Floating Trees

A tree in the forest near my home

Years ago I read C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy since I had enjoyed his The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe series as a kid. The Space Trilogy books were too weird for me and I can’t remember if I finished all three. What does stick in my memory is one of the settings (on Venus I think, but I could be wrong). The main character ran across surreal floating islands coated in trees and surrounded by water. The movie ‘Avatar’ also brought us tree covered floating islands (this time floating in the air due to a ‘flux vortex’), but the strangest trees I’ve come across are floating on glaciers and they’re real.

A while back, I went to a talk by Hig about his trek with his wife, toddler and baby across Malaspina Glacier (find their blog here). They lived in the wild for two months. Clearly they are somewhat crazy - in a fantastic way, I wish more people took their kids into nature that way. From the video and photos clearly the kids had an awesome time.

Malaspina Glacier sits by the ocean on the southern reaches of Alaska reaching 600m thick in places and covering an area of 3,900 square km. Like many glaciers, this one is shrinking however the most striking feature to my mind is that in places trees grow on it. Trees growing on top of ice - how fabulous is that! Even assuming there is some sort of soil layer buffering the roots from the ice.

Are there other glaciers out there with trees growing on them?

A sappy story

Last weekend we took a jar of used turpentine to our recycling center to be disposed of. The jar's lid wasn't on perfectly, the jar tipped as I drove around a curve, and a tiny splash of turpentine spilled, filling the car with a sent reminiscent of a pile of fir branches. The smell took me back to when I was a kid exploring the forest. Fir trees are sappy – a fact I learned early while climbing them. The fir trunk has sap blisters that burst under my hands when I grabbed the branches. The sap left sticky residue on my hands, so climbing a fir tree quickly became a inferior choice compared to the maples and alders. But, something about the sap intrigued me, so I would collect it by lancing the blisters with my pocket knife and capturing the drips in a large clam shell. When I had enough, I would light the sap to see the black smoke (probably not the smartest of ideas).

The smell of turpentine started me wondering if it's made from fir sap. It didn't take much digging to learn that what I'm calling sap is actually resin, a hydrocarbon secreted by predominantly coniferous trees and a few other plants (both the biblical frankincense and myrrh are resins). Resin is also known as pitch and it has some neat properties. It behaves as a solid normally, but if a force is imposed on it long enough the deformation will increase indefinitely, just like a liquid. Cool, but how does it become turpentine?

Resin is converted to turpentine by distillation, a process where the parts of a liquid are separated using heat – for example if you want to make a fortified wine like brandy, you would need to heat the wine and collect the alcohol as it evaporated away. Generally, turpentine is made from pine trees, but it's also a byproduct from reducing coniferous trees to pulp.

Turpentine is commonly used as a solvent; we use it for cleaning brushes coated in oil paints. It could also be used to thin out oil paints.

As a tangent, I pulled out an old country skills handbook to see what they suggested one could do with turpentine. Apparently, it was used as an ingredient in mosquito repellent along with some other nasty stuff – I was relieved to see that this concoction was to be used by saturating cloth with it and placing it by the door instead of putting in on your skin.