Strange trees

Mr. thalarctos and I drove around the Olympic Peninsula last weekend with Geobuddy--not the GeoBuddy GPS system that comes up when you google the term, but more of a Flat Stanley project for his young cousin back East.



We stopped at Kalaloch on the western Washington coast--here's the map, with the green arrow showing where we stopped:



I've never paid much attention to trees before, but hanging out at Pharyngula and Creek Running North has made me much more aware lately of the diversity and beauty of non-mammalian forms. So the trees registered in a way they never had before. It was just before sunset, so the light made their forms really stand out; the effect reminded me of a Maurice Sendak story.



You can see it a little bit in the long shot, but when you get closer, you can really see some strange shapes on the tree well:









I remember observing to Mr. thalarctos that it looked as if the trees had tumors. Sure enough, when I got home, I googled tree tumor, and got a ton of references. This old picture, from the year I was released :) (1958), shows a heavily-affected tree.



From: White PR. A Tree Tumor of Unknown Origin. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1958 Apr;44(4):339-44.

To my untrained and mammal-centric eye, this looked very much like the trees at Kalaloch. But I also came across references to tree galls, which seem to be a reaction to insects, and burls, which I am not sure about. And the article the picture came from seems to use "tumor" as a superset of "gall", while other sources seem to distinguish them from another.

All in all, a delightful puzzle to figure out over the next couple of weeks. And if anyone has any insights or clarification into what is going on with these trees, and with tree neoplasms in general, I'd be very interested in hearing about it.

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Strata

Before my conference in Cincinnati, I visited my in-laws in Kentucky, and they drove me around to show me the state. I used to "commute" back and forth on I-65 between Birmingham, AL and Bloomington, IN, but Kentucky is such a convergence of landscapes that that experience didn't give me any inkling of what the center of the state looks like.

Much of the drive to and from Lexington goes through rock like this (not too shabby for shooting out the back seat of a moving car, is it? :) :



So I totally get the horizontal lines--that's the layers of rock that the glaciers deposited in sequence as they expanded and receded. Those horizontal layers tend to be a lot more regular than I would have thought; it's amazing how straight they can be.

It's the vertical lines that mystified me, until Dad explained. Those are the holes left by the drill bits as the builders were cutting through the hills to put in the freeway. They'd drill down at regular intervals, pack the holes full of explosives, and BOOM! I would have expected a wholesale, uncontrolled explosion, followed by a big unholy mess to clean up, but Dad explained that this technique caused the rock to shear off in vertical layers--a relatively neat and controlled process.

The explanation makes sense, certainly lots more than the vertical glaciers I was trying to imagine putting down those lines.

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