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Exploding Maple Trees Rock Texas Winter
The Epoch Times ^ | February 12, 2022 | Nathan Worcester

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 ...


TOPICS: History; Miscellaneous; Weird Stuff
KEYWORDS: mapletrees; texas
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To: Twotone

Maple trees from which syrup are produced are largely “up north”, up into Canada. Do those trees explode, or is this only for those in Texas?


21 posted on 02/13/2022 6:20:11 PM PST by GingisK
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To: Mogger

Yup, we call it Tuesday.


22 posted on 02/13/2022 6:49:26 PM PST by VTenigma (The Democrat party is the party of the mathematically challenged )
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To: Twotone

During winter, the sap flows into the roots of the maple, leaving the wood of the tree relatively dry.

As winter draws to a close, the days are (relatively) warm and the nights are still frosty. The problem comes on very warm days when the sap flows back up into the wood too early. Then the freeze causes the water-like sap to expand and the wood splits apart with a loud pop.


23 posted on 02/13/2022 7:11:01 PM PST by DNME (... at that awkward stage. Too late to work within the system; too early to shoot the bastards.)
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To: lee martell

He won’t be canceled; he’s a lib.


24 posted on 02/13/2022 7:17:25 PM PST by Flaming Conservative ((Pray without ceasing))
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