Drunken
trees are a stand of trees displaced from their normal vertical alignment. This
most commonly occurs in northern subarctic taiga forests of black spruce under
which intermittent permafrost or ice wedges have melted, causing trees to tilt
at various angles. Some trees survive their soil eroding and continue to grow.
Others collapse or drown as the subterranean ice melts. As they are staggered
across the landscape, people often refer to them as 'drunken trees.'
Drunken Trees are also called, tilted trees, or
a drunken forest may also be caused by frost heaving, and subsequent palsa
development, hummocks, earth flows, 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. They tilting begin when the trees are 50
to 100 years old, suggesting that surface heaving from new permafrost
aggradation can also create drunken forests.
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