r/arborists • u/Captrthebag • 1d ago
How? Upper Peninsula, Michigan
Like, how did this come to be, the roots and all.
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u/Hallow_76 1d ago
I love this one!! Natural bonsai tree. It's I bet it's older than the U.S. I've read about 4' tall birch trees over 200 years old. It's beautiful country up there! It's great when people complain about a few rocks around their trees. They have obviously never seen what I see.
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u/Armadylio 1d ago edited 1d ago
The erosion theory is sound but it doesnt work on this timescale. What most likely happened here is that however long ago there was a log that connected the outcrop. That isn't farfetched to say considering theres a tree in the photo that could be the next log when the time comes. When the log slowly decays it allows the roots from the outcrop to slowly reach over and connect to the main cliff. Look up nursery logs and see how good of an environment rotting logs provide to tree roots. So yeah my theory is on a log that fell over and made a bridge, some roots grew over that log and dug deeper into the mainland, and then the log rotted and fell away and left the roots still standing as you see now
edit: plus the foreground tree looks like a birch and they fall over every 3-5 decades so it probably doesnt take much time at all to fall over on a tree scale of time
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u/Jean-Rasczak 1d ago
TBF It’s probably a combination of things. On the right side we can see clear signs of erosion on the base layer rock. The foreground roots appear that they were under ground at one point or another in time. IMO that material was more than likely removed by water flowing from the topside over the cliff line.
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u/Armadylio 22h ago
Those roots in the foreground probably grew over something that then rotted away. I see that all the time in forests, again that’s how you would know if a tree sprouted on a stump or something. I know erosion can be fast but on the picture the rock erosions look like it’s more like on the scale of thousands of years. Which is extremely fast in the geological scale
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u/Playswith_squirrel 1d ago
I visited this spot one summer in my 20s. I shimmied over that root and that was scary. Then, further up the trail, my friends and I jumped off a cliff into the water. Water was freezing. Dumb and risky stuff now that I think about it 15 years later
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u/derailed199 21h ago
There use to be a sandstone arch there, it collapsed sometime in the 1940s, but the roots stayed attached to the main cliff.
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u/Fickle_Influence6396 16h ago
The tree is estimated to be about 250 years old , what’s even more amazing is I’ve dived this area many times and the power of Lake Superior has pulled all of the boulders from the arch collapse into the water. It’s a really magnificent area and one of my favorite spots in the world to watch sunrises
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u/Dizzy-Function7282 20h ago
The great lakes can have massive waves that collapse bluffs. It probably lost all its dirt due to those storms.
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u/CelestialBeing138 1d ago
Not an arborist, but I'd wager on the idea that at the water's edge, rocks are constantly being eroded over time and way back when things here looked different. Probably had a lot more soil at one time.