Solved cryptogram
The rings in a trunk hold a year by year account of the weather the tree lived through.
Biology Facts, sourced to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 69 letters over 20 different ones, graded medium.
Or go to the puzzle’s own page first.
What it means
A ring is one growing season, and its width depends on how good that season was for growth, so a good year is a broad ring and a drought is a narrow one. Because the pattern of good and bad years is shared across a region, rings from a living tree can be matched to rings from an older dead one, and that one to a beam in an old building, chaining the sequence back thousands of years further than any thermometer reaches.
The claim comes from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
- SourceNOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
- CollectionBiology Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length69 letters, 20 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
- NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cellmedium, 69 letters
- NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cellmedium, 71 letters
- NCBI Bookshelf: The Cellmedium, 68 letters
- U.S. National Park Servicemedium, 71 letters
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.
- National Human Genome Research Institutemedium, 74 letters
- MedlinePlusmedium, 68 letters
- NIDCDmedium, 68 letters
- NCBI Bookshelfmedium, 79 letters