"Frost Quakes" Another Aspect Of Harsh Winter Of '26 Not Seen In Ages

Frost quakes rarely cause damage, but in this recent case
it caused a bulge underneath a Michigan  convenience
store that damaged some of the flooring.   

It's a frigid winter night, and all of a sudden you hear a boom and the house shakes.

An earthquake, right? 

No, not in the traditional sense. People in several places in the eastern United States in recent weeks have experienced what are known as frost quakes. 

The Associated Press explains what these things are: 

"These noises are known as frost quake for cryoseisms, a cold-weather phenomenon that occurs when rain or melted snow in the ground quickly freezes, expanding as it solidifies, when temperatures rapidly fall below freezing. As the ice expands, pressure builds around the surrounding soil, causing it to crash  and make booming sounds and light shaking." 

Frost quakes can damage water mains due the shifting ground. However, most winter water main breaks come because frost shifts the ground without shaking it or making noise. Or water freezes in the water main itself, causing it to burst. 

More ominously, on extremely rare occasions, shifts in the ground can cause gas leaks.

However, frost quakes almost never cause appreciable structural damage, but there was recently such a case.  

 A frost quake in st. Claire Shores, Michigan  was strong enough to cause damage. At a 7-11 store on 11 Mile Road in St. Claire Shores, surveillance video shows a ridge suddenly rising across the floor in the middle of the shop.  An eight-foot long section of floor tile inside the store was destroyed. 

When the deep cold of this winter hit states around the Ohio River Valley, frost quakes were heard and felt across much of  Tennessee and Kentucky.  It usually doesn't get cold enough long enough there to get frost quakes, but this year was different. 

Frost quakes have also been reported in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and other states this winter.

With a somewhat warmer weather pattern settling in now, more frost quakes are gotten less and less likely, unless you're in the relatively chilly air up near the Canadian border. 

Scientists: We're Not In A New Geological Era Created By Humans/Climate Change

The planet pictured here has not entered a new
geological epoch, a committee
of scientists recently decided. 

Scientists are not ready to declare a new geologic epoch that takes into account how us humans are wrecking Earth. 

As the New York Times reports, people have proposed declaring we're now in a geologic era called the Anthropocene.   

We're going to stick with the era we've been in for the last 11,000 years or so.

Says the New York Times:

"By geologists' current timeline of the Earth's 4.6-billion-year-history, our world right now is in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent retreat of the great glaciers. Amending the chronology to say we had moved on to the Anthropocene would represent an acknowledgment that recent, human-induced  changes to geological conditions had been profound enough to bring the Holocene to a close."

Those changes caused by humans are nuclear bombs, which spread at least a bit of radiation worldwide, global trade, and of course climate change. 

There's no question us humans have done those things, but not to the extent that we need to declare a new era, said a committee of scientists.  Declaring a new geologic era is too limited and recent as signposts for humans' reshaping of planet Earth.

Also, these epochs should be judged with a heavier slant toward geography than anthropology or human history. 

The NYT again:

"'It constrains, it confines, it narrows down the whole importance of the Anthropocene,' said Jan A. Piotrowski, a committee member and geologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. 'What was going on during the onset of agriculture? How about the Industrial Revolution? How about the colonizing of the Americas? Of Australia?

"'Human impact goes much deeper into geological time,' said another committee member, Mike Walker, an earth scientist and professor emeritus and the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. 'If we ignore that, we are ignoring the true impact, the real impact, that humans have on our planet.'"

Other eras Earth has gone through seem pretty big ticket and differ greatly from each other. These include the Triassic, which featured the dinosaurs, the Paleocene, in which mammals took hold, and the Pleistocene, which include the ice ages. 

The decision by this committee of scientists not to declare the Anthropocene surprised some observers. In any event,  in the zeitgeist of social media, the back and forth over the subject will continue. 

In fact, there's activists who want to declare not the Anthropocene but the Pyrocene, which is an era in which man introduced fire and more importantly, the fact that man has introduced an era of rapid-fire climate change. 

Stephen Pyne explained this more in a 2021 Grist article:

"The Pyrocene proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefined the Anthropocene according to humanity's primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. It comes with a narrative - the long alliance between fire and humans. It proposes an analogy for the future - the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene."

It's true that climate change has the potential to be as dramatic as the Ice Age - though obviously going in the opposite direction of that era.  I think calling our current era the Pyrocene is good for climate activism.

I'm just not sure if it's a full geologic era for Earth.

What do you think?