Drunken trees, tilted trees, or a drunken forest, is a stand of trees displaced from their normal vertical alignment.
This most commonly occurs in northern subarctic taiga forests of Black Spruce (Picea mariana) under which discontinuous permafrost or ice wedges have melted, causing trees to tilt at various angles.
Tilted trees may also be caused by frost heaving, and subsequent palsa development, hummocks, earthflows, forested active rock glaciers, landslides, or earthquakes. In stands of spruce trees of equal age that germinated in the permafrost active layer after a fire, tilting begins when the trees are 50 to 100 years old, suggesting that surface heaving from new permafrost aggradation can also create drunken forests.
Read more about Drunken Trees: Permafrost, Relationship To Climate Change, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words drunken and/or trees:
“Chant lessons and your family will prosper; drunken ditties will lead you to ruin.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)