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Celebrating New Life

On Earth Day 2015, members of the Woods Hole and WHOI communities gathered to celebrate the life of one of the much-loved copper beech trees that stood for 150 years along Challenger Drive on the Institution’s Village Campus. Despite efforts to save it, the tree was rapidly declining and had to be removed for safety reasons. On July 23, 2015, a group of volunteers planted a new beech tree in its place. Wood from the old tree lives on in various ways, including at the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility (NOSAMS) which is measuring the variation of radiocarbon in the tree over its lifetime.(Photo by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)