The hardiest trees rely on physics more than on chemistry to make it through the winter. When the seasonal chill begins to reach black or white spruce, for example, the sap leaves their living cells and flows into intercellular spaces.
Paleobotanist Jack A. Wolfe of the United States Geological Survey at Menlo Park, California, has found a number of tropical rain forest fossils along the eastern Gulf of Alaska. These include several kinds of palms, Burmese lacquer trees, mangroves and trees of the type that now produce nutmeg and Macassar oil.
A swath of dead, tilted and broken trees now makes obvious the trace of the Fairweather fault that broke in July 1958 to devastate Lituya Bay and nearby parts of southeastern Alaska. Sagging or tilting of the ground along a fault trace causes trees there to tilt or even fall.
Newcomers to Alaska will frequently order young pine, fruit or maple trees from their home state in the lower 48. They enthusiastically proclaim that the trees should do well here because the temperatures in Montana, or Minnesota, or North Dakota, or wherever they're from frequently plummet as low as they do in Alaska.
Why Lower 48 Fruit Trees Don't Do Well in Alaska | Geophysical Institute
The trees have told him that giant weather systems like the Aleutian Low seem to have persisted despite human-caused warming. During winters when the Aleutian Low is strong, warmer temperatures and southerly winds create icy, stormy conditions that increase the likelihood of trees being damaged.
In an earlier column , I asked if any readers could explain why the grain in trees seemed to spiral up the trunk-in a clockwise direction. That is, spiral marks in old trees crack open from the upper right to lower left around the trunk. Professor (now Emeritus) Neil Davis, the originator of this column, posed the same question in this column over ten years ago, and it's time for an update. I ...
Trees release an incredible amount of pollen to improve the odds of finding a female flower. One birch catkin (the cluster of tiny flowers that looks like a caterpillar) can release millions of pollen grains.