Bizarre Earthquake Lights Finally Explained | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre Earthquake Lights Finally Explained

news.nationalgeographic.com

93 pointskposehn23 comments

If these can be triggered so far in advance of a quake, couldn't we bury instruments of some kind that also trigger under those conditions? That would be useful regardless what types of rocks are in the area.

It might not be perfect, but anything is better than the no warning we have now.

I remember various ways of aurora detection but all of them depend more or less of precise wavelengths being observed and doing some noise filtering and amplification. It sounds here that various manifestations are possible so hopefully a method could be found, but it could be complex.

We do have pretty good aurora forecasting though, through satellites upstream in the solar wind. There are even smartphone apps for that, I'll plug this one that a friend of mine was involved in: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.unis.Aurora...

I already saw research in using changes in electrical charge in the air to detect earthquakes ahead of time.

> For example, cameras caught clear images of earthquake lights in Pisco, Peru, in August 2007, during a magnitude 8 earthquake there.

Oh, yeah? Too bad we don't have the technology to share such images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj2PQ3onAL0#t=40 Most of the cameras in this video were aimed towards the sea

Color me skeptical. Power lines and transformers which arc as they are pulled apart by vibration make a hell of a lot more sense to me.

Totally agree about that. I think those are what most of us saw (I was there, and the lights I saw coincided with the power failing). HOWEVER:

.. several of the cameras from the video were facing the ocean (i.e. the one at Larcomar, the mall in front of the sea, or the one at the airport, which is right next to the sea). Also, many people reported lights from either the ocean or from desert hills that lacked transmission towers or anything electric.

Although I'm still not totally sold on the idea of rocks emitting light, I hope I won't have the chance to verify it for myself, as the experience of an entire pitch-black city being illuminated with light arks in the middle of an earthquake was scary enough.

Try scraping two quartz crystals together and you'll see it for yourself!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence

Having experienced the 6th largest earthquake ever recorded by a seismograph [1] I can assure you the lights I saw during that night were a lot brighter and higher in the sky, so power lines and transformers are ruled out. I was living fairly close to the epicenter (about 18 miles from the picture you can see in the wikipedia) and the lights were up for several minutes after the electricity went out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake

Clouds reflect light. Arcing can be extremely bright to night-adjusted eyes.

Contrast with a known transformer explosion in NYC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqxXd09Wv94

0m15s and 2m55s.

They're bright as all fuck and would light up the sky impressively.

The article says that it's not caused by Piezo effects, then goes on to describe exactly that.

Actually, it sounds a lot more like triboluminescence to me.

I would suspect that those are actually the same thing.

Bad journalism, maybe?

This pilot has a first-person account and eerie photos of what may be earthquake lights:

http://www.pbase.com/flying_dutchman/pacific_eruption

An electrical discharge does not explain the color. To be a complete explanation it needs to explain the color of the lights.

Gas emission from the ground prior to earthquakes?

There has been some work to attempt to link the two.

>Freund says common forms of earthquake lights include bluish flames that appear to come out of the ground at ankle height; orbs of light called ball lightning that float in the air for tens of seconds or even minutes

Perhaps coincidental and unrelated, but similar orbs have been reported in conjunction with crop circle events.

Once someone's already gone to all the effort of making a crop circle they are precluded from being a credible witness for other 'related' phenomena.

I though crop circles were made by people who had to much time on their hands.

I'm also inclined to believe that. Only one problem: in addition to crop circles that can easily be attributed to humans there are some that has been really hard to pin down it seems. (Because of the product of precision and timing etc.)

I think it could be interesting if someone would watch those places with drones and IR etc but until it is thoroughly explained I'd admit that we expect to be able to explain it but at the moment we don't know.

Edit:remove hyperbole (be more than happy -> think it could be interesting )

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