Steve Voelker

I don't know of that restaurant but any location in the bootheel of MO reminds me of 1) The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12, 2) how they locally pronounce Madrid emphasizing the first syllable, and 3) the only place in MO to find disjunct beech and eastern holly trees.

I really thought ice cover would have had a substantial effect on evaporation from Lake Superior in winter. It would have some effect from first principles but apparently it is small.

Here is a pic of steam fog evaporating from open water but impeded by ice during very cold winter conditions.

I often take it for granted but here at MTU we live in a wild place and I love it.

Here is a bobcat from our kitchen window from last January (in town, 5-6 blocks from campus).

This is a <1 year old cat born in spring of 2024. We started seeing its mother in the fall/winter of 2023/2024.
.

Yes, there are conifers in Greenland! 🌲

500 yr-long Juniperus tree ring-based temperature reconstruction with oldest living shrub 367 yo! 💪

Striking here: 1/3 of corpus is from archive (collected end of 19th c)
Highlights importance of reanalysing old samples using modern analytical techniques! 👏

DOGE may have been an utter failure — but it did inspire retired forest-service workers to try and fill the vacuum of the agency it gutted.

Page One, WaPo:

Eye of the storm, which has now shifted eastward so north winds should be hitting those stations now.

Yes, there are thousands of years of this scenario possibly playing out. It does not speak to the knowledge of the people, but of the people to tolerate experimentation -- which is really cool.

A red oak canoe would last minutes to hours.

I used to do presentations to hundreds of 1st-3rd graders each year featuring red vs white oak permeability.

Little kids were screaming and laughing while blowing bubbles out of 4-inch pieces of red oak. Not remotely possible in white oak.

Join the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona for our 2026 Dendrochronology Intensive Summer Course (DISC)! Spend 3 great weeks (May 18th to June 5, 2026) in the field, lab, and classroom learning first-hand how tree-ring research is done! ltrr.arizona.edu/summerschool

Now this is the way to start winter -- 14-27" of snow predicted by Thanksgiving in Houghton!

The resin on hardwood to be impermeable is also a possibility but seemed unlikely because if they had resin (from white/red pine in this area) they would have just made the dugout out of white pine.

If red oak was chosen over white oak, it could be that is often a bigger tree with fewer branches -- and perhaps because it was more likely to form large vertical fire scars conducive to dugout formation. It could have been rubbed with rendered fat to plug up the xylem.

The canoes are 14C-dated. I have been in contact with some of these researchers and have the dates. The scenario you describe could have occurred.

It seems possible that some people making a dugout canoe did not know about white vs red oak species differences in wood properties and that those red oak canoes were just more likely to sink fully intact and thereby more likely to be found hundreds to thousands of years later.

Beyond that, this injury formation would need to be completed without local cambial dieback around the edge of the tree ) so it could keep growing.

It is just impossible from my estimation and alternative hypotheses should be explored. The one that is right there is survivorship bias.

To induce tyloses formation you would have to injure a tree so severely that drought stress was caused throughout the sapwood without killing the tree.

Then, the tree would need to keep growing and this would need to be repeated every ~5 years or so for 10-50 years to get enough wood for a dugout.

Red oaks can and do form tyloses, but they only do so in the sapwood (the living outer portion of the tree) and only under severe hydraulic stress.

This often happens after red oak trees are cut down and before they are cut up for wood.

However, oak sapwood is narrow, usually < 1 inch wide...

Red oak canoes are surprising because these species have huge vessels that conduct water really well when alive and when MOST of the wood is dead.

White oaks are similar but plug up ALL their vessels with tyloses.

This is why white oaks are used for barrels for wine, whisky, etc but not red oak...

The paleo wood biologist niche is small so maybe I should elaborate.

First, finding 15 dugout canoes in a single lake boggles my mind. That is amazing and does not need another hook/lede.

Second, it IS initially surprising that a substantial portion of these are from the red oak group.

Time to get your public comments in on the proposed Waters of the U.S. rule that would strip protections for countless wetlands and streams.

Trout unlimited has a tool on their page that will automatically send your message to the EPA as well as your representatives:

www.tu.org/conservation...

Fig. 1 Lignin accumulation in cell walls differentially covers the surface of polysaccharides and fills in the cell wall void spaces to dynamically adjust cell wall hygroscopic and mechanical properties.

#TansleyReview: Physiological roles of #lignins – tuning cell wall hygroscopy and #biomechanics

Pesquet, Cesarino, Kajita & Pawlowski
👇

📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#LatestIssue

I find this incredibly unlikely.

I cannot imagine a way red oaks could be injured up and down the length of the tree to induce extensive tyloses formation over years to decades without also inducing extensive decay.

www.jsonline.com/story/news/l...

Also the pungent conifer yet very sweet aroma of Doug-fir being reduced from trees to lumber and chips in the PNW.

I have been meaning to get down there. I have areas mapped out from General Land Office surveys and modern satellite imagery that I think will have the most red pine stumps. White pine stumps are more abundant in most cases but are always too decayed, which does not help us understand fire history.

This is in Michigan. Hiawatha National Forest, old dune sequence between Lake Superior and Au Train Lake.

A person in an insulated jean jacket and full safety gear using a chainsaw to cut through an old red pine stump in a conifer forest setting.

The same person, now wearing a large backpack filled with wood cross-sections using a chainsaw to cut a red pine stump in an open old dune red and white pine forest.

New grad student collecting her first fire scar data along the shore of Lake Superior today.

Really big (old growth) white pine in a cutover landscape matrix. The loggers missed this one hiding in a hemlock and white cedar grove.

Same big white pine but from a different angle and with a blaze orange cap for scale.

Huge old yellow birch with a younger hemlock neighbor (they don't talk to each other).

An old strip-bark white cedar. Less than half of the circumference of this tree has living cambium. Most of the big white cedars were logged off in this stand ~120 years ago, their hollow stumps are still abundant. This one was apparently too hollow to be cut down then.

Second annual I didn't see any deer while hunting in the UP, so I will post pictures of cool stuff from when I got bored and started hiking through the woods.

No worries, I ended up being too busy today.

Apart from a bit of silliness I was out scouting for red pine dendro fire history sites along the shore of Lake Superior.

And I was doing it wearing my late father's "shooting glasses" that I came across this past week.

Scruffy middle aged man with a blue and green plaid shirt and pink glasses laying on a bed of reindeer lichen wintergreen and lowbush blueberries.

Some people think I have a cushy job.

And this afternoon, they would have been right.