Last spring, I was looking out my living room window and across the street were several tall pine trees. A couple of them seemed to giving off some kind of gas at the top. It was an overcast day and it was dead calm. Every 5 min. or so there would be a slight breeze and the gas seemed to disappear only to reappear when the breeze stopped. All my freinds think it was an acid flashback and I’m not sure I dissagree with them, but I’m just wondering if this has ever been documented or witnessed before. Any ideas?
It may have been natural evaporation. Often you’ll see steam like wisps rising from a lake into the colder morning air. I suppose if there was enough condensation on the needles, the same effect might occur. There’s quite a bit of surface area on the needles of a pine tree for condensate to fall on.
What time of day was it? How about the air temperature or approximate relative humidity.
Rhythmdvl’s collection of WAGs:
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Acid flashbacks. Hey, your friends know you better than I do. Besides, who knows what the long term effects are of smoking trees.
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Punk birds. Young teenage birds roosting in the tops of trees are sneaking out for a quick smoke before school.
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Forest fire. Or something like that happening beyond the tree line, making it appear to come from the trees. Have you had your depth perception checked lately? Perhaps tree-smoking does have some noticeable long-term side effects.
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Tree porn. Yep, that’s right. In your innocence you were watching the arboreal version of the ‘money shot.’ Pines, spruces, etc. are gymnosperms. Gymno = naked (told you this was porn!) and sperm = seed. Gymnosperms seeds are not wrapped up tightly in an ovary and don’t have insects do the pollination. To breed, the seeds mature inside the shaft of the pinecone, and when the time is right, the cone spreads itself open, exposing its nether regions to the elements. A ‘gentle’ breeze comes along, and blows the seeds out of the cone and onto the forest. Because this is a less efficient pollination method then found in flowering plants (angiosperms) gymnosperms produce loads of the stuff. So I’m guessing that what you saw at first was nature taking its course, but five minutes after you were watching the pines have their post-coital Marlborough.
Well, I would suppose it’s either transpiration or gymnospermy (Hey, didn’t Satie write some music about that?)
Now I have absolutely no idea what color pine tree seeds are, but I’m assuming they’d be like most pollen I’ve come across and be some sort of yellow-green shade, yes? So what mojopitch saw would depend on what time of day he saw the gas.
If it was kinda early in the morning or had been cold and just starting to warm up (sun burning off the fog and all that) I’d bet in transpiration - trees giving off the excess moisture and oxygen they’d accumulated during the night. It looks like fog coming off the trees, which is exactly what it is.
If it was later on in the day then it’s probably tree porn, like Rhythmdvl says.
Don’t you guys remember. Ronald Reagan said that trees were the main cause of air polution. You just witnessed the proof.
If memory serves I think pine trees and their relatives, depending on the temperature and humidity do release volatile hydrocarbons (they are full of pine pitch after all) that can couse the air to shimmer right above the trees if viewed at the right angle.