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.
“It was when the trees were leafless first in November
And their blackness became apparent, that one first
Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)