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“It was pretty loud. I mean, the two of us woke up out of deep sleep, it woke my daughter up. It definitely was a boom and my house, my roof was shaking.”

Paige Kruger, who lives at Lawrence and Avenue, described similar banging sounds around her house.

“My dad was like walking around the house to see if anyone broke in,” she said.

“Then it sounded like somebody was basically banging around in the walls of our house.”

They are cracking of ice or two blocks of ice moving one against each other. It happens because ice expands when it gets cold

Allison Bent, a seismologist with Earthquakes Canada, explained how the “frost quakes” felt similar to earthquakes but were caused by ice.

“What they are is cracking of ice or two blocks of ice moving one against each other. It happens because ice expands when it gets cold,” said Bent.

“So it often happens when it’s extremely cold, like minus 20 or colder and particularly if there’s been a sudden drop in temperature, and especially near lakes and rivers.”

It feels a lot like an earthquake to someone close to it, but Earthquake Canada’s instruments don’t pick up the shaking since these ice quakes are very localized, according to Bent.

“So we suspect that’s what’s people have been feeling,” she said.

As for potential for damage, Bent said she’s “never heard of there being any. Usually the effects are very, very localized.”

“You can feel the shaking, but as far as I’m aware there’s never been any damage from a frost quake,” she said, comparing it to a very weak earthquake.

Geoff Coulson, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment Canada said that in his 30 years involved in the weather service, he hadn’t seen so many reports of frost quakes. He attributed a lot of that to social media.