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:
““The city’s grotesque iron skeletons
Would knock their drunken penthouse heads together
And cake their concrete dirt off in the streets.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)