Trees Are EXPLODING Across America — and It Sounds Like Gunshots

A historic winter storm sent temperatures plummeting so fast that trees across the Midwest began bursting from the inside out — a phenomenon so well-known to Indigenous peoples they named an entire moon after it.

Gunshots in the Night

On January 20, 2026, meteorologist and social media influencer Max Velocity posted a warning to his more than 262,000 Facebook followers: temperatures across the Midwest and Northern Plains were about to fall to 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and when they did, the trees were going to start exploding. Within days, his post on X had been viewed more than 10 million times, discussed on The Pat McAfee Show, and sparked a nationwide conversation about a cold-weather phenomenon that most Americans had never heard of. Multiple social media users responded with photographs of local trees that had been split wide open on dangerously cold days. One person in Iowa posted video of a tree erupting into a cloud of sawdust. The clip looked like something from a disaster movie, except it was real, and it was caused by nothing more exotic than freezing cold air.

The phenomenon is called frost cracking, and while the term “exploding trees” is sensationalized, the reality is strange enough on its own. When temperatures plunge rapidly, the sap and moisture inside a tree’s trunk freeze and expand, building enormous internal pressure. The bark and wood can only hold so much. When the pressure wins, the tree splits open, and the release of all that stored energy produces a crack so loud that people consistently describe it as sounding like a gunshot.

Meteorologist Adam Feick, speaking on The Pat McAfee Show during the storm, compared it to a can of soda left in a freezer too long. The liquid freezes, expands, and the container gives way. Trees work on the same principle, at a much larger and louder scale.

The Moon of the Cold-Exploding Trees

None of this was news to the Indigenous peoples of North America. The Lakota people of the Dakotas have long designated a winter period — roughly corresponding to February — as Cannápopa Wi, which translates to “Moon When Trees Crack From The Cold.” The Arapaho consider December their tree-cracking time. For the Abenaki, it is January. The Cree also recognized the phenomenon, calling the first new moon of the new year the “Moon of the Cold-Exploding Trees.” In the Ainu language of Japan’s northern Indigenous people, the word for tree trunks bursting from frozen water is nipusfum. These aren’t quaint folk names. They are precise observations from cultures that spent centuries living in forests during brutal winters, listening to the trees fracture around them in the dark.

The written record in Western science goes back centuries as well. During the Great Frost of 1683 — one of the most severe winters in recorded English history, so cold that the River Thames froze solid to a depth of one foot and Londoners held a massive carnival on the ice — Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon documented that the trunks of oak, ash, walnut, and other trees were split and cleft so thoroughly that daylight could be seen straight through them. The cracks, Loudon wrote in his Encyclopaedia of Gardening, were attended with noises that sounded like the explosion of firearms. A scientific paper published by the Royal Society in 1684, authored by Dr. Robert Plot and botanist Jacob Bobart, was devoted entirely to documenting the effects of that winter on trees and plants. The Great Frost of 1683–84 was so brutal that the seas off southern Britain froze solid for up to two miles from shore. During the frost of 1837–38, large bushes of heath had their stems split into shreds, and the wood of evergreen oaks and sweet bay trees cracked and split in the same manner.

The Science Inside the Bark

The mechanics of frost cracking go deeper than just frozen sap. Trees are not solid, uniform logs. They are composed of multiple layers with different functions and different rates of thermal response. The bark on the outside gets colder faster than the inner wood. It contracts. Meanwhile, the sap coursing through the tree’s internal channels — structures called xylem and phloem — begins to freeze and expand outward. Xylem carries water and minerals upward through the tree. Phloem carries sap down from the leaves to the roots. When the fluid in these channels crystallizes, the expansion is relentless.

Bill McNee, a forest health specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, explained that when sap reaches its critical freezing temperature — usually well below 32 degrees Fahrenheit because the sugar content acts as a natural antifreeze — it expands and puts tremendous pressure on the inside of the tree. If the tree is physically unable to handle that pressure, it cracks. That cracking is how the tree relieves the internal stress. It takes a significant amount of force to crack wood, McNee noted, which is why the sound can be enormous. Longitudinal frost cracks can run the entire length of a tree trunk.

The phenomenon is particularly common during rapid temperature swings. A warm day followed by a bitterly cold night is the worst-case scenario, because the tree has not had time to gradually acclimate. McNee explained that around minus 20 Fahrenheit is the threshold at which sap freezes and cracking begins. Hardwood trees — species that lose their leaves in winter — are the most vulnerable, with maples getting the most attention given how common and susceptible they are. But oaks, elms, poplars, ash, aspen, and even fruit-bearing trees like apple, peach, and cherry are all affected. Conifers like pine and spruce can crack too. Arborist Simon Peacock noted that non-native species, like silver maples and certain linden trees, tend to be the most at risk because they have not adapted to extreme cold the way native species have.

The trees themselves don’t literally blow apart in a cloud of flame and shrapnel. The cracking, while loud, does not typically send debris flying. Most trees remain standing after a frost crack. Many will survive, healing themselves over the following spring and summer by producing callus tissue — a kind of natural bandage — along the split. But the cracks leave a permanent weak point. A tree that has cracked once is more likely to crack again during the next deep freeze, reopening along the same seam. And those open wounds provide easy access for insects, fungi, and bacteria to attack the tree’s tender inner wood, potentially leading to long-term decay and structural weakness.

2,000 Miles of Winter

The January 2026 winter storm that prompted all of this was historic. An Alberta clipper — a low-pressure system flowing down from Canada — brought a mass of Arctic air into the United States that originated from a disruption of the polar vortex, which normally stays parked over northern Canada and Alaska. The cold air interacted with moisture from California and the Gulf of Mexico to create a storm system that at one point stretched nearly 2,000 miles from the Mexico–United States border into eastern Canada.

More than 200 million people across parts of 30 states were in the storm’s path from Friday, January 24 through Sunday, January 26. The National Weather Service warned that nearly everyone east of the Rockies would see some effect from the snow, ice, or cold. In the Dakotas and Michigan, temperatures plunged as much as 30 degrees below typical January averages. Wind chills in some areas dropped between 35 and 50 degrees below zero. Meteorologists in Minnesota warned that the Arctic air flooding in from Canada would make it feel like minus 38 to minus 54 Fahrenheit across the entire state. Eastern Iowa saw wind chill values below minus 40.

States in the path took emergency measures. South Carolina and Texas declared states of emergency. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp urged residents to secure food, fill gas tanks, and prepare for potential power outages. In parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and New England, snowfall reached six to 12 inches, with some locations receiving up to 24 inches. In southern regions — parts of Texas, the lower Mississippi Valley, northern Georgia, and the Carolinas — the storm brought heavy ice and sleet that caused widespread power outages and major travel disruptions. Toronto’s Pearson International Airport recorded its largest single-day snowfall since records began in 1937, receiving 46 centimeters. Over 560 flights were canceled there in a single afternoon.

It was into this setting that Max Velocity’s warning about exploding trees hit the internet. Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources responded with a Facebook post acknowledging the phenomenon but assuring residents there was no need to stay out of the woods to avoid exploding trees. The trees weren’t going to shatter into lethal projectiles. But they were going to crack.

And Then the Ground Started Cracking, Too

The trees were not the only things breaking open. Across the southern United States — in places unaccustomed to such extreme cold — residents began reporting thunderous booms that shook their houses. In Middle Tennessee, thousands of people called authorities convinced they had just experienced an earthquake. In Kentucky, multiple counties fielded reports of mysterious loud explosions. A Lexington resident wrote to local TV station WKYT asking if anyone else was hearing loud booms or cracking noises inside their house.

What they were experiencing were frost quakes — technically known as cryoseisms. The mechanism is similar to what happens inside a tree, but on a geological scale. When the ground is saturated with water from rain or melting snow and then temperatures plunge rapidly, that subsurface water freezes and expands. The expanding ice puts enormous pressure on the surrounding soil and rock. When the pressure becomes too great, the ground cracks, releasing energy in a burst that can produce a sound like a cannon shot and vibrations strong enough to rattle windows and crack walls.

In Nashville, residents across Middle Tennessee reported hearing and feeling frost quakes on the night of January 26, after temperatures had plummeted more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of hours. The ice buildup in some areas had reached 0.8 inches before the temperature crash. In Kentucky, the Kentucky Climate Center’s Shane Holinde confirmed that the booms were cryoseisms caused by moisture from the weekend’s heavy sleet and freezing rain seeping into the soil and then rapidly freezing. One Kentucky woman told NPR that the frost quake at her house had lasted only a second or two but was strong enough to produce three cracks in her living room wall.

Frost quakes are typically a phenomenon of the Northeastern United States and Canada. Their occurrence across Middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky during this storm was extremely rare. The Nashville-area National Weather Service office took to social media to reassure residents, posting that the loud booms were not paranormal — just cryoseisms. The ground, they explained, was freezing, expanding, and cracking under pressure. AccuWeather noted that some frost quakes have been reported loud enough to wake people from a deep sleep. Unlike earthquakes, which originate deep underground, frost quakes are surface-level events. But they can be detected on seismographs, and the boom they produce is real enough to convince anyone within earshot that something much more dramatic is happening.

Texas Already Knew

The January 2026 storm was not the first time the southern United States experienced exploding trees. In February 2022, during Winter Storm Landon, residents across North Texas reported hearing what they described as gunshots throughout the night. Lauren Reber, a resident of Princeton — a town north of the Dallas metroplex — told NBC DFW that her family listened to trees exploding all night long. Branches fell on her family’s barn and collapsed it. With their firewood frozen solid, their only heat source was a propane heater.

Janet Laminack of the Denton County Texas A&M AgriLife Extension explained at the time that Texas trees are particularly vulnerable to frost cracking because of the state’s wide temperature swings. Trees in Texas may not be completely dormant or prepared for the cold when a sudden freeze hits, unlike trees in northern climates that get cold and stay cold, allowing the tree to acclimate gradually. When temperatures in North Texas dropped to 18 degrees Fahrenheit — 14 degrees below freezing — the sap inside trees that had not yet fully entered dormancy froze rapidly, and the cracking began.

Trees weakened by frost cracking in Texas during 2021 and 2022 suffered long-term consequences. Arborists noted that the freeze damage left trees more susceptible to drought, disease, and high winds. When the 2024 Houston derecho and Hurricane Beryl brought severe winds, many of the trees that toppled had been quietly weakened by successive freeze-and-drought cycles. Matt Petty of the Davey Tree Expert Company, working in Houston during the derecho aftermath, observed that freeze-damaged trees were more susceptible to fungal pathogens that weakened their root systems, making them vulnerable to uprooting in exactly the kind of wind event that followed.

Minus 70 and Splitting Wood

An Alaskan social media user responding to the January 2026 viral post noted matter-of-factly that trees in Alaska split or explode from moisture drying out inside the trunks during periods of extreme cold on a regular basis. Wilderness survival author Linda Runyon described lying awake during nights of 40 below zero, listening to the trees explode around her, calling it a true wilderness thermometer. During Captain Bach’s travels near the Great Slave Lake in Canada, the cold reportedly reached minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature at which even the wood of instrument cases and carrying boxes split apart.

For homeowners worried about their trees, McNee recommended wrapping smaller trees with tree wrap — a material similar to painter’s tape — from the base up to the first set of lower branches. Light-colored trunk wraps or even a coat of interior-grade white latex paint can help protect young landscape and fruit trees by reflecting sunlight and reducing the extreme temperature differentials between the sun-warmed south-facing bark and the frozen north side. Wraps should be removed promptly in spring. Wounds and cracks should never be coated or sealed, as this can trap moisture and promote decay.

The trees in the upper Midwest experience these kinds of temperatures every few years. They handle it. They may carry the physical scars — raised lips along healed frost cracks, reduced timber value, increased vulnerability to insects and disease — but most survive.

The Lakota tracked 13 moons in their calendar, each named for the defining characteristic of that period. Cannápopa Wi falls during the deepest cold of winter, a time when the camp stayed in a single location, women mended clothing, men conducted raiding parties, and children gathered around fires to listen to their elders tell stories. Outside, in the frozen dark, the trees cracked and boomed like distant artillery. The Lakota named it because it happened. Every winter. Without fail.

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NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.