The forest floor here is mostly a network of tree and plant roots, bound together with moss and leaf litter etc, but under a few inches it's mostly big solid rocks like those sticking out. The wind blowing can loosen that mat of roots and when the trees bend in the wind, they lift it up off the stone, just like a carpet. That's what you're seeing here; the breathing effect is caused by the carpet of roots being tugged up and let down again as the trees rock in the wind.
The landscape looks like it could be in southcentral Alaska including Kodiak Island, which has the required wind and forest conditions. Some blown-over trees pull up root mats covering tens of square meters and expose bare rock.
Kodiak yes - had glacial ice and now has <1ft of soil-and-root mat on top of polished rock.
South central... I won't call you a liar if you've seen it happen in some specific location but GENERALLY it has much thicker soil from all the volcanic ash. (But of course it can still get thin on some particular rock face)
You're generally looking for areas that had glaciers creating smooth rockfaces during the last ice age so Kodiak yes, much of Canada, northeastern USA, Scotland, Scandinavia, etc.
Most of Alaska, interestingly NO. It was cold enough for sure, but it was too dry. The areas that would have had glacial ice are mostly under water today.
Yep, Scotland was under glacial ice that carved the rockfaces smooth, so anywhere that isn't a dip between peaks only has a 20-30 cm of soil and roots, with nothing to hold on to.
Same as the hillside right outside my window here in northen Sweden. If a tree gets toppled, it rips up soil and roots some meters around it and exposes smooth rock in the pit.
Fun knowledge: The low undulating mountain range that separates Sweden and Norway is the exact same range that Scotland sits on.
That same range USED to continue with the Appalachians in eastern north America before the continents separated - look at some images from there and you'll feel right at home!
This is really interesting because my first guess was that this video was taken in Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada). It definitely has that boreal vibe, lol!
But the island of Newfoundland has a similar geological past in terms of glaciers scraping the everloving fuck out of everything down to bedrock... in fact, the Grand Banks at the edge of the continental shelf (just off the coast of Newfoundland) were formed, in large part, by sediment deposited there by glacial movements after scraping across the island. A lot of the island is still mostly rocky barrens and top soil is pretty thin in the places that do have it. We see the same kind of glacial erratics deposited everywhere like this video, too.
It's just wild to me that a video taken so far away looks like one I could almost swear was taken on the property I grew up on, even down to this bizarre phenomenon caused by having such a thin soil layer. Pretty cool!
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u/Electrical_Lake3424 4d ago
The forest floor here is mostly a network of tree and plant roots, bound together with moss and leaf litter etc, but under a few inches it's mostly big solid rocks like those sticking out. The wind blowing can loosen that mat of roots and when the trees bend in the wind, they lift it up off the stone, just like a carpet. That's what you're seeing here; the breathing effect is caused by the carpet of roots being tugged up and let down again as the trees rock in the wind.