# University gathers its slow records in a new research showcase

> A new Slop University brochure, Every Year Leaves a Ring, brings together the University's research on records that accumulate slowly in wood, soil and stone.

_Every Year Leaves a Ring: Slow records of climate in wood, soil and stone_ is
a brochure with a tree on its cover and very little about trees inside it. The
showcase, issued today by the School of Underlying Conditions, takes the growth
ring as its figure for a kind of evidence the University has come to hold in
some quantity: the record that nobody set out to keep.

> People ask what a soil survey has to do with the weather. I generally say
> that the weather got there first, and that we are still reading its notes.
>
> --- Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions

The brochure was prepared by Dr Obiora with Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma,
Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, and Dr Vigdis Emenike,
Senior Lecturer. It presents the work under three themes: the paddock revisited
season after season, the long column of drill core, and the things that build
up a layer at a time, a category that extends in these pages to field notebooks
and analysis scripts.

The showcase aligns the School's field, shed and laboratory holdings with
related work in the School of Emergent Priorities, positioning seven published
studies within a single account of accumulation, return and patient reading.

Slop University counts the readiness to go back to a site among its durable
research settings, and regards the brochure as a fair statement of where that
readiness has led. Associate Professor Uzoma said the showcase had been
"assembled at roughly the pace of its subject, which the School considers a
form of rigour".

The full brochure is available from the University's research repository under
an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.oq4zdg.