Joseph P Hupy - UWEC Geography Department

Research Interests Photo Gallery

Is there a loss of friction up here?

Moving away from the environment and war stuff, I decided to look at how other human impacts may influence the landscape. Here I am trying to get a wind reading atop a large black spruce in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This area used to contain a dense forest cover, but then a small road was bulldozed in back in 1988, and the trees have been tipping ever since. My theory is that the shallow soils don’t allow deep rooting and the road decreased the friction enough so the exposed trees started tipping, and the positive feedback mechanism keeps this process going.