data can only show what normal used to look like. The climate we are entering isn't a steady state that can be characterized once and extrapolated; it shifts, and the only way to know when a threshold is crossed is to be watching when it happens. Even with perfect observations, she said, modeling this landscape is very difficult. The interactions among snow, soil, wind, and forest on a mountainside are complicated in ways that the most advanced modeling and remote-sensing tools don't yet capture. Observations, in her words, are "the truth that we check against," what we teach people with, and what we teach models with. Without them, "we aren't testing our ideas about the mountain at all. We're just believing them."
Elevation as a Stand-In for Time
Heggli closed by looking ahead to the next speaker. Adam Csank works with tree rings that reach back hundreds or thousands of years, and she hopes NevCAN can give him the other end of the time scale: ten-minute weather data that can be connected to a ring representing a single year. Together, she hopes, the two records can address a question she hears often: will the bristlecone survive climate change?
Along the transect, she said, elevation can stand in for time. Warmer, lower sites may resemble what higher sites could look like as temperatures rise. Scientists around the world are finding species shifting upslope, so the question becomes whether the bristlecone can keep up.
She is now looking forward to inviting other researchers and "weather-curious minds" into the community around the data. Every ten minutes, the record logs what is happening at eight stations at once. It was doing so before she started graduate school, and she hopes it will continue after her: "I hand it over to whoever comes next."
Centuries of the Bristlecone: A Calendar That Looks Forward
Jonathon Keats said he drives Highway 50, "the loneliest road in America," every year to visit the trees. What caught his attention was their lifespan of up to 5,000 years. Eleven years ago (Warner had corrected his notes from "around a decade"), he began to think of the trees as natural calendars.
The idea was partly inspired by dendrochronology, which reads the relative thickness of tree rings to look back at past climate. As an experimental philosopher, Keats said, he wanted to look forward instead. So he and many Long Now people "with power tools" set survey markers into the ground around a sapling. Looking back over thousands of years, the trees grow about 1 millimeter per year on average. Using that standard, the markers are spaced outward from the sapling and stamped with future years, extending thousands of years ahead. As the tree grows, the marker its girth reaches tells you what time it is. That isn't the time on "your Hallmark calendar or your Google watch," Keats said, but the time from the tree's perspective.
Because the site is so remote, Keats also wanted to bring that time into the city. He imagined a municipal clock built on the same logic. If you take the atomic clock as the baseline, the bristlecones as a calendar speed up or slow down, year to year and over millennia; Keats said the reverse framing is equally valid and is the one he prefers. The clock's pendulum would swing at a rate based on the trees' growth, so the clock would be "metabolically tied" to the trees on the mountain. The clock was built, engineered in particular by Phil Abernethy and Brittany Nicole Cox, and designed to keep tree time for the next 5,000 years. It is in Reno, "the biggest little city in the world," at the Nevada Museum of Art, which Keats said has been a partner alongside Long Now from the start and gives the public a way to encounter the trees through the clock.
Why Tree Time: The Anthropocene and Chronodiversity
Keats acknowledged that a decade or more of work on this might seem strange, and explained his motivation in terms of the Anthropocene: how did we get into the mess of climate change and mass extinction? There are many possible answers, he said, but for him time is "of the essence," meaning the ways we use, misuse, or abuse it. In his view, a large part of the problem is that we insulate ourselves from the rest of life on Earth. We keep time by the atomic clock and expect our Amazon orders on time, without recognizing the systems affected or the feedback that runs through all interconnected life.
Tying human time to what the trees experience is his response. Those experiences are themselves shaped by conditions humans are largely responsible for; he gave the example of rising carbon dioxide levels producing faster tree growth. In this way, he said, people can see themselves in time, calibrate themselves accordingly, and build a relationship with the trees over time.
He has extended the same idea to rivers. He showed the Knik River in Alaska and described clocks and calendars, in Alaska and elsewhere, whose speed is set by river flow measured at gauging stations: "What if the flow of time were calibrated by the flow of a river?" He also described an installation currently in Burghausen on the Salzach River: a calendar that, "if all things go well," will be calibrated by the changing meander of the river, which may move faster or slower depending on surrounding conditions.
All of this, Keats said, is about how we can live as part of nature in a context we are all making together. He argued that the data and other sources each carry an authority we need to attend to, and that they need to be integrated into a "chronodiversity" that is part of biodiversity. He also framed timekeeping as a collective effort, among humans and among all life on Earth, observing the world together and reaching a homeostasis that might keep everything going. He closed: trees and rivers have no need for clocks or calendars, and his dream is a future where we don't either, "where time is observed in the environment where we all of us make time together."
Elders of Time: Behind the Scenes
Between talks, Long Now screened clips from Elders of Time, its in-house documentary about making Centuries of the Bristlecone. Filmmakers credited included Justin Oliphant, Shannon Breen, and drone operator Kayla Sharp.
The first clip showed the survey markers being installed. A Long Now staff member explained that the team mostly works in San Francisco organizing talks and productions, but helps artists install pieces at special moments like this one. As the trees grow, in theory they will envelop markers showing how big a tree growing at the average rate would be in a given year. Because the trees don't grow at an average rate, they won't reach the markers as expected. The staff member said that is part of the point: bristlecone time is variable rather than constant, not Coordinated Universal Time.
The second clip introduced the horologists. Phil Abernethy, who called himself a "sculptural horologist," which he said is a fancy name for a clockmaker, described this as the most complex and longest-term project he has worked on. He said it went through many iterations. He realized Keats's idea could not be carried out entirely mechanically, so he had to find a way to show variable time in a form people would recognize as time. He proposed two clocks: one showing standard time and a mirrored assembly showing bristlecone time. Another voice in the clip reflected that humans cannot impose their own time on nature, that our way of cataloging time is our own creation, and that time "unfolds in its own place in the world." The example was a daisy opening and closing each day as the time cycle of a flower.
The third clip covered the science behind calibrating the clock. The Reno clock is guided by data from tree cores, which give a baseline understanding of the grove's growth patterns. The clip showed coring at about chest height through the center of a stem to approximate the tree's age, and explained the bark, the cambium (the live tissue just beneath the bark), and the sapwood. Researchers never take just one core from a site. In harsh conditions, not every tree puts on a ring in a given year. The clip offered an analogy: "we all know that one guy who wears shorts no matter what the weather." One tree may keep growing in the cold while the others don't, so many samples are needed. In future years, the team will return to the mountain for micro-cores to adjust the rate of bristlecone time on the museum's clock, so that the clock registers the trees' experience of time.
A Paleoclimatologist's Perspective: The Past as a Guide to Extremes
Adam Csank, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, had just returned from the mountain two weeks earlier. He thanked Strachan and Robertson for drawing him in through the clock's calibration work, noting that Strachan had been trying to involve him for ten years and that the clock was "finally the kicker."
He described his work: coring trees across the western United States and using ring widths to reconstruct past climate, sometimes over the last 100 to 200 years, sometimes over thousands. He also works in the Canadian High Arctic on mummified forests that died three to four million years ago. Those forests, he said, show how ecosystems functioned in periods warmer than today, or at least about as warm as where we are heading. To anticipate future change, in his view, we need to understand how and why climate varied in the past and which ecosystems thrived or failed under those conditions.
He pointed to headlines about megadrought in the West, about the odds of megadrought in the Southwest, about possible megafloods, and a story asking whether the U.S. megadrought will ever end. Of that last one, he remarked that if a drought never ends, it may not be a drought but simply climate change. Paleoenvironmental data, he said, provide examples of conditions we have never experienced. He quoted a University of Colorado researcher's line that "there's nothing magical about the last hundred years." He showed a long time series, including bristlecone data from California's White Mountains, indicating that the West has had worse droughts than any in the modern record, and suggested those are the ones we should worry about.
Tree Rings as Proxies, and the Law of the Minimum
Csank explained that tree rings are a proxy. They don't record climate directly; they record the tree's response to climate. That means they must be calibrated against direct data to understand what they say. Trees follow what he called the law of the minimum: growth is controlled by the scarcest resource, not by the total resources available.
So in the lower-elevation Southwest, for example at Methuselah Walk in the White Mountains, bristlecones respond to water. Those precipitation-sensitive trees produce the drought records he had shown. At around 11,400 feet near the top of Mount Washington, however, the trees are limited by growing-season length, which summer temperature controls, so they record temperature. Such high-elevation records feed into Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions.
He showed a time series of Mount Washington bristlecone ring widths and pointed to a rapid acceleration of growth beginning around the 1980s, which he called "the signal of climate change right there at those high elevations." He cited bristlecone researcher Matt Salzer's finding that the growth surge has occurred only in a narrow band within about 150 meters of upper treeline, regardless of the tree's elevation. He suggested the acceleration might be visible even in the cores he took at Centuries of the Bristlecone.
That led to the first of his long-term questions: when will the growth acceleration stop? If warming continues, Csank said, there will be a point when higher temperatures no longer benefit the trees and water instead becomes the limiting factor. If people are watching, they will see when that happens.
Monitoring as a Rosetta Stone
Csank said he recently asked a room of scientists what studies could be started now whose results might not appear for 10, 20, or 100 years. The common theme of every answer, he said, was monitoring, the kind of work Heggli described.
He showed 24/7/365 monitoring data of Pinus longaeva, provided by Scotty Strachan, and said he doubted many people had ever seen such data. Having data at this resolution, he argued, gets at how the trees are actually responding to climate. It acts as "a Rosetta Stone" for reading the stories in the rings. Without it, how do we get from a ring width to a temperature reconstruction, or understand how bristlecones will cope with what he called the longest unrepeatable experiment in Earth's history, climate change? In his estimate, it could be thousands of years before we really know how human-caused warming has affected these trees.
He said bristlecones have lived through climates comparable to today's over their history of 10,000 years or more. The open questions are how they will handle climate changing faster than at any point in that history, and temperatures that may exceed the range where they have been "happy." They may move and do fine elsewhere, he said, but if no one is looking for those places, no one will know. Networks like the one on Mount Washington let researchers observe and check on the trees now, to understand how they will respond in the future and how they responded in the past.
He compared this to the cherry blossom records that Japanese monks have kept for 1,200 years. The monks who began recording peak bloom in 812, he said, surely did not know it would become a valuable climate change record. We don't know whether NevCAN's record will be invaluable a thousand years from now, he said, "but it might be. And if we're not watching, we won't know."
From Solar Storms to Frost Rings to Fire
Csank then listed other questions the site makes possible. He showed a photo, taken by someone named Craig a few weeks earlier, of the aurora over the bristlecones. He has been working with a group at Northern Arizona University studying Miyake events: by measuring radiocarbon in tree rings, researchers can detect past solar storms and estimate their size. Are we heading toward a Carrington event that could disable the Starlink satellites we rely on? He said we don't know. But without understanding how tree rings store and sequester carbon today, using the NevCAN network, researchers can't relate the magnitude of a past event (he cited one in 977) to what happens now. He called this a new study that is only possible because NevCAN exists.
He also asked whether ten-minute data can connect to a thousand-year record, and said instantaneous events make it possible. A frost ring forms when a cold snap hits after bristlecones begin growing: water in the cambium freezes and expands, leaving scar tissue. Ten-minute data can show exactly when such frost events occurred and how they appear in the wood. That could help interpret past frost rings, which he said are often linked to large volcanic eruptions such as Pinatubo.
Even a disaster would be an opportunity, he said. If the bristlecone site burned, sad as that would be, it would allow a study of how bristlecones recover after fire. But again, only if someone is there watching. He said these were just ideas that occurred to him while preparing the talk, offered to show how unique it is to have NevCAN co-located with such long-lived trees.
Closing Film: Building for People Who Don't Exist Yet
The program closed with the last minutes of Elders of Time. Speakers in the film reflected that thinking about the future and the past are two sides of the same coin. We don't know the intentions of people in the past, they said, but we know ours: we are building for the future. If more people think that way, it may help us empathize with people who don't exist yet. One speaker called it an "incredible privilege" to work on something meant to last thousands of years, at a time when few things are made that way, and hoped it would inspire others to take on deep-time projects. Keats, in the film, said the work is the beginning of an intergenerational thought experiment. A 5,000-year span is specified for everything put in the ground, he noted, but much more could happen. He argued that the quest for ever more precise time is not necessarily accurate, because it encourages a sense that the whole world can be controlled. To get past the Anthropocene, he said, we need to rediscover our relationship with all other life forms.
Q&A: Two Clocks Speaking Against Each Other
An audience member asked whether there had been collaboration or engineering exchange between the bristlecone clock and Long Now's 10,000-year clock. Keats said he had long admired the Clock of the Long Now as a concept. When he spoke at The Interval in 2015, it was partly because of his deep-time work, such as cameras with exposure times of a hundred or a thousand years. He already had an idea for a calendar calibrated by tree growth, originally redwoods. Learning about bristlecones convinced him they were ideal. Using Strachan's images of the mountain, he turned that 2015 talk about his past work into a pitch for something he wanted to last 5,000 years, speaking about it "as if it were inevitable."
He described the two clocks as telling stories that are "not strictly parallel nor strictly perpendicular." The Clock of the Long Now brings precise timekeeping into the world over 10,000 years. Keats said he is trying to "obliterate" precision in the sense of every beat being identical, and to emphasize accuracy to a different standard, one set by other life forms and living systems. Accuracy and precision are not the same thing, he noted. In that sense, he said, the two clocks speak against each other, but they can only do so because both are speaking. The 10,000-year clock gave him a context he hadn't had for understanding his own work, and ideally his clock helps people understand what the Long Now clock might mean now and in 10,000 years. Warner said this was the moment the project "clicked" for him: the idea that the bristlecone clock is just as accurate as the other clock.
Asked what has been learned from bristlecones, Csank said one lesson is how narrow the elevation band is where trees switch from water-sensitive to temperature-sensitive growth. The line can be about 50 meters wide, and a small temperature change can move it up 50 meters; within a single site, walking down 50 meters can take you from temperature-responsive to water-responsive trees. That is one reason few dendrochronologists would claim a 10,000-year bristlecone record gives a 10,000-year record of California water resources. The other reason is what he called paleoclimatology's "dirty little secret," stationarity: the assumption that trees respond to climate today the way they always have, which may not hold over a bristlecone's lifespan. He said a lot of active work aims to resolve this, because researchers want bristlecones to be a reliable 10,000-year climate record. He added that bristlecones appear more resilient than previously thought. A widely reported paper a few years ago suggested limber pine might outcompete bristlecone in a race upslope. Csank said later studies across more sites found that this applied only to one place in a unique situation, and that elsewhere bristlecones are doing much better than limber pine.
Strachan added from the audience that the site monitors plant-available water, greenness, sap flow, and more. During the deepest drought years of the last decade, they measured directly that bristlecones outperformed limber pine and Engelmann spruce on the site. The bristlecones took up water faster, resisted cellular cavitation longer, and responded more quickly to summer monsoon water. Strachan called this a direct, minute-by-minute measurement of resilience that would be very hard to obtain without being out there with a notebook constantly, a role electronics now fill.
The final question asked about unintended uses of the monitoring technologies. Heggli said her instrument work usually doesn't invent entirely new technology. Instead it adapts existing measurement principles to new questions. In her work on snowpack temperature, for example, she starts from techniques like infrared temperature measurement used on satellites and asks whether they can be modified or narrowed to observe something not previously measurable. Ideas come from experience: "windshield time" in the field truck, like ideas in the shower, and simply being on the mountain. Coming from operational monitoring into academia, she said, she is often the one "pumping the brakes" on enthusiasm for new instruments, because people underestimate the elements. In the Sierra Nevada, she said, snowpacks have ripped chain-link fences, and the Snake Range also has persistent snowpack. The mountain teaches how to monitor more robustly. She also stressed bringing diverse, interdisciplinary minds together. She has often heard someone describe a method in a presentation and realized she could apply it to something no one had been able to observe. Hard science depends on people and processes, she said. You never know when the light bulb will go off, just as you never know when a sensor will capture what you later realize you needed. Echoing Csank, she concluded that everyone wants a 10,000-year record, but getting one is the hard work and the challenge, and "no single person's going to do it on their own."
Good evening. I'm Andrew Warner. I'm your host for this evening. Today's a special evening because we get to showcase the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve. This is a place that's really important to us at Long Now, yet very few people get to go to. It's very remote. It's hard to get to. The roads are terrible. Every time we go out there, we get a flat. And it's at 11 and a half thousand feet. So walking half a mile feels like you're walking about 5 miles.
We originally got this piece of land, became stewards of this piece of land because we were going to site the first monument-scale 10,000-year clock there. That didn't end up making sense to be the location for that clock. But in the process of figuring that out, we fell in love with the mountain and we fell in love with the trees and decided we wanted to stay stewards of some of the oldest trees in the world that are up there. We also started working on long-term science initiatives with partners as well as siting long-term art projects, which is what we're going to be talking about tonight.
Before we get into that, though, I just want to give a quick thanks to two people who aren't going to be on stage tonight, but were instrumental in making all this happen. The first is Scotty Strachan over there. Scotty was our partner from the very beginning in the long-term science. And honestly, I don't know if anything on the mountain would have happened without Scotty's wisdom and guidance over the years. So thank you, Scotty.
And the other is Colin Robertson over here in the baseball hat. He's the director of the Institute of Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, and a project you'll hear about later in the evening, Centuries of the Bristlecone. Colin was really essential in turning it from an idea to reality. So really appreciate that, and they also both drove from Reno, which is crazy.
So we're going to start by looking at the science on the mountain. Our first speaker is Anne Heggli. Anne is a hydrometeorologist. Anne is both the person working on the mountain in the snow at 11,000 feet repairing sensors as well as the scientist back in Reno working on the data set that involves 100 million data points that's collected up on the mountain. So we're really excited to have Anne here tonight. Oh, Anne is a Long Now research fellow, which, you know, that's pretty. Please welcome Anne.
Good evening. It's really wonderful to be here and connect with you all. Oftentimes I'm alone in my office or out with a handful of colleagues on the mountain. So to get started as we talk about this Great Basin sky island, as I was introduced, I am a hydrometeorologist. Really, I am an observational scientist. I study by watching, measuring, and recording.
I enjoy being out on the mountain with my tools, a shovel, a sensor, and sitting there thinking about where the sensor should go and why to get the data that we need. I have also spent time inventing sensors. By observing the data, I have sometimes found that there's observations that we need that we cannot capture. And we need that data to better improve our process-based understanding of things like how snow moves off of the mountain and into our water supply. These observations have all led me to study how the water moves, how rain and snow arrives, how it sits, and how it leaves.
In so much of my personal history, I found that the work that I need to do has found me and not the other way around. My father was a meteorologist. He got his start studying snow crystal formation and cloud microphysics. He later worked for California Department of Water Resources managing the statewide monitoring network. When I was 11 was the first time he took me out into the field. And it was mostly just playing around in the dirt, which I later found to be a lot of the fieldwork that I do now.
But when it came time for me to go to college, I actually came here to the city and I went to San Francisco State. I studied international relations and Spanish, nothing to do with weather and water. But later I found myself working alongside my father as his translator as he worked for the World Bank on modernizing Peru's hydrological monitoring network. And yep, I was translating Spanish to English and vice versa. But I was also translating what it takes to actually keep an observational monitoring network on a mountain for a long time and with people maintaining it. This field very much found me, and through the work with these people and the processes, I came to love everything that goes into collecting weather and water data that helps our societies thrive.
I also learned that the most useful data that we collect is on a range of time scales, 10 minutes to decades. Ten minutes is a thunderstorm. Three decades is the start of a climatology. The trouble is that there are very few places on this Earth where we can observe both at once. And I came to find out that there is a place in the center of the Great Basin doing just that, where there is a community of people observing this Great Basin sky island.
I made my first trip to Mount Washington September 2022, so four years ago exactly. I was a graduate student then and brought out by a mentor, Scotty Strachan, to meet this Long Now Foundation and take a look at these transect stations. Sitting around the campfire that very first night, I started to absorb the vibe. A crew of people who were kind, inclusive, wildly intelligent and curious, and clearly in love with the place.
The next morning, we all piled into our caravan of vehicles and made our way up the mountain. And I did what I always do sitting in the field truck. I looked out the window and observed, and I saw the ecosystem change from sagebrush to pinyon-juniper to mixed conifer and then, of course, near the top, the bristlecone. And nestled into the same landscape is a transect of eight stations that start in the Spring Valley, make their way up Mount Washington and then over to Wheeler Peak and back down the other side into the Snake Valley. Eight stations that are collecting this data every 10 minutes since 2011. NevCAN somehow found me.
This landscape is calm and peaceful, but it's also extreme. As you drive up the mountain with a window down, you can feel the temperatures gently lower as the air gets cooler with elevation. When you're on the top of the mountain, you can feel the sun tuck behind a cloud and get a temporary relief before it peeks back out again, stings the skin, and your body starts to heat up.
I remember having lunch on the montane station watching a thunderstorm move up valley, bringing wind and rain, and then later being back at my desk working on the quality control procedures for these 10-minute data, trying to narrow in on this threshold of what is the maximum amount that the air temperature could change in just 10 minutes. And I narrowed into a timestamp and zoomed in, and sure enough, a 23° Fahrenheit change in just 10 minutes. And when I looked at all of the other data, I saw that it was all telling the same story. Wind increased, solar radiation dropped, precipitation started, all of the signs of a thunderstorm. And in this way, we can learn about the station, what we experience.
And that is sometimes at the very top of the mountain ridges, we have the coldest air temperatures. And down in the valley floor, the air temperatures can be even colder. Sometimes in the winter especially, that cold air drains down into the valley and it pools, creating an inversion. And this is only so deep, though, and it leaves this kind of middle area of the mountain that's a little bit more temperate, the banana belt. In this way, our stations are designed to measure something exactly like this. And we can start to ask and answer questions about how long does this cold pooling persist? Is it moving? Is it changing over time? How long does it take during the daytime when the solar radiation and the sun comes out and warms the air and mixes it up?
From a lot of this data, we see that the bristlecone are shaped by it. In the Snake Range, some of these bristlecones are twisted into krummholz, in these low, kind of matted, wind-beaten trees. These gnarled branches are bent in the same direction for a reason. And that reason is written into the same wind and air temperature records that they're collecting.
One of those trees on Wheeler Peak, some of you have heard this story, was for a while believed to be the oldest living thing. And in 1964, it was mistakenly cut down after being dated just under 5,000 years old. And for those of you who have been out on the mountain, we don't forget that story. And you can lose a single record in an afternoon, the oldest record in an afternoon, but hopefully not anymore. There are other protections in place. But part of this is why I take the stewardship of these stations so seriously.
We could lose the data if we're not careful with it. If we're not able to keep it going, that's the end of the record. And after 15 years of collecting data, we have a long way to go to be able to ask and answer those longer-term questions. In research, we often borrow the term of seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. And I have adopted it since I started working on this mountain because here I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and of giant infrastructure.
The scientists who designed NevCAN chose the stations carefully. They invested in high-quality instrumentation. They built the radio links to get the data up off of the mountain that has no cell service. And when funding cycles end, as funding cycles do, two of them in particular, Scotty Strachan and Greg McCurdy, kept it alive, largely on their own time, unfunded, and for years. And that's the part of the story that amazed me the most, the part that told me that I had met the community that really cared about the data.
So let's get a little bit more technical for a bit, and I'll tell you exactly what we're measuring on these towers because for me the list of instrumentation is the argument for these stations. We've got wind speed and direction, net radiation. So that's outgoing and incoming shortwave and longwave radiation, snow depth, precipitation, air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, soil heat flux, soil moisture, and soil temperature at multiple depths. And in the higher-elevation, snow-dominated areas, we've got snow water equivalent. And a handful of these stations are also equipped with phenocams. And if you want to do the math, and of course I did, it's over 120 million data points and counting.
This combination of sensors is globally rare. There are not many places where you can get this full energy balance of instrumentation. And it's rarer still to have an entire transect making these observations. And then it becomes preciously rare that it is located in the Great Basin, in the middle of one of the least monitored regions in the United States, in the driest state, and amongst some of the oldest living things.
And this isn't rare because nobody wants it, but it's rare because our research systems here really aren't set up for it. Our grants run on two- to three-year cycles. And so that means that it is exceptionally challenging to try to ask the slow question, and we often cannot make the investment into finding the answer. But a university, a research institute, and a foundation walked out onto a mountain. And I'm sure there's a punchline in there somewhere. I haven't been able to find it. But really, each of us has held a piece of this for long enough to keep it alive. But when we start thinking about this transect in the terms of the Long Now, it's still in its infancy. We aren't even to the nowadays yet, which is the start of a climatology.
So getting into this, there is a part of the story that I tend to overlook because it's not really exciting or fun, but this is part of the grueling work that I have been doing, and I think you all might find some value in it. Since 2022, I have been doing the slow and unglamorous work of turning 15 years of raw 10-minute data into quality-controlled data that a scientist like myself could trust. Quality assurance, quality control, starting with a single station year by year and then sensor by sensor. And some of these sensors have multiple sensors and multiple depths within them. So this isn't even the full picture. And then doing this at all eight stations.
Most of this work is expertise executed behind a desk. Data spikes, it drifts, it flatlines. And the way that it fails can tell me what is wrong. A radiation sensor that reads low at midday might indicate clouds, but it also could mean that snow is sitting on top of the sensor. So I check the precipitation gauge. I check the air temperature. I check the snow depth and see if they're all telling the same story. When I can read the error from my desk in Reno, it helps let us know what we need to pack into the field trucks before we make that six-hour drive out.
But ultimately, I have the data I need to tell the story about the weather and the water on the mountain. And this is just one month of data, not even of all of the parameters from one station. And you can see at the top solar radiation. Below that we have air temperature and relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, precipitation, and then the soil temperature and volumetric water content, which is the soil moisture. And to the trained eye, you can quickly glance at that and see exactly what's happening.
Part of this work is also the fieldwork, and it can be really, really fun, especially when you're out there with the right group of people, but it can also mean cleaning dead ants out of a rain gauge. The ultimate goal, though, is to try to keep this instrumentation so well tuned that the amount of quality control that I have to do back at the office becomes minimal because we don't ever let bad data leave the station in the first place. And yes, this data is teaching us about the mountain, but at the same time, the mountain is teaching us about what we need to do to these stations to make them more robust and work better.
All of this expertise on sensors and time series data leads to providing a model-ready data set, which is the same thing as an AI-ready data set. That old rule of garbage in, garbage out does not go away when AI is at the helm, and there has been a lot of conversation about this. The way that this works is it doesn't make the same mistake that an individual does executing a model behind their desk. It can make this mistake confidently at scale and for who knows how long. So if we are going to be handing this data over, our world's climate questions over, we had better make sure that they are the best data that we can possibly get.
And even once we have 30 or 50 years of data, it can only tell us what normal used to look like. The climate we're moving into isn't a steady state that we can characterize once and extrapolate from. It shifts. And the only way we know when a threshold gets crossed is to be watching when it does.
As someone who has spent years working with environmental data, even with perfect observations, still modeling this landscape is really difficult to do. It's remote. It's dramatic. The interactions between snow and soil, wind, and forest on a mountainside is complicated in ways that our most advanced modeling and remote sensing tools do not capture yet. And that's why observations matter. They're the truth that we check against. They're what we teach people with and what we teach models with. And without them, we aren't testing our ideas about the mountain at all. We're just believing them.
So from this, I of course want you all to feel connected to this mountain. And maybe you won't feel as connected to the stations or the data as I do, but I hope that this talk has helped provide a glimpse into the value the data holds when it is cared for. Hundreds of research questions are yet to be asked and answered across numerous disciplines. And after pouring myself into the data and upgrading the sensors over the last four years, which is still such a short amount of time, I'm now looking forward to inviting others in, researchers and weather-curious minds, to be a part of this community, our community that is connected to and curious about the Great Basin sky island. At the end of the presentation, you're going to be hearing from Adam, a dendrochronologist who works with these
Tree rings, which are a record that stretches back hundreds, if not thousands of years. What I'm hoping that NevCAN gives him is the other end of the time scale: 10-minute weather data integrated into a tree ring that represents a year.
Together, those two records will hopefully let us investigate a question that I often hear: Will the bristlecone survive climate change? Along the transects, we can use elevation as a stand-in for time. Warmer sites down low could look like what the higher elevation sites might look like as air temperatures rise. Scientists all over the world are finding species shifting upslope. So the question goes: As the climate warms, can the bristlecone keep up?
The Long Now chose Mount Washington for a reason. It is a place to practice thinking on time scales longer than a human life. NevCAN is working towards becoming a part of that practice. Every 10 minutes, the data record logs what is happening simultaneously at eight stations across the transect. It has been doing that since before I started graduate school, and it will hopefully keep doing it after, and I hand it over to whoever comes next. And as long as there are people who continue to choose the long science and the slow work of observing, we will be there watching the mountain. Thank you.
Thank you. And our next section is on Centuries of the Bristlecone. It's an art project that was actually hatched 11 years ago on the stage, right here. It's really cool to have Jonathon back. Jonathon Keats is the artist behind Centuries of the Bristlecone. He's also an experimental philosopher and has just been a really wonderful partner to work with for the last few years, and I can also personally attest is basically the most interesting person to spend a multi-day desert road trip with. Please welcome to the stage Jonathon.
Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for the generous introduction I now have to live up to in terms of what I'm going to say to all of you, that we are not on a multi-day trip here.
Every year I travel Highway 50, the loneliest road in America, to visit some of Earth's oldest living beings. Up at Mount Washington in the Great Basin can be found a grove of bristlecone pine trees that have been stewarded by the Long Now Foundation for decades now. These trees are special for so many reasons, but one of them that caught my eye as I started to look and as I started to learn is that they live for a long time, up to 5,000 years.
And around a decade ago, or now I need to update my notes because Andrew has corrected me, 11 years ago, I started to think about the trees as natural calendars. Now, this was inspired in part by dendrology and specifically by dendrochronology, which you'll hear more about later from Adam because he actually knows something about this. But basically it is a way in which to be able to look back in time by reading the rings of a tree and their relative thickness as ways in which to be able to see the climate as it was.
But being an experimental philosopher, I didn't really want to look back. I wanted to look forward. And so what I started to do is to think about how these trees, these natural calendars, might be calendars that could orient us looking in the present and in years to come at the environment in which these trees live.
So in other words, what I did was to set survey markers into the ground. And I should say it wasn't just me. There were a lot of other people from the Long Now Foundation with power tools who were doing this. What I was striving to do was to create a calendar looking forward in time, taking data from the past. So looking back over thousands of years and finding that the trees grow at a rate about 1 millimeter per year, setting these markers in the ground with future years stamped into them such that it is possible to stand back and to see the time from the tree's perspective.
In other words, by taking that standard of 1 millimeter per year and spacing markers on the mountain around a sapling going forward thousands of years, and then seeing where the tree is right now, what its girth is, what marker it has met, this becomes a way in which to find out what time it is. Not what time it is according to your Hallmark calendar or your Google watch, but according to the trees. It becomes a way in which to know time from their perspective.
So as already has been explained, it's hard to get there. And so with that remoteness of Mount Washington, I wanted to figure out a way to bring this time into the city. And so I started to imagine a municipal clock, a clock that would use the same logic, the same concept where time is variable, at least if we're taking the atomic clock as our basis and we're looking to the tree. Of course, the opposite is equally valid and is the way in which I've been looking at it.
But where if we take the atomic clock, we find that the bristlecones are, as a calendar, they're speeding up or slowing down in terms of the time that they're telling on an annual basis or on the basis of thousands of years. I wanted to bring this into the city with this clock that had a pendulum that would swing at a rate that was based upon the trees and effectively, by virtue of being based on their growth, would be a clock that was metabolically tied to the trees as they're living up on the mountain.
And so I did it. Or again, I should say we. And most of that we should be Phil Abernethy and Brittany Nicole Cox in particular, who engineered a clock that is designed for the next 5,000 years to keep time as the trees are in a way that we can encounter that time in the city, in the biggest little city in the world, which is of course Reno, which happens to be the place where the Nevada Museum of Art is located, and where that museum, which has been a partner together with Long Now from the very beginning, where that museum has been able to make a very public-facing way in which people can see these trees and can interact with them through this clock.
So all of this effort, a decade or more of work, might seem strange, to say the least. So I should tell you maybe a little bit about my motivations. To a great extent it comes down to the Anthropocene. How did we get ourselves into this mess? Climate change, mass extinction, all of that. And I think that there are many ways in which to consider this question. There are many answers. But to me, time is really of the essence. It's about the ways in which we use time or misuse it or abuse it.
In other words, a larger part of the problem, I think, comes down to how we insulate ourselves from all other life on Earth by keeping time according to the atomic clock and by getting our Amazon order on time, but not recognizing all the systems that are affected, not recognizing the ways in which all life on Earth is interconnected and where feedback is constantly what is a matter of our input and also needs to be a matter of how we interact going forward on the basis of our past behavioral patterns.
So in other words, by looking to these trees, by bringing these trees into the city, by making it so that time is a matter of what these trees are experiencing, and where these trees are experiencing what they are as a result of this climate, which we by and large are responsible for right now, these conditions more generally that we're responsible for, for the carbon dioxide level that as it increases results in a tree that is growing more quickly, for instance, as a result of all of this, this becomes a way in which to be able to see ourselves in time and to be able to calibrate ourselves accordingly, and also to be able to build a relationship with these trees through time.
A relationship that is potentially one that not only can be with trees, but also can be with rivers. So this is the Knik, a river in Alaska. And I have also worked with rivers in Alaska and in other places creating clocks and calendars that are calibrated by the flow of the rivers. What if the flow of time were calibrated by the flow of a river? That's the basic question that I'm asking myself, and that's a question that I'm trying to address by using the gauging stations to be able to gauge the rivers and to speed up or slow down the clock accordingly.
And again looking to a calendar. This is an installation that's currently in Burghausen on the Salzach River, which is a calendar that will be calibrated, if all things go well, on the basis of the changing meander of the river, which will change in ways that are based upon all the conditions around us, where that might be faster or slower.
So all of this as a matter of looking to these other life forms and these living systems, all of this is really about how we can live in the environment, how we can live as a part of nature within this context that is a shared context that we are making, all of us together. In other words, to try to figure out how we potentially, taking all these data in, taking all this information, taking all of these sources and all the authority that they carry, because each one of them carries authority that we need to be attentive to, that needs to be integrated into the chronodiversity that is a part of the biodiversity that we need to be a part of. All of that needs to be a part of our lives while simultaneously it needs, I believe, to be a group effort.
A group effort that's not only a group effort amongst us humans but all life on Earth collectively reckoning time by collectively observing the world in which we live and collectively coming into that state of homeostasis that potentially keeps us going forward. Of course, trees and rivers have no need for clocks or calendars. And my dream is that ultimately we'll live in a future we don't either, where time is observed in the environment, where we all of us make time together. Thank you.
Thank you, Jonathon. Up next we have some clips of Elders of Time. This is the behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of Centuries of the Bristlecone that we produced in-house here at Long Now. We have the filmmakers in the audience tonight. We have Justin Oliphant, who's on the staircase right there. Shannon Breen, you can't see, but she's upstairs running the livestream. And the drone footage is by Kayla Sharp, who's also sitting on the stairs right there.
So our first clip is going to show us installing parts of the land art installation up on the mountain.
And then, yeah, and then we'll trace them. Right. And the other question I think we need to address is whether we want them.
One good video shot.
The Long Now team, and these are folks like me who, we mostly work in San Francisco. We're mostly doing things like organizing talks, productions, but for special moments like these, we're helping these artists install these amazing pieces.
So as these trees grow, in theory, they will envelop these survey markers that show, if they grew at an average, how big the tree would be at that moment. Of course, they don't grow at an average, and so they won't hit these in the expected ways, but that's part of the point of the project, is that bristlecone time isn't Coordinated Universal Time and is variable rather than constant.
Up next, we get to meet the horologists, who are the people who fabricated the clock and helped design it.
I recognized that the idea that he wanted to convey would be impossible to do mechanically, completely mechanically. So I had to come up with a way of conveying variable time in a format that would be recognizable as time. My name is Phil Abernethy. I'm a sculptural horologist, which is basically a fancy scientific name for a clockmaker.
This is probably the most complex and involved project, certainly the most long-term project that I've been involved in. It's been through a lot of iterations. I proposed that we have two clocks, one which was actually showing the standard time that we all use, and then mirrored the same assembly which would show variable time.
You.
This idea that we can impose our own time on nature, on the planet, on creation of living things. We don't have that ability. We are not separate from time. In fact, our experience of time or the way that we catalog time is our own creation.
Time does not really exist. Time unfolds in its own place in the world. A daisy opens and closes its eye at the beginning and end of each day, greets the sun, and that is the time cycle of a flower.
And this next clip gets into the science and dendrochronology behind the calibration of the clock. The clock in Reno is guided by data we receive from tree cores. With these cores, we have a base understanding of the bristlecone grove's patterns of growth.
What we're going to do is core at approximately chest height. We're going to try to core through the center of one of the stems. Should give us an approximation of the age of the tree.
So I'm going to slip under the core, go all the way to the end, get the core secure, break it loose.
So you have the bark, you have the cambium, which is the live tissue directly under the bark, and then you have the sapwood. And the rings are not particularly visible when you first pull the cores out on most trees.
And call it good. We never collect just one core from a site. We always try and have as many cores as we can. And this is to resolve some of the complications that can happen with ring widths where, in particularly harsh conditions, we can have times where not every tree at a location will even put on a ring in a given year.
We all know that one guy who wears shorts no matter what the weather. And so that guy is responding to climate very differently than everybody else. And so that tree doesn't care how cold it gets, whereas the other trees might not grow because it's too cold for them. And so this is one of the advantages of collecting so many of these samples.
In subsequent years, we'll return to the mountain to retrieve microcores that will be used to adjust the rate of bristlecone time on the museum's clock. The clock will register the trees' experience of time.
So in that last clip, you saw Adam Csank. I'm happy to say we have Adam here this evening in three-dimensional space, and he's our next speaker. Adam is a paleoclimatologist at the University of Reno, and he just got back from the mountain two weeks ago, so that's exciting. And he's here to explain how the expeditions required to calibrate Centuries of the Bristlecone can become an opportunity to design other long-term studies based on bristlecone growth data. Please welcome Adam.
Yes, thank you all for having me out here. And also I do want to thank both Scotty and Colin for, through the calibration exercise with the clock, getting me involved in this project. Scotty's been trying to get me involved for 10 years now, but this finally was the kicker.
And so I thought I would maybe start off by giving you a little bit of a background of what it means to be a paleoclimatologist and dendrochronologist, and why that gives me a unique perspective on thinking about long-term questions we can ask of the bristlecone at the site.
So I work a lot on tree ring data throughout the western United States. What I do is I'll go out to the mountains. I'll take tree cores from trees, and I will use this data to use the ring widths in the trees to tell us something about reconstructions of past climates. Now sometimes this means I'm working on the last 100, 200 years, sometimes on thousands of years. But then sometimes I also go up to the Canadian High Arctic, where I spend a lot of time working on mummified forests that died three to four million years ago, which can tell us about how ecosystems existed during time periods that were warmer than they are today, or at least about as warm as where we're heading.
And this is the value of paleoclimate data, really. It is that to anticipate future changes, we need to understand how and why climates varied in the past and what sorts of ecosystems both thrived but also did not thrive under those conditions.
How this also comes into context is we can't go by without seeing news stories like these about megadrought in the West, or whether climate change could push megadrought to 99% in the American Southwest, or if not megadrought, maybe
Megafloods, who knows? And my own personal favorite: will the U.S. megadrought ever end? Which was a question asked recently, which I would argue, if it doesn't end, is it a drought or is it just climate change?
This is the value of paleoenvironmental data. It gives us this example of conditions that we have never before experienced. So what is the worst-case scenario? As Rajagopalan of University of Colorado likes to say, there's nothing magical about the last hundred years. The tree ring record shows us that droughts lasting decades have routinely gripped western North America. And we can see graphs like this time series that go back, which include some of the data from bristlecone pine from the White Mountains of California, that show that we've had worse droughts than we've ever experienced. And so maybe we should worry about those.
Now tree rings do this because they are a proxy. Now a proxy does not record climate directly, but it records climate as a response to climate. This means that we need data against which we can calibrate that proxy to understand what it tells us.
Trees operate based on what we call the law of the minimum, which is that growth is controlled by the scarcest resource, not the total amount of resources available. So what this means with tree ring data, it means that if you go to low elevations in the southwestern United States, say Methuselah Walk in the White Mountains, if anyone's been there, those bristlecone pine are responding to water. So these are precipitation-sensitive trees. They're the ones that get to that drought record that I showed you.
However, if we go up to 11,400 feet up at the top of Mount Washington, those trees are at high elevations. They are limited by the length of the growing season, which is controlled by summer temperatures. And so these trees provide a record of temperature. That's how we get those records of global temperatures that are the Northern Hemisphere temperature record.
So if I show you a time series of the bristlecone pine tree rings from Mount Washington, this is a signal of temperature at high elevations. And you can see the rapid acceleration of growth that has happened since about the 1980s. That is the signal of climate change right there at those high elevations. And in fact, Matt Salzer, who spent lots of time working on bristlecone, has written that the growth surge has occurred only in a very limited elevational band within about 150 meters of upper treeline, regardless of tree elevation. And in fact, if you look at these cores that I took at Centuries of the Bristlecone, perhaps you can see that acceleration of growth.
And so this brings me to the first of my many long questions for what we can ask at the Bristlecone Preserve. And that is, when will this growth acceleration stop? If we continue warming climate, there will arrive a point where temperatures will no longer be beneficial to those trees and they will start to become impacted by water instead. That might become more limiting. If we are watching those trees, we can see when that point happens, and it will be very interesting to observe.
And so this is the sorts of questions that we can start to ask. In fact, I asked this question of a room of scientists recently: what sorts of scientific studies can we start now where the results may not be apparent for 10, 20 or 100 years? And do you know what the common theme of every single answer those scientists gave was? It was monitoring. It was the sort of work that Anne presented earlier in this evening. And if we are doing that, it provides us the opportunity to ask all sorts of incredibly interesting questions about these bristlecone.
We can, for example—have you ever seen 24/7, 365 monitoring data of Pinus longaeva, or bristlecone pine? This is courtesy of Scotty Strachan. I doubt very many people in this room have. However, we have it at NevCAN. And the really interesting thing of having this data at this resolution of these trees is it gets us at this question about how are these trees responding to climate? How are they doing? Essentially, the data provides us a Rosetta Stone that allows us to understand and read the stories that the trees are telling us. If we don't have that data, how do we get from a tree ring width to a temperature reconstruction?
How do we understand how bristlecone pines are going to be dealing with the longest unrepeatable experiment that we have been doing in the history of our planet called climate change? It could be thousands of years before we really know how human-caused global warming has affected these trees. Bristlecone have dealt with climates that are on par with what we're experiencing today over the course of their 10,000-year history or longer.
However, how will they deal with the fact that we are changing climate more rapidly than at any point in their history? How will they deal with temperatures that may exceed the range of where bristlecone have been happy? They may move somewhere else and they may be fine in other places, but if we aren't looking for those places, we won't know where they're going to do. But we can start studying them now.
We can set up networks like we have at Mount Washington. We can observe those trees. We can check how they're doing. We can understand how they're responding to climate today to help us understand how they will respond in the future and how they have responded in the past.
We can liken this network to the cherry blossom network that Japanese monks have been monitoring for 1,200 years. The monks, I guarantee, did not know that this would become an incredibly valuable record for understanding climate change today back in 812 when they first started writing down when those cherries started peaking. We don't know whether the record we have at NevCAN will be incredibly valuable a thousand years from now, but it might be. And if we're not watching, we won't know.
What else can we do with the data up there? Well, it can afford access to all sorts of other questions. Craig took this amazing picture up there a couple weeks ago of the aurora with the bristlecone. And so I've actually been working with a group at Northern Arizona University who are trying to understand what we call the Miyake events, which are where tree rings, by measuring the radiocarbon in the tree rings, we can see solar flares and we can start to understand how big these solar flares are that have happened in the past.
Are we heading towards a Carrington event that could disable all our Starlink satellites that we rely on so much? We don't know. But if we're not using the tree rings today and understanding how they store and sequester carbon and taking advantage of the NevCAN network, we won't know how to relate the magnitude of the event we see in 977 to what is happening today. And so this is a really interesting new study that is only possible because we have NevCAN up there.
What about the 10-minute data? You think, can we go from 10 minutes to a thousand years? Well, there's instantaneous events that are really valuable to understand in the tree ring. So this is a picture of a frost ring, and a frost ring occurs if you have a cold snap during the growing season. So once bristlecone pines start growing, it freezes—the water in their cambium freezes and expands, and that causes scar tissue in the tree. And having 10-minute data can let us understand when those frost events happened and how did they manifest. And this could help us interpret frost rings that have happened in the past, which often are related to large-scale volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo.
As sad as it would be, let's say the bristlecone pine site burned down. Well, then all of a sudden we have an opportunity to study how bristlecone pine recover postfire. So there is even an opportunity in something that we may perceive to be a detrimental event to ask these long-term questions. But again, if we're not there watching, we can't necessarily answer these questions.
And so these are just a selection of ideas that I randomly had whilst putting together this talk to think about what we can do for the future. And so I just want you guys to have an appreciation for how unique and valuable an opportunity having NevCAN colocated with these long-lived trees is to answering really interesting questions about our past and future climates. So thank you.
We're going to close out the programming with the last four minutes of Elders of Time. So please enjoy.
Thinking about the future and thinking about the past, they're really two sides of the same coin. If those people in the past were thinking about how people in the future were going to engage with these things, what kind of intentions would they have had? We don't really know. But we do know that our intentions now are that we are building things for the future. And if we have more people thinking about that, maybe that'll help govern our actions so that we are able to empathize with people that don't exist yet.
Gives me hope. It's hopeful that we are making something that we do intend to be engaged with in not just a small way but in a big way, that we hope people will calibrate their lives around, in a sense. Right now it definitely does not seem like people are making things to last 3,000 years, but it's an incredible privilege to be a part of a project that is thinking that way. That we are building something that we believe will last that long and that people in the future will hopefully, and even people now, be inspired to take on challenges like that and take on more projects that are about deep time.
So I just subtract actually one.
This is true expertise acquired in just a few days, and it's going to be around for a long time to come. I am so impressed and so grateful.
Where we are right now is at the beginning of a thought experiment that is an intergenerational thought experiment. There's a 5,000-year span specified for everything that we have put in the ground, but that's only what we've put in the ground. Much more could happen and much more will happen.
We are always on the quest to make time more precise. But that precision is not necessarily accurate because what it leads to is this sense that the entire world can be controlled. What needs to happen if we are to get past the Anthropocene is that we need to rediscover the relationality between us as humans and all other life forms.
Thank you. We're going to do some questions. If y'all would like to come on stage. Any questions from the audience? All right, got one over there.
Now, in the bristle clock, was there any collaboration, brainstorming, engineering that went on between those two teams?
So I was very much aware of the Clock of the Long Now for a long time and found it to be really exciting as a concept. And when I gave a talk here in 2015, it was very much for me this excitement of being able to come into this room where some of the prototypes are to be found and to connect in terms of my own practice, which is often looking into deep time, to connect that with that clock. So, for instance, I've created cameras that have an exposure time of a hundred or even a thousand years. And so that's why I was invited to speak here.
But I had an idea going way back of a calendar calibrated by the growth of trees, by the growth of redwood trees at the outset. And learning about the bristlecones, I came to realize that they were actually ideal to work with. And so I started to talk about this as if it were inevitable, using Scotty Strachan's images from the mountain and effectively turning the talk that was supposed to be about the things that I'd done into a pitch for something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to last over the next 5,000 years.
And through and through, the Clock of the Long Now has been very much on my mind as a clock that is telling another story that is not strictly parallel nor strictly perpendicular. That is to say that the Clock of the Long Now is this remarkable clock that is attempting to bring precision in timekeeping into the world over a period of 10,000 years. I'm trying to do everything I can to obliterate that precision as a matter of having every beat the same as every other by, as I said up here earlier, looking at accuracy and saying that accuracy and precision are not one and the same, as anyone who's read the dictionary will tell you, but saying that they're not one and the same and that what I think we need to be looking at in addition to that is looking to accuracy where that accuracy might be accurate to some other standard.
And I think that it's really important to be looking to these other life forms and living systems and using that as a basis to observe the world and to calibrate our actions. So in a sense the two clocks are speaking against each other, but they can only do so by virtue of both speaking. And I think that it is this extraordinary situation that I find myself in of another clock looking out over 10,000 years that provides the context that I didn't have, that I've come to recognize really is essential in terms of understanding the clock that I've been working on. And ideally, it also works in the other way toward understanding what the Clock of the Long Now might mean to us today in 10,000 years.
Thanks, Jonathon. Yeah, that was the moment where I think the clock really clicked for me, is when you're like, "No, the bristlecone clock is just as accurate as this other clock." And I was like, "Oh, go with Brian over here."
Okay, the question is, what have we learned from the bristlecones?
Well, what's really been interesting in the tree ring community about bristlecone is we have learned things about how this line of the elevation that shifts between water-sensitive to temperature-sensitive is actually a very, very narrow band. It shifts very quickly. It can be, that line can be 50 meters, and so you can see that a small temperature change can move that line up by 50 meters and then all of a sudden those trees change. So even at the scale of that site you could walk down 50 meters and you could go from trees that are responding to temperature to trees that are responding to water that quickly.
And so that's one of the reasons it also makes bristlecone a little bit complicated for doing long-term tree ring studies. So this is why there's not very many dendrochronologists that will be like, "The bristlecone pine are 10,000 years. Therefore we have a 10,000-year record of water resources in California." There's two problems with that. One is that this elevation line changes very rapidly, especially at the time scales that bristlecone live at.
But then the other thing that can happen is in paleoclimatology we have a dirty little secret we call stationarity. And what that means is that we assume that the way that trees are responding to climate today is the way they always have responded to climate. And that's not necessarily true, right? Especially at the time scale of a bristlecone. And that's where there is a lot of ongoing work actively going on right now to resolve that because we all want bristlecone to be a really good climate record because we want a 10,000-year record of climate because we want to try and understand these things. And so these are some of the things we've learned.
We've also learned that they're a little bit more resilient to climate than we maybe previously thought. There was a paper that got a lot of news a couple years ago about how limber pine are going to race bristlecone to the top. Turns out when we did more studies of more places with bristlecone, it was only in that one place in that one unique situation that limber pine might race bristlecone. There's other places where bristlecone are doing way better than limber pine. And so we are learning that the species is actually quite resilient to climate change, and so that's a positive. So those are some of the things we've learned. I don't know if anyone else wants to—I know Scotty probably has some points that he would love to say, but...
Anne's talking about measuring plant-available water, and we're monitoring the greenness and sap flow and other things associated with bristlecone on the site, and one of the things we were able to
Measure directly on the site was that, in fact, during the deepest drought years the last decade, the bristlecone outperformed the limber pine and the Engelmann spruce on the site in terms of picking up water faster and also, we'll call it, not going into cellular cavitation as quickly, and also taking advantage of water more quickly to do with a summertime monsoon. So that equals that direct minute-by-minute measurement of the resilience in a process that is very difficult to do unless you're out there with a notebook all the time, which fortunately now we've got electronics that can handle that for us.
All right, thank you, Scotty. We have time for one more question. All right, we'll go right here.
Wonderful. So the question is: what are the potential unintended uses of the technologies you've been developing to monitor the bristlecones?
In the observational monitoring community, there's a lot of some of the work that I've been doing trying to better understand snowpack temperature. We know certain measurement principles, like infrared temperature. This is used on satellites, but sometimes these things are opaque to water, so it can't be seen through, and we learn from those technologies. And then from that, for the example of some of the instrumentation I've been working with, it's not necessarily trying to develop an entirely new technology, but trying to find those technologies and find ways that we can adapt them to answer a new question. Can we modify the way that we've been doing it? Can we narrow in on the window that we're looking at?
But it takes the experience of being out there, being able to have these ideas. One, there's just the field truck time and the windshield time where you have the opportunities for ideas to come to you, right? It's the same way you get ideas when you're in the shower. Sometimes having that space and then just being out there and observing can allow those ideas to cross. But it's also the experience of being up on the mountain.
Because of my observational monitoring background and coming into a more academic realm, there's a lot of excitement about putting out instrumentation, and I'm always someone that's pumping the brakes because you do not understand how difficult the elements are on some of the instrumentation, and then you put that into a snowpack. In the Sierra Nevada, we've had snowpacks that have ripped chain-link fences. So trying to measure anything in a snowpack can be really destructive. And the same thing goes for the Snake Range, right? There's persistent snowpacks there as well.
So having that experience, and this is what I was trying to say, the mountain can teach us a lot about ways that we could probably shift the way that we have been doing the monitoring to do it in a more robust way. But it's also what we need by getting more diverse minds and interdisciplinary work into the room. Because I can't tell you how many research presentations I've been to, or in rooms talking about things, and they say something and all of a sudden a light bulb goes off. I'm like, "Oh, well, if you're doing that for that, I might be able to do that for this other thing that we haven't been able to observe." And so it happens in a really organic way.
And this is where so much of the work—we're doing this hardcore science, but it's really people and processes are the things that make it happen. We need to get the people together in the room to share ideas, not being afraid of asking questions and, "What do you think about this or that?" Because you never know when that light bulb's going to go off, the same way that we never know when that sensor is going to collect the thing that we now needed to observe, and we just need to be there watching.
So we're constantly trying to get—and this is where it's a cool opportunity to be in a room with you all, because I feel like it's a really good opportunity to have different kinds of minds and backgrounds. Because as Adam was talking about, there's a lot of hard work to be done, and we want that 10,000-year record, but that's the work. That's the challenge that we're up against, and no single person's going to do it on their own.
Thank you so much. Can I get a round of applause?
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