Alanna Mitchell
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About 42,000 years ago, Earth was beset with oddness. Its magnetic field collapsed. Ice sheets surged across North America, Australasia and the Andes. Wind belts shifted across the Pacific and Antarctic oceans. Prolonged drought hit Australia; that continentâs biggest mammals went extinct. Humans took to caves to make ochre-colour art. Neanderthals died off for good.
Through it all, one giant kauri tree stood tall â until, after nearly two millenniums, it died and fell in a swamp, where the chemical records embedded in its flesh were immaculately preserved.
That tree, unearthed a few years ago near Ngawha Springs in northern New Zealand, finally allowed researchers to fit a tight timeline to what before had seemed like an intriguing but only vaguely correlated series of events.