You can tell the age of a tree by counting its rings, but these records of trees' life really say a lot more. Scientists are using tree rings to learn what's being happening on the sun's surface for the last ten thousand years. Each ring represents a year of growth. As the tree grows, it adds a layer to its trunk taking up chemical elements from the air. By looking up the elements in the rings for a given year, scientists can tell what elements were in the air that year. Doctors Stevenson is analysing one element——carbon-14 in ring from both living and dead trees. Some of the rings go back almost ten thousand years to the end of the Ice Age. When Stevenson followed the carbon-14 trail back in time, he found carbon-4 levels change with the intensity of solar burning. You see, the sun has cycles. Sometimes it burns fiercely and other times it's relatively calm. During the sun's violent periods, it throws off charged particles in fast moving strings called solar winds. The particles interfere with the formation of carbon-14 on earth. When there's more solar wind activity- less carbon-14 is produced. Ten thousand years of tree rings show that the carbon-14 level rises and falls about every 420 years. The scientists concluded that the solar wind activity must follow the same cycle.