‘Blue lights’ flash in sky moments before Morocco earthquake
thesun.co.uk
thesun.co.uk
/s
The cause of course could easily be from the electricity distribution infrastructure, or from some piezo/etc effect from the earth moving - it's likely not presaging the quake itself
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nMcFOfouVk4>
Earthquake P waves travel at roughly 10,000 kph (6,700 mph), and will take about 9 seconds to travel 50 km (30 miles), a typical distance to the horizon.
During an earthquake, transformers may be disrupted over a wide region, and will be seen as precursor lights from regions further from the epicenter. Despite that, they're a human and technological phenomenon, not a natural and geological one.
Similar effect as "power flashes" from tornadoes; tornado blows on power lines, power lines short out, blue arc is produced, everything is bright blue for miles for a bit.
The color and sound were unlike anything I've ever seen or heard.
From memory, something like a blue'd lightning bolt without thunder + the sound of 100 giant hornets shifted down in frequency.
If you've ever seen welding light in person, imagine that intensified a couple orders of magnitude.
It looks exactly the same to my eye. https://youtu.be/q1_ZtCXLnes
That is the point.
Atlantians used it to power their space ships.
There was a large power substation about 5km away in roughly that direction, and that was my original assumption. But I don't think it tripped (at least not completely), as we didn't lose power.
It was also far brighter than I would expect from an arc at a substation (it drowned out local street lights), higher in the sky, with multiple flashes covering much more of the sky than a single substation.
So I strongly lean towards it being earthquake lights, which is a documented phenomenon.
Or, you know...UFO's.
One likely possibility is that power lines are shorting because they've become "guitar strings" and are touching each other while vibrating from the quake.
Another interesting possibility is that some of the underground rocks may be exhibiting the piezoelectric effect, generating high voltage electricity when squeezed, and the resulting sparks are observed.
I believe the possibility of a piezoelectric effect, but the specific blue colour is what makes me think of a power lines versus fracturing rocks.
You can see that sections of the grid flicker in line with the transformers shorting out.
However, there is a distinct short white flash at the 12 second mark, before the longer blue flashes start which I would presume has a different cause.
From the article, emphasis mine:
>The intriguing bursts of light were captured on CCTV at a home in Agadir approximately three minutes before the disaster.
There are several seconds between my smart watch time and the network time displayed on my workstation. There are several minutes between those two times which I consider accurate and the time displayed on the battery powered clock on the wall. There are hours between those times and the time displayed on my coffee-maker.
Where does the camera get its time stamp?
US government already experienced with weather and climate and even in SF fog where they were successful spreading pathogens. why isnt something that could be considered?
These huge earthquakes are becoming more and more common ever since Turkey.
Hate to be that guy, but either the Earth decided to completely renew it's surface or someone is playing God. And they don't have to be human, if you know what I mean.
I would say probably
depending on the kind of earthquake and sediment/ground/stone it can involve a bunch of friction not just in the crust which could create electric charge which could lead to ground to sky/cloud lightning
which would make it a (normal non mystical) natural phenomena
if you look at this random googled photo of ground to sky lightning (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/567172146806422809/) it color and form wise can "close enough" match the observed behavior
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Marrakesh-Safi_earthquake
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...
The font of the timestamp/label is familiar though, so it's probably a cheap Chinese device, and I'd guess they're so widely used that they've managed to make the clock to be quite accurate.
If the camera is on the far-side of the transformer from the epicenter, then it could take from 5 to 30 or more seconds for ground shocks to be apparent. Speed of travel through solid rock is about 10,000 km/h, slower through softer or more disrupted geology.
I think because earth quake travels as a wave, it might have shaken up that area first causing something to blow up.
To those blaming it in power infra, I have not see any proof if that, especially before the actual shock.
One feature was the asynchronicity - one of the variables had to be lagged, I can't remember which one.
Not sure what to make it but possibly related to lights in the sky.
First recorded incident was in the year 869
I hear there's a recorded incident of a dead man who got buried in a cave and then resurrected and walked out of the cave some time later.
It has the same intensity of a transformer shorting out and the color is very similar but it also looks like local lightning strikes along a line of storms.
As a geophysicist, I am in the crowd that believes that earthquake lights are a real phenomena related to the earthquake and they may eventually be utilized as a predictive tool. The technology is not mature enough to be able to understand their method of generation and the sensor network that would be necessary to use them as a predictive tool is too sparsely distributed.
I wonder whether every earthquake has a spectral signature but the only ones we are able to see directly are those that dip deeply enough into the blue end of the spectrum to fall within the limits of our own vision.
Perhaps a UV detector array deployed in an active region could help us understand whether we miss these signals because we can't see them unless the quake is powerful enough to cause a wide-bandwidth event that bleeds into the visible spectrum. This may also help explain why some animals that can see UV or spectral components outside our own visual limits are disturbed before earthquakes. Maybe they can see these signals and the combination of seeing these signals and feeling ground motion precursors could trigger the animal behavior that has been observed globally.
I think this is an interesting problem that requires further study.
An epicentre is just a human generated approximate coordinate - it has little to with the physical quake itself.
I'm not sure why you think the epicenter is unimportant in describing the "physical quake". To the geologist it helps establish rock types present in the rupture zone based on their knowledge of tectonic history and stratigraphy of the region. The characteristics of the overburden also help to understand how each wave mode in the full wavefield of the earthquake with be manifest at the surface as the energy propagates from the source (at the epicenter). The initial estimation of the magnitude of the earthquake may be revised as data from more sensors is factored in to the location determination, that is true. That does not mean that it is just a wild guess or that it is poorly constrained.
> as the energy propagates from the source (at the epicenter)
That just isn't how earthquakes work.
Let's assume a slip along a plane cutting through the ground. The earthquake waves are generated at all parts of the surface slip (all parts of the plane). At different times as the rupture propogates. There is no center - that is merely a simplification.
Slightly off topic but I've pondered making a plugin that blocks and removes certain "news" sources of my choice from loading on my browser and showing in news aggregators and search engine results. I can avoid them on my desktop and on HN easily because I see the URL preview, but it's much harder on my phone.
Someone below has also pointed out that most of these UK tabloids are noted in the Wikipedia list of potentially unreliable sources https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Potentially_unreli...
You have to understand that this is (likely purposefully on both sides) not compulsory or well-attended. Hell, it really should be a grade 9 required class but that would make it harder to lie to future constituents. Can't have that. Same with law and various other essential life skills like drivers ed which are conspicuosly absent from general curricula.
(Drivers' ed is hardly an essential life skill in many parts of the world, btw.)
Lastly, media literacy is basically (as far as I'm aware) not really compulsory or required for most students. I'm saying it should be. They are the perfect age to learn about how these systems subjugate and weaponize their personal data, emotions, etc
Was bat boy an invention of Weekly World News? If so, WWW was satirical, with intentionally bizarre made-up stories. People were supposed to read it for the comedy, but I guess a version of Poe's Law applies and some people took it seriously. I remember one article of WWW claimed Saddam Hussein was hiding in a submarine in an American lake -- and I bet some people believed this.
The Sun I imagine pretends to be a serious newspaper though.
Made me spill my coffee!
https://weeklyworldnewsvault.tumblr.com/post/130026803238/co...
Warning: that site has plenty more WWW covers, you may lose a good chunk of your time perusing them.
> Get your career diploma at home!
Edit: made even more special after the subsequent one:
> More hair!! Style it fast! With Wild Growth® Hair Oil
Is it much different than getting a “diploma” drum prerecorded videos?
One example WWW headline was something like “Scientists discover black hole the size of a head of a pin in the Nevada desert.”
WWN was made into what it was by the same guy as was behind the creation of the National Enquirer as a tabloid - Gene Pope.
A graduate of MIT in just 3 years, when he bought up the Enquirer he'd been employed in the CIA's psychological warfare department immediately prior.
This was in 1952, the same year the CIA and other military groups met to discuss the increase in UFO sightings (like the ones making front page news over Washington DC that same year), and started project Blue Book.
Suddenly Gene Pope buys up a struggling periodical, turns it into a tabloid putting stories of UFO sightings next to sightings of Elvis being alive. This was expanded in 1979 to the WWN, where the paired stories became even more outrageous (Bat Boy).
For decades the mere mention of UFOs was typically associated with tin foil hats, and was the result of a likely intentional domestic propaganda effort that took on legs of its own as successful tabloids in their own right.
Here are some of the choicest scoops: https://www.ranker.com/list/national-enquirer-real-news/evan...
I think they also outed several celebrities over the years back when it was taboo.
Remarkably, rumors of Elvis being alive persisted until 1977!
As a consumer in supermarkets, it's hard to overstate how powerful the effect of stifling rational interest in the UFO/ UAP topic is when one passes those tabloids in the checkout line every week, which contain any number of random claims in the headlines alongside presumably legitimate and illegitimate UFO-related coverage.
I read that as CIA and other military groups met to discuss increasing the UFO sightings and didn't blink an eye, it fit in so well.
If you read the article, they’re only reporting on the light. No explanation was given. Are you now denying it never happened or that you just don’t like the outlet; since they’re two different things.
HN is not an "everything goes" platform, it has specific guidelines and policies designed to drive a higher quality conversation and higher quality sources of information, which is one of the reasons it stands out as a good aggregator for me. And I'm of the opinion that UK tabloid spam doesn't meet the criteria, not because of their political bent (I don't know what it is *), but because of their consistently wobbly and expedient relationship with the truth when it happens to be incompatible with their business model.
* I'm guessing faux conservative, since at least one of them is owned by Rupert Murdoch, same owner of the famously high quality Fox News who just lost a high profile $787.5 million defamation lawsuit for false reporting on voting machines.
Maybe we could have a parallel twin site for non serious "news"?
Edit: ¹or other sources mixed with the serious ones: for example, the pages from Andy Borowitz on The NewYorker. This just came out in real time... https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-calls-...
Maybe we could have a parallel twin site for non serious "news"?
Yep, it's still around
Didn’t know about this page either!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/P...
Russell suggests to check where Wikipedia ranks in that list.
Well, the "credibility discrimination problem" is much easier on some sources (the "Rockstar ate my Hamster" headlines runners for example).
(I'd thought of noting that it's not secondary either, decided to keep it simple.)
What Wikipedia is generally good at is in providing a synoptic presentation of a topic and identifying sources that document the points, facts, or arguments it presents. I'll often mine it for resources when doing a shallow dive on a topic.
For deeper dives, I'll try to branch out further from both those and other points.
Yes, I played on the term "source", as "witness" vs "reporter", to stress in theory the human factor and in practice the paradox (inherent in the difficulties Wikipedia has to have in providing quality).
Can you substantiate this claim? I'm searching for such an article from The Sun and can't find anything. I have found numerous stories about the burning man ebola hoax, but none of them say The Sun participated in it.
I'm not saying you're lying, but maybe you fell for some fake news about fake news. I found this Reuters article about a faked screenshot of a Forbes article, purporting to show Forbes spread the hoax (they didn't): https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-burning-man-forbes...
I was at Burning Man during the rain/mud, went bare foot for a few days, did not get "trench foot", nor did anyone else I knew there. Their unbelievably trashy reporting during that (everybody is fighting and getting trench warfare diseases, etc) is one of the reasons I'm unusually motivated to comment on their reliability as a source of information today.
but be warned not so nice pictures
Also known as:
> immersion foot syndrome[6] and as a nonfreezing cold injury (NFCI)
quote of cause:
> It can occur in temperatures up to 16 °C (61 °F) and within as little as 13 hours. Exposure to these environmental conditions causes deterioration and destruction of the capillaries and leads to damage of the surrounding flesh.[7] Excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis) has long been regarded as a contributory cause. Unsanitary, cold, and wet conditions can also cause trench foot.[8]
Idk. how warm it was there, but looking at other clothes worn probably not ~<16C, additionally even if the mud is that cold as long as you take brakes to warm up your feed e.g. in the mid day sun and don't walk through the night it still would be very unlikely. Then not having to walk in the same wet boots you have been wearing (wet) since weeks also helps.
And even if some one got NFCI it likely was only a case which comparable with what people had in WW1 was quite harmless. I.e. not really what people think about when mentioning trench foot (and knowing what it's about).
So all in all misleading and in a very intentional and knowing manner.
This is hyperbole at best. Sodom and Gomorrah have been confirmed to have experienced a "heat event" that caused pottery to exhibit the same chemical glazing that happens in a nuclear blast. Note that a nuke is not required for this form of glazing to appear, just very high temperatures.
See https://youtu.be/SDiYb20iAsM for an informal discussion.
I guess a partial truth is easier to sell than a complete fabrication.
God, I can't even. People are in desperate need of media literacy classes.
Also, what non-right wing conservative person is baited by that headline? Its so fing transparent to whom they are appealing.
The deniers vehemently deny, and outright insult people’s experiences.
The people who say they’ve experienced will be adamant that they have.
Honestly, I hope it’s real and we find a way to replicate it only because it’s so cool.
To them it is completely obvious and real. That this life is a mere shadow, a simulation. Nothing will convince them otherwise.
But we (general public without that experience) can't possibly believe it, come up with many theories on what the brain is doing.
I've never experienced ball lightning but I can believe the ones who have most of the time.
Death experiences, I can't even imagine something more real than my current reality, how could I possibly start to believe it? Despite how obvious it is to those who went through it, it's impossible for me to even begin imagining something like that.
I've avoided psychedelics because all I have is my brain, and I'm scared I could screw something up in my mind. I kinda want to keep my mind safe, it's all I am. Losing the consistency of my mind that I've always known is scary.
Psychedelics probably won't permanently screw you up. On the most common ones, like psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, you may even still feel very much yourself while tripping.
That said, if this is your attitude about psychedelics, they would probably be a bad time for you. It's one of those things where the more you stiffen up and brace yourself, the scarier and more uncomfortable the changes in your perception that come with tripping will seem to you. You definitely want to approach them with more openness and curiosity, and if you don't feel like that's available to you with respect to psychedelics, opting out of them is a totally sound choice.
There are more cameras pointed all over the place than ever, and somehow there has never been a recording of this phenomena, despite the Wikipedia claiming upwards of 5% of people having experienced this?
Nah.
When googling for images for ground to sky lightning video cameras often perceive it in similar colors as what was seen on the video, the form also somewhat matches if you consider that the bottom isn't visible (covered by houses) from the distance.
> Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/us/politics/china-disinfo...
Also, having seen FEMA at work first hand, they are approximately useless. I could see a lot of anger happening organically.
They're the "everything happens for a reason" types. Their belief system doesn't properly integrate chance events, so when confronted with one, they create a bogeyman. Because somebody being in control, even a bad somebody, is more comprehensible than nobody being at the wheel.
Avoiding all errors in cognition is often extremely difficult, ain't nobody got time for that sort of "pedantry".
The crazies and loons simply make the job of that first type much easier.
See: <https://fsi.stanford.edu/events/beyond-%E2%80%9Cbots-and-tro...>
She discusses this in some of her online presentations on YouTube. If you're interested in those, I'd suggest looking prior to ~2020 and ~2016 specifically as later discussion gets more caught up in COVID-19 related and Trump-related topics. Which are interesting in their own right but not the sources I had in mind.
(I'll see if I can locate a representative video, there's a lot to comb through.)
Her publications are listed at her UW bio page: <https://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/profile/kstarbi>
"Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs – lessons from the pandemic (2020)" might address that point: <https://theconversation.com/disinformation-campaigns-are-mur...>
Specific rhetorical methods of disinformation seems like a topic others are working on. Possibly useful DDG search: <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=rhetoric+of+disinformation+...>