You may have heard about “frostquakes” with the recent cold weather in the GTA and other areas of Southern Ontario. You may even have heard one yourself. Professor Bill Gough, a climatologist at UTSC, discusses this phenomenon with one of his graduate students, Andrew Leung, a second-year student in the UTSC PhD program in Environmental Science.
Gough: Andrew, over the past couple of weeks Toronto has experienced a wide range of severe weather. One interesting aspect of these weather events is the frostquake. This is a new term for most of us. It was an article in the media that quoted UTSC graduate and local weather media meteorologist Natasha Ramsahai (HBSc 1998), that alerted me to this relatively rare phenomenon. You’ve done some research on this recently. So, what is a frostquake?
Leung: A frostquake is a natural phenomenon. Similar to an earthquake, a frostquake generates very minor ground shaking and cracking sound or “boom” that is on a much smaller scale than an earthquake.