UFO-like ‘earthquake light’ mystery solved by scientists

For many years witnesses have reported seeing eerie lights appearing before or around the time of an earthquake. 

Science Recorder | Rick Docksai | Saturday, January 04, 2014

 

Scientists used to think that people claiming to see balls of light in the air before or during an earthquake were telling tall tales. Then video cameras at the scenes of recent earthquakes proved otherwise: Footage showed that there really were bight orbs floating in the air above a fresh earthquake fissure. Even more recently, a few researchers have found a source for the mysterious lights deep beneath Earth’s crust.
In a report published Jan. 2 in the journal Seismological Research Letters, researchers analyzed 65 documented occurrences of earthquake lights over the last 400 years. The Great San Francisco Earthquake was one of these—bystanders had described seeing floating lights two before the earthquake hit.
The study researchers identified an electrical current that flows out of some earthquake fault lines as the composite plates that constitute the crust pull away from each other. This electricity may be what’s forming the lights.
Most big earthquakes happen at subduction zones—sites where one continental plate dives below another. But the earthquake cases where witnesses saw lights bucked the trend. Of the incidents that the researchers examined, 97% seemed to occur not at subduction zones, but at fault lines within continental plates.
These light-prone fault lines would be ones of extreme friction. Continental plates would run against each other and buckle, creating rifts where the Earth would pull itself apart. The rifts would form steep, almost vertical faults that would extend deep into the Earth’s magma, and magma rocks that has been buried deep underground would migrate closer to the surface.
These magma rocks tend to have crystalline structures—a byproduct of the intense heat and pressure to which they have been subjected for eons—and these crystalline structures are conducive to forming electricity when subjected to heavy friction. The electricity would flow to the surface, ionize in the air, and create flashes of light.
The records of earthquake lights clearly extends much farther than does the record of serious study of them. Friedemann Freund, a crystallographer at NASA Ames Research Center and San Jose University and one of this study’s coauthors, acknowledged that until recently, the lights phenomena had not made its way into scientific reports, partly because the evidence was only anecdotal and the lights would only be visible for brief instants, sometimes only fractions of a second. This only changed in 2007, when video cameras at earthquakes in the Italian town of L’Aquila and the Peruvian town of Pisco both caught earthquake lights on film.

Source: Science Recorder