The cracking of Texas trees freezing

 Epoch Times:

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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.

“The thickest trunks of trees are rent asunder with a loud sound, which, in these deserts, falls on the ear like a signal-shot at sea,” wrote von Wrangel, as translated by Elizabeth Sabine.

In North America, meanwhile, the Sioux tribe have historically referred to January as the “The Moon of Cold-Exploding Trees.”
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I have been fortunate enough to have spent most of my life in warmer climates although my first overnight bivouac in Marine Corps OCS was in six inches of snow in northern Virginia during training that would eventually lead me to Vietnam.  It was quite a climate change for a guy who grew up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.  Nor did I hear last winter during the Texas deep freeze.