Relationship To Climate Change
Drunken trees are not a completely new phenomenon—dendrochronological evidence can date thermokarst tilting back to at least the 19th century. The southern extent of the subarctic permafrost reached a peak during the Little Ice Age of the 16th and 17th centuries, and has been in decline since then.
Permafrost is typically in disequilibrium with climate, and much of the permafrost that remains is in a relict state. However the rate of thawing has been increasing, and a great deal of the remaining permafrost is expected to thaw during the 21st century.
Al Gore cited drunken trees caused by melting permafrost in Alaska as evidence of global warming, as part of his presentation in the 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth; but global warming skeptic Marlo Lewis, senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, claims that, "drunken trees may partly be a consequence of the PDO shift," referring to the 1976 switch to the warm phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation.
Similar warming leading to permafrost thawing in neighboring Siberia has been attributed to a combination of anthropogenic climate change, a cyclical atmospheric phenomenon known as the Arctic oscillation, and feedbacks due to albedo changes after melting ice exposes bare ground and ocean which absorb, rather than reflect, solar radiation.
Read more about this topic: Drunken Trees
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