Half of the patients that came in over the past few days are homeless, while others had jobs that kept them out. He said based on what he has seen thus far, this could be one of those years. Hospital, a level 1 trauma center, that in a really bad year will see 150 cases of frostbite for the season. Stathis Poulakidas, the head of burn and wound care services at Cook County Health. It’s more typical to hear of booms once every few years in rural areas of states such as Wisconsin and Massachusetts.The bitter cold in Chicago has kept hospitals busy, with doctors at one facility during the brunt of an Arctic freeze treating 50 frostbite victims, including some people who may lose an arm or a leg. Leung suggested that in addition to social media reports, frost quakes have garnered extra attention becuase they have occurred in a major city, Toronto. As recently as Sunday, 911 operators in Illinois and Missouri took reports from callers who said they heard booms. King’s map shows frost quake markers in states such as Maine, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “Soon enough, it appeared to everyone that these noises were not random due to the sheer volume of reports,” Leung said. “It amazed me how gracious people were to have a Web page where they could see that other people were hearing and feeling the same strange events as them,” King said. She assembled a Google Map to allow users to pinpoint and describe their own frost quake experience. While visiting Texas during Christmas, King heard news reports of “booms” in her hometown and turned to Twitter to see what people were saying. Since the beginning of the year, Leung has tracked numerous frost quakes in freeze-gripped parts of the Midwest. Witnesses have described the sounds as being similar to gunshots, exploding bombs and falling trees. When temperatures suddenly reach near 0 degrees, the water table expands and starts cracking the soil and smashing nearby rock formations. They might crack roadways and building foundations, but that kind of result is rare.įrost quakes can strike after a pounding of rain or when the rapid melting of snow saturates underground streams. “Since frost quakes are rare, localized, cannot be monitored and tend to cause only minimal damage, the scientific community has very limited amount of information,” said University of Toronto Scarborough Climate Laboratory researcher Andrew Leung. “But typically they will not be felt very far away.”Īnd social media have given researchers a new way to study the little-discussed temblors. “Even though their source sizes are small, the shaking they cause at the surface can be large because they occur so close to the surface,” Thurber said in an email to the Los Angeles Times. The most intense frost quake he’s seen was a magnitude 1.5. He guesses that the frozen water tables are tens of meters long. The term also includes the cracking and slipping of glacial ice and the fracturing of frozen lake ice, said Clifford Thurber, a geophysics professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “I went on Twitter and found several tweets from people who were awoken by the same thing, at the same time, around the same area as my apartment building,” she said.įrost quakes have a scientific name: cryoseism.
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