Diving Right In

Swimmers hit the water in their own styles early Saturday morning at the Provost swimming pool. The Piranhas Swim club hosted the annual event in town and had Forestburg, Wainwright, Killam, Castor, and Lacombe compete with them on July 17. Results and more pictures in this week's paper. ©Provost News Photo. Want to Subscribe to The Provost News? Click here.

Drought Detective Studies Tree Rings, Pollen Samples
A paleoenvironmentalist from the Provincial Museum of Alberta was in Provost on Friday night explaining her extensive drought studies and findings of Alberta’s past at a variety of stages, dating back 10,000 years.

Dr. Alwynne Beaudoin was brought to the Recreation and Culture Centre on July 16 by the Bodo Archaelogical Society and was introduced by Dr. Terry Gibson, who is heading a dig at Bodo.

In her hour-long talk, Beaudoin told about 35 people that “drought is not a simple thing” and says that she looks at slices of time by examining tree rings and cores of mud samples from lake beds.

The tree rings of certain kinds of evergreens—mainly pine and spruce—allow scientists like herself to find out, by counting and measuring the width of the rings what the moisture content was at particular times.

Beaudoin and her team have been studying trees from the Porcupine Hills near Pincher Creek which show the 1990s drought was more intense than the 1920s. She noted that droughts from the 1600s and 1700s were also intense and over the last 500 years there have been droughts more severe than Alberta has recently experienced.

She and her team goes out in the winter and looks for mud from across the bottom of lakes, taking core samples. “It’s like little time capsules.” She examines pollen trapped in those samples to see how vegetation changes over the years. Other conditions in the lake are also examined in detail through a microscope.