Big booms get calls to POST newsroom and begins a night of research and strange findings ... but no definitive answers.
A frost quake? Really?
Were those house-shaking, window-rattling booms heard tonight the result of the oh-so-pretty landscape we have been enjoying for the last several days?
After the two booming shakers hit the area at about 9:15 tonight, our newsroom fielded dozens of calls and our social media and website was busy with comments. So far tonight, the boom and the questions has resulted in hours of research, some strange findings ... but not many solid answers.
One of the options was a frost quake. Really? Has all that wintery-white frost on trees, fences and power lines created some sort of sinister geo-thermal timebomb?
What the heck is a frost quake anyway? Have you ever heard of one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryoseism
Excellent. Thank you wiki.
So there are such things - outside of the grocery store cereal aisle - as frost quakes.
Or was it simply a ripple from one of dozens of subterranean earthquakes that rattle beneath us on a daily basis ... as we have found out by searching out any and all possible reasons why our earth shook. Earthquake websites around the world show that dozens of underground rattlers take place almost every hour around the world. Earlier tonight, there were more than a dozen little tremors recorded up and down the Western coast of Canada and the US. From Alaska to California, there were several over the last few hours.
Chicken Little. Ahh. Now he was a fast-thinker. But is that what we're becoming? Over the course of 20 minutes from the time the windows shook and the buildings rattled, we were able to 'google' and research more than a dozen 'possible' ideas to what had happened. Is it too easy to find larger than life reasons for what could have made the rattle? Does access to too much information result in too many questions? Was it a meteor, an explosion, a fighter plane, a pipeline explosion? Is the earth trying to buck us out of the saddle like an angry bronc? Did all of that pretty frost have something to do with it?
Did it come from the sky?
Time to send an email to our friends at the air force base next door. They were responsible (or at least their planes were) for a series of loud booms last year during Maple Flag war game exercises. We're waiting for them to get back to us.
So - what was it? Our best journalistic guess after all of that research and keyboard navigation is .... we don't know yet.
For now, let's all stay positive. As the POST ewsroom has already said on its facebook site just after the big noise ... we think the noises were Economic Booms. That's right. The dollars will soon start rolling back into our communities. Boom, baby! ..... unless it was that cunning frost.
