Heels 1976

Field analysis

Field analysis

The individual leatherwood bush is a highly abrasive, firmly rooted object. Spikey twigs (Gooder,1971) and speartipped branches with high tensile strengths are surrounded by tough resistant leather leaves with sharply serrated edges (see illustration in Sissons, 1971 p.63). These components are several orders of magnitude harder and strongerthan the human flesh and its general cloth armour. Upon contact with the flesh and armour any one of these components causes molecular disarray and removes molecules, atoms and electrons from it (see also Radcliffe, 1974). Hence although a collection of leatherwood bushes (the leatherwood field) exhibits variations in surface tension and density, it always produces significant abrasion of a moving tramper. By application of the Schrodinger Equation,McLachlan (1963) showed why tramper velocity through leatherwood is vanishingly small. However even entrained and effectively stationary trampers lose mass from the LTI due to the amplitude of their frenzied struggles. It is this loss of mass which leads to the buildup of static charge on the tramper.