Posted on 02/13/2022 2:39:56 PM PST by Twotone
The next time you hear a loud “crack” outside on a moonless winter night, don’t assume it’s someone firing a weapon. It could just be an exploding tree.
In Collin County, Texas, locals recently heard a number of trees cracking in the icy weather.
“We listened to them all night. Sounds like gunshots going off,” Lauren Reber of Princeton said, as reported by NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.
In 2005, “exploding maple trees” were the basis of an April Fool’s Day hoax from the media. But while trees don’t exactly detonate like bombs, they have long been seen as vulnerable to the frigid weather this time of year.
In “Works and Days,” a guide to farming written around 700 B.C., the ancient Greek poet Hesiod tells of the harsh conditions during “Lenaion,” a month corresponding to January and February:
“In the month of Lenaion the days are bad; they skin oxen alive. Beware of this month and its frosts that grip the earth when the gusty north wind stirs the broad sea and blows through Thrace—that nurturer of horses—as land and forest bellow. Up the mountain woodlands it blows against many high-crested oaks and sturdy firs and fells them to the rich earth as the vast forest groans.” (trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis.)
Explosive frost-cracking is also well documented.
In his “Narrative of an expedition to the Polar Sea, in the years 1820, 1821, 1822 & 1823,” the Baltic German adventurer Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel described the effects of bone-chilling cold in the Russian Far East.
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
That sounds like the name of some Street Theater Group.
“Exploding Maple Trees”..Pantomime, Air Guitar, Drum Circles and virtual yodeling.
We lost one Maple in the 2011 freeze - it cracked and never recovered, but the cracks in our remaining one mostly healed back
“Exploding Maple Trees” sounds like the name of a Radiohead song.
That too.
Something worth acting out on a stage.
I was thinking about the ‘exploding’ whatever column that Dave Barry wrote. How did he miss the maple trees?
If you are lucky, the explosions will be mild, the trees will heal quickly and a fairly normal syrup harvest can happen in March. If the cold snap is too long or too pronounced, you can write off the harvest for the year.
I know a guy who owns a substantial amount of maple forests. He harvests the sap in March and sends it up to Vermont for processing where they can label it Vermont maple syrup and jack up the price big time. He tells me that Pennsylvania could process our own maple syrup if we wanted to and leave Vermont in the dust as we outproduce them in sap by many times. But it is just more profitable to ship it to Vermont for processing.
Cottonwood trees hold an amazing amount of water and I’ve heard them pop during a cold snap (-15F) in SE Alaska. Super loud sharp crack/bang that I wouldn’t want to be standing next to.
at -10 i’ve heard nails pop on the deck so loud sounded like pistol shots
I wonder if the cracking could be prevented by tapping for syrup before hand?
Dave Berry is a fun and observant columnist.
Hope he hasn’t been ‘Cancelled’ yet.
We had a winter storm a couple years back like that. The snow was so heavy it had most of the pine trees bending in ridiculous angles. Taking a walk with my pup was like hunting season. Snapes and pops the whole day. Lost three tall Douglas firs in my yard that day.
You’re not taking all of the sap out of the tree. During the winter, the sap goes to the roots but when it warms up, the sap starts circulating throughout the tree. I suspect that’s the cause of the popping.
anthropogenic climate change?
...spent a number of years in the Central New York region....many, many very cold winters up there; 18 degrees below zero for a solid week back in the mid- or late-1960s if I recall...would routinely hear the elm trees crack in the middle of the night....they are pretty much gone now, victims to a disease carried by the Dutch elm beetle or some such.....
Where I live the loud cracks are gunfire.
Folks around here go to the riverbanks near by and light stuff up.
It’s kind of unnerving to the folks that just moved in from out of state.
The trees popping at night can be quite loud.
Sometimes, when it's 40 below or so, they do it in the daytime too.
This is in Texas, they went from 80+ to 20’s. I was wondering if they tapped them prior to the freeze if that would have saved some trees.
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