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Earthquake Lights (EQL)

amarok2005

Ephemeral Spectre
Joined
Aug 26, 2005
Messages
370
When I was in college, in Library Science, we were supposed to look up a Government Document and write a report on it. (The whole fifth floor of the library was devoted to "gov. docs", which had call letters/numbers totally different than those of the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems.) Who would have known there was a whole government publication devoted to "Earthquake Lights?"

Here's a photo of one taken around the time of the Tsunami that hit Japan in 2011:

files.myopera.com/nepmak2000/blo ... PicJvK.jpg
Link is dead. Here is the photo from the MIA web source:


EarthquakeLight-PicJvK.jpg

SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE:
https://web.archive.org/web/2014022...om/nepmak2000/blog/EarthquakeLight-PicJvK.jpg

I don't know about earth lights in general, but earthquake lights are supposed to linger at ground level, though they can light up clouds overhead. They are often described as "dome-shaped" masses of luminosity, so they'd be great at playing landed flying saucers. Don't think they could shoot around high in the atmosphere.
 
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Clue to earthquake lightning mystery
By James Morgan, Science reporter, BBC News, Denver

Mysterious lightning flashes that appear to predict earthquakes could be sparked by movements in the ground below, US scientists say.
Unidentified glowing objects were spotted moments before major quakes in China and Italy recently.
These flickers could be triggered by shifting soil layers which generate huge electrical charge, say scientists.

Using a tub of plain kitchen flour, they discovered an entirely new physical phenomenon.
They announced their findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver.
"Our first suspicion was this has got to be a mistake. There must be something stupid we are doing," said Professor Troy Shinbrot, of Rutgers University, New Jersey.
"We took a tupperware container filled with flour, tipped it back and forth until cracks appeared, and it produced 200 volts of charge.
"There isn't a mechanism I know that can explain this. It seems to be new physics. "

Repeat experiments with other granular materials produced the same voltage phenomenon.
If it occurs along geological faultlines, sliding and cracking of soil grains could be generating millions of volts of electrostatic charge.
This in turn could seed lightning in the air above - creating a natural "early-warning system" for impending earthquakes.

Stories of "earthquake lights" have been recorded for 300 years, but were typically dismissed by scientists as hearsay, or fodder for UFO enthusiasts.
However in recent decades - and with the advent of YouTube - sightings of "clear-sky lightning" have been captured, analysed, and confirmed by scientists.
Videos of luminous orbs seen during the Fukushima and L'Aquila earthquakes were widely shared online.

"We want to know - why does this lightning appear sometimes but not others?" said Prof Shinbrot.
"Not every major earthquake is preceded by lightning. And not all clear-sky lightning is followed by earthquakes."

To understand the link, scientists in Turkey have erected towers that measure voltage fields in the air over earthquake-prone regions.
"They've found there do seem to be precursors for some large earthquakes - magnitude 5 or higher. But the voltage signal is not always the same. Sometimes it's high and sometimes it's low.
"Clearly there is a lot yet to be understood."

His first aim is to understand the flour experiment - what is this new, unknown mechanism which generates voltage in the powder cracks?
"This is not what you typically think of as static - it's not like rubber shoes against a nylon carpet. This is two layers of exactly the same material rubbing against each other - and generating voltage.
"How is this happening? Your guess is as good as mine.
"I think the reason that no-one has reported this before is that no-one has thought to look."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26462348
 
This focus on granular materials generating electrical charges makes me wonder ...

Is this related to the oft-cited but little-understood role of static electricity in grain elevator fires and explosions?
 
EnolaGaia said:
This focus on granular materials generating electrical charges makes me wonder ...

Is this related to the oft-cited but little-understood role of static electricity in grain elevator fires and explosions?

I'm pretty sure there is a link.
 
Bizarre earthquake lights finally explained
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2015022...lights-earthquake-prediction-geology-science/


Rare flashes of light that are sometimes seen around earthquakes are not caused by birds, or planes, or UFOs—all of which had been previously used to explain the phenomena known as earthquake lights.

Instead, the lights are caused by electrical properties of certain rocks in specific settings, report scientists in a new paper.
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150209210753/http://srl.geoscienceworld.org/content/85/1/159


Sometimes called earthquake lightning, the lights can take "many different shapes, forms, and colors," says study coauthor Friedemann Freund, an adjunct professor of physics at San Jose State University and a senior researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center...

[Apologies if this has been posted before - I fear I have insufficiently propitiated the search deities... Edit: Not to mention the copyright deities :oops:]

See Also:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ar-in-the-sky-during-an-earthquake-180948077/
 
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That headline suggests that this is a new discovery, but in fact the idea goes back years. As the authors say in their paper:

INTRODUCTION

With the beginning of seismology as a science in the 19th century, many scholars devoted time to reporting luminosities associated with earthquake activity. To name a few, the Irish engineer Robert Mallet, the “founder of seismology”, published a five part catalog entitled “On the Facts of Earthquake Phenomena” (Mallet, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855), in which numerous reports on earthquake luminosities can be found. His catalog, first presented to the British Association of Science, covers the years 1606 B.C. to 1842 A.D.. Ignazio Galli, an Italian priest who graduated in Natural Sciences, published in the early 1900s a catalog of 148 seismic events associated with different types of luminosities. His catalog covers the years 89 B.C. to 1910 A.D.and focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on European events (Galli, 1910). Other early researchers on the subject of earthquake lights (EQL) include the work of Taramelli and Mercalli (1888), De Ballore (1913), Terada (1931), Musya (1932), and Montandon (1948).

More recently, numerous studies have been published dealing with descriptions of EQL, some of them offering a possible explanation with regards to the light‐producing mechanisms (e.g., Yasui, 1973; Tributsch, 1978, 1982; Devereux et al., 1983; Gold and Soter, 1984; Hedervari and Noszticzius, 1985; Derr, 1986; Freund, 2003a; St‐Laurent et al., 2006; Derr et al., 2011).

http://srl.geoscienceworld.org/content/85/1/159
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150209210753/http://srl.geoscienceworld.org/content/85/1/159
 
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an interesting clip from a security camera here - it would be good to see half an hour of footage either side of this section to see whether the light effects only occurred during or close to the earthquake, which would mean a coincidental lightning storm could be ruled out.

which appears to have been filmed somewhere about here https://goo.gl/maps/CgsuyiiHJ4u
 
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I gave a talk at NASA's Goddard Space Center about earthquake lights. It was incredibly well-received. You can see it at this link (if their old-timey web software cooperates) https://mediastream.ndc.nasa.gov/Public3/webvid/SCI/2018/GSFC-2018-SCI-0328/default.html
That was smashing, thank you. It made me think a bit of Steve, also a mysterious light. But Steve is harder to deny the existence of. I loved the claims of pre-earthquake plant drooping! Mind you, if water tables diminish then maybe it can affect plants after all?
 
...if water tables diminish then maybe it can affect plants after all?

Plants rely on soil moisture near the surface (maybe the top half meter). That is usually not directly connected to the water table. Trees have deeper roots but a few days of lowering of the groundwater table will not make them droop. I'm not sure the plant thing is reliable but I found it an interesting observation.
 
That is cool.
( But I notice it is raining? So how do people really know that it's not lightning? or why do they think it's not lightning, I wonder)
 
Bizarre earthquake lights finally explained
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/2015022...lights-earthquake-prediction-geology-science/
The 2014 National Geographic article includes the following excerpt and photo of earthquake lights (EQL).
Jim Conacher thought he was seeing UFOs when he spied seven yellow, luminous globes floating on a mountain on Tagish Lake in Canada's Yukon territory in the early 1970s.

A retired Canadian government agriculture inspector, Conacher took a photo of the lights, which circulated widely as purported evidence of a UFO encounter.
Conacher-EQL-TagishLakeCA.jpg
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM CONACHER
Earthquake lights are captured in this photo taken at Tagish Lake, in the Yukon Territory, in 1972


... [The] timing of Conacher's photo seemed to place it just a few hours before the nearby Cross Sound earthquake of July 1, 1973, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale.
 
These are not earthquake lights unless you use a REALLY broad and useless definition of "lights" after "earthquakes"

https://spookygeology.com/earthquake-in-mexico-triggers-media-frenzy-over-earthquake-lights/

There are three specific reasons why we can reasonably conclude that these flashes were NOT earthquake lights. 1. They appear to be along the horizon, not high in the sky. 2. They occurred after the quake, sometimes minutes later. 3. They are not the typical and unique descriptions of earthquake lights as glows, balls, or unusual sparks, curtains or flames.

Instead, these flashes are almost certainly from arcing wires from electrical lines that are broken or touching each other. Or, they are electrical transformers that have been damaged and emitting flashes. They can also be normal lightning flashing. Due to most reports being in Spanish, I’m not readily able to tell if a thunderstorm was occurring but it is visibly raining in some news videos. So, a thunderstorm is also a possible explanation. If so, that event is unconnected to seismic activity.
 
These are not earthquake lights unless you use a REALLY broad and useless definition of "lights" after "earthquakes"

https://spookygeology.com/earthquake-in-mexico-triggers-media-frenzy-over-earthquake-lights/

There are three specific reasons why we can reasonably conclude that these flashes were NOT earthquake lights. 1. They appear to be along the horizon, not high in the sky. 2. They occurred after the quake, sometimes minutes later. 3. They are not the typical and unique descriptions of earthquake lights as glows, balls, or unusual sparks, curtains or flames.

Instead, these flashes are almost certainly from arcing wires from electrical lines that are broken or touching each other. Or, they are electrical transformers that have been damaged and emitting flashes. They can also be normal lightning flashing. Due to most reports being in Spanish, I’m not readily able to tell if a thunderstorm was occurring but it is visibly raining in some news videos. So, a thunderstorm is also a possible explanation. If so, that event is unconnected to seismic activity.
Apologies. I was quoting the text at the link.
 
Apologies. I was quoting the text at the link.
No worries. LOTS of people were counting these as such so it was appropriate for this thread.

Sadly, people will now assume that earthquake lights are just flashes in the sky after earthquakes because they will read headlines and eat up social media instead of learning about them.
 
No worries. LOTS of people were counting these as such so it was appropriate for this thread.

Sadly, people will now assume that earthquake lights are just flashes in the sky after earthquakes because they will read headlines and eat up social media instead of learning about them.
To be fair, that’s a step up from Gods chucking thunderbolts at each other.
 
I think the journalist totally misunderstood the scientist in this case. It also was a shame that they promoted the idea that earthquakes somehow are more prevalent in September, which is just folk belief. Disappointing coverage on the whole. Only David Bressan at Forbes did a good job by saying they weren't earthquake lights.

It's quite depressing that such a rare phenomenon has been cheapened by people because they want it to be true so badly. So now, much of the public thinks that these mundane flashes are earthquake lights.
 
Some videos of alleged earthquake lights during last night's tragic event in Turkey/Syria
https://www.corriere.it/cronache/23...ro-d6c9e170-a5ff-11ed-a839-e2a726793555.shtml
I see one video. The rest are from other events in the past.

This video CLEARLY shows the bright blue flashes are occurring at the time of shaking and are immediately followed by the power going out. These are all electrical transformers exploding.

I don't find recent claims of EQLs compelling. The actual interesting things that may be related to fault stresses are very rare. https://spookygeology.com/earthquake-lights/
I am very curious to hear about observations that may have been recorded prior to the quake, particularly if there were ionospheric sensors. Because the quakes were shallow, there is more chance that electrically charged particles could have been emitted and detectable.
 
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