Have you ever woken up early in the morning and heard a boom or crack in the middle of winter? Chances are you could have heard a Cryoseism, or, a ‘Frost Quake’.
A frost quake happens when the ground gets saturated with water before a flash freezing. The water in the ground then freezes into ice. When water freezes into ice it expands. Once the ice has filled all the little pockets and nooks and crannies, it still may need space. So that really loud crack you might hear is the ice expanding in the ground.
David Phillips, the Senior Climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, says there is a specific reason frost quakes occur early in the morning.
“They seem to happen from midnight on for a couple of reasons. One, this is where your temperature reaches the coldest in the wintertime; it’s typically around six, seven, and eight o’clock in the morning. They keep falling and then they generally reach the bottom of the temperature gauge, as they say anywhere between five and eight o’clock in the morning. So this is where the temperature would reach its bottom point. The other thing that’s important at night, is that typically there are fewer sounds, you know, there’s no traffic there’s not the busyness of people, there’s not construction, everything seems to be still. And also the winds tend to be less at night than they are during the day. So these are kind of the reasons why it increases the likelihood you’re going to hear them at night.”
Although this nature phenomenon is relatively harmless, it can cause damage.
“In some extreme cases, it can cause the foundation in a house to actually crack. And it requires repair. And that would be a really extreme kind of case. But it has happened. Sometimes people with a flat roof house like townhouse for example, the water up there collects and then there’s a sudden freeze and then this will produce a kind of a popping or cracking sound as the ice freezes.”
Phillips adds that frost quakes are not really something people should worry about. They happen few and far between and are something you really have to be listening to to hear.
“All of a sudden, you’ll hear something that sounds like a crack, a loud popping sound of some sort. We come to all kinds of conclusions that it must be an aircraft or its weapons testing, or it’s maybe it’s a tree freezing and snapping or it’s a gunshot or exploding gas lines, all sorts of things, but you know, it’s just nature kind of groaning.”
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