﻿During an earthquake,
something even more mysterious than the tremor itself
is happening in the skies above.
Something that up until 2007 had never been filmed,
but had been whispered about for centuries.
Reports of peculiar lights appearing just before earthquakes,
described as glowing orbs, lightning-like streaks and even fire in the sky.
The last thing you’d expect to see during an earthquake
is strange flashes of light.
Blink and you’d miss the silent, electric, luminous dancing in the sky
just minutes before the ground begins to shake; a ghostly pre-show with a devastating finale.
What could be causing this?
How could the movement of entire continents deep below us
create a dazzling light show in the skies above - lighting up the land for miles around?
I’m James Stewart and you’re watching Astrum Earth.
This is the fascinating truth behind “Earthquake Lights” -
a natural phenomenon so rare and unexplained,
it defies science and fuels legends.
What are they? Why do they appear?
And could they be Earth's warning light before everything shakes apart?
Perhaps the most alluring aspect of earthquake lights is just how rare they are;
indeed they are so rare and so undocumented
that there is still some doubt over their very existence.
Not only does this make just seeing them a nearly impossible task, it makes
articulating what they are, even harder. Sometimes called “earthquake lightning”,
earthquake lights can take many different shapes, forms, and colours. They may appear
similar to ordinary lightning, a bolt of powerful colour lighting up the sky as if from nowhere.
They may be a luminous band in the atmosphere akin to polar aurora, filling the sky with dazzling
beauty. Other times, they resemble glowing spheres floating midair, as if a crystal ball
was levitating before your eyes. They may also look like small flames flickering in the sky,
like an airborne log fire, or even larger flames emerging from the ground as if cast down from the
gods above. The reason earthquake lights are able to take on such a wide range of colours,
shapes and forms is likely due to the way in which they’re formed and specifically,
what they pass through… but more on that later. There are a select few who have seen these lights
in action, or at least claim to. Eye witness accounts date back over 1,000 years, telling
stories of dragons lightning up the sky, detailing yellow orbs floating eerily in the distance and in
one American state, they inspired an entire book series called “Haunted Summerville”.
The story was created after reports from locals seeing a glowing orb throughout the
1960s on a nearby abandoned railroad. A video taken in China shortly before the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake seems to even show them as luminous, brightly coloured clouds floating in the sky,
as beautiful and whimsical as they are devastating and chilling.
The debate amongst some geophysicists still rages on in some corners, continually questioning and
debating whether any of the reports constitute hard, solid evidence for earthquake lights.
Historical witness testimonies of the rare and little understood
natural phenomenon were typically dismissed by scientists as hearsay,
or fodder for UFO enthusiasts and other conspiracy theorists. After all,
how do you go about trying to prove something that only very few people have seen first-hand?
What are we really dealing with here? Do earthquake lights really exist, or are they simply
another chapter in a book of fiction? Can they be chalked down to hallucinations from overzealous
witnesses wanting to make a name for themselves, or has science got another surprise up its sleeve?
To find the first tales of Earthquake Light incidents, you have to go back over a millennium,
back to ancient texts from China and Japan which depict luminous phenomena
preceding earthquakes often perceived as omens or even supernatural events.
Deep in rural China around the year 373 AD, those texts described terrified farmers running for
their lives after seeing “fire dragons” lighting up the sky. The texts chronicle that these dragons
appeared moments before a significant quake in the region, and disappeared just as quickly,
lightning up the farmland a vibrant, angry red. In this period of time, the connection between gods,
spirits and otherworlds was rife, and sightings like these would have only fanned the flames
of terror of what these people were witnessing. At this time they wouldn’t have even understood
why the ground itself was shaking, let alone why dragon-shaped lights lit up the skies above them
at the same time. These visions were likely the final images some of these poor people ever saw,
with the legends of their encounters passing on from generation to generation.
On the other side of the world, similar whispers of mysterious lights were being
heard in the temples of ancient Greece. An ancient Greek historian, Callisthenes of
Olynthus wrote of “immense columns of flame” that foretold the earthquake that destroyed
the cities of Helike and Boura in 373 BC. So convinced were the Greeks that these lights
were one of their gods lashing out, punishing the people on Earth for something unseen,
that they built sacred sites like temples as an offering of peace in a desperate attempt
to stop such divine intervention from supernatural forces happening again. As the years have gone by,
and technology has evolved, we now know that those structures are built close to or nearby
fault lines deep underground; the very place you might expect to see earthquake lights.
As time went on accounts of earthquake lights seemed to dry up; so extravagant were the tales
that many simply refused to accept them and they all but vanished from the record books.
The invention of electric lighting in the 19th century only aided their demise;
any accounts akin to possible earthquake lights were often dismissed as being caused by damaged
power lines or other electrical issues as the world got to grips with the new technology.
Similarly with the birth of modern scientific seismology and instrumental measurement around
the same time, the bizarre lights dotted throughout ancient history just did not fit
into the framework of the classical mechanics of which seismology was built at the time. Scientists
were at a loss as to how to explain them, and so tended to dismiss them entirely. The phenomena
nearly vanished from planet Earth entirely… until one day, something extraordinary happened.
Dr. Kuribayashi was a dentist in the town of Matsushiro, Japan and he enjoyed photography
in his spare time. After finishing his work day on the 4th of December, 1965,
he headed out that evening to take pictures of the nature surrounding him for his collection when he
looked up and spotted something strange just before midnight. A luminous aurora,
blue-white with a reddish tinge drenched the night sky, stretching out nearly 8
kilometres in diameter. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, and indeed to him - this
dentist had just captured earthquake lights on camera for the very first time.
This particular region, Nagona in central Japan was subjected to frequent earthquakes
from 1960 to 1967. In fact, frequent feels like an understatement, because there were 62,826 during
this period - they were so common, people quickly got used to them; they became a way of life,
like taking the rubbish out or walking the dog. The earthquakes came from Mt. Minakami,
which is located in the centre of Matsushiro Town and they are known collectively as the
Matsushiro Swarm. But even this seemingly indisputable evidence was not enough;
prominent seismologists like Tsuneji Rikitake suggested the images were fabrications,
nothing more than a trick of the camera, or even a faulty lens. The world, it seemed,
wasn’t ready to accept the existence of earthquake lights. Something had to give.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Jim Conacher, a retired agricultural inspector,
was out for his daily hike on Tagish Lake in Canada's Yukon territory in 1973. Mid hike,
he looked up and was aghast to see what he thought were UFOs in the distance. He saw
several yellow orbs 1 metre in diameter floating like an alien craft on a mountain, darting around,
as if choreographed to an invisible song played by an orchestra from another world.
Quickly, he reached for his camera and in doing so captured one of the eeriest
known earthquake light sightings to date. It’s as if the camera itself has flared;
there, right in amongst the mountain a yellow hue peers out toward the lake as if lighting
an enticing path to a hidden land. Unbeknownst to Conacher at the time, these mysterious orbs
appeared just minutes before the nearby Cross Sound earthquake on the 1st of July, 1973.
The evidence for earthquake lights was finally starting to gather momentum.
In Tangshan, China, residents were woken one night in 1976 by great fireballs lighting up
the skies above, flashing in the darkness like a firework display. The next night right on cue,
an earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter scale ravaged the area, tragically killing more than a
quarter of a million people and destroying the entire city. The stories of the mysterious lights
joined local lore, as locals tried to process what had just happened, and tried to piece together
the hours that led up to the earthquake and the strange firework display so many had witnessed.
The next time the elusive lights struck, they displayed a bright purple-pink, appearing as
globes of light hovering along the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City in Canada, in 1988. As
if by coincidence, these lights were observed in the days and weeks leading up to and during
the Quebec earthquake, including foreshocks, the main shock, and even the aftershocks.
The lights varied in appearance, with descriptions including globular masses,
bands, rays, and intense atmospheric illuminations.
In Pisco, Peru, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck in 2007 just before 7PM. Moments before
the quake struck, something even more spooky was occurring. A naval officer saw pale blue
columns of light bursting out of the water at least four times. Several similar lights
were observed along the Peruvian coast and were extensively reported in the capital city of Lima,
about 150 kilometres northwest of the epicenter… but this time something changed.
The entire event was caught on video. A random CCTV camera outside a mobile office
captured flashes of bright blue, drenching the nighttime sky a dazzling shade of turquoise.
By complete chance a seismometer record had been set up at a nearby university campus,
not far from where the footage had been captured and finally the dots were beginning to connect.
The seismic activity record directly matched the qualified eyewitness observations,
and CCTV footage of the phenomena from other parts of the city. It had been confirmed - the
lights had appeared during that 8.0 earthquake. Now, for the first time really ever… there was
unequivocal evidence that these peculiar lights did indeed directly correspond to earthquakes.
From then on, things moved fast. Shortly before the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila,
Italy, flames of light several inches high were seen flickering above the stone-flagged streets of
the town’s historic centre. Many people reported ‘peculiar sightings of glowing lights, flashes,
lightning, flames, luminous orbs and even giant fireballs’, all of which were considered prime
candidates for earthquake light. Overall, 241 luminous phenomena were documented.
Things didn’t stop there either because this camera shy event showed itself again
in Wellington, New Zealand in 2016, turning the sky a stunning aqua marine. Just one year later,
after an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mexico on the 7th of September,
videos of fuzzy green smears in the night sky went viral online as the lights struck
again. As if trying to outdo itself with each earthquake that appeared around the world,
the firework-like display returned as recently as 2023, flashing above the skies of Morocco,
moments before a devastating earthquake struck the country. During the Morocco quake,
the earthquake lights seemed to take things to a new level,
lighting up the entire city in the dead of night with its ominous white-blueish tinge.
All of a sudden earthquake lights had been thrust into the scientific
spotlight after far too long in the dark…but one big question
still remained unanswered - what freak of nature could possibly cause them?
For this, we must turn to physics.
As science has clamoured to make sense of this beautiful phenomenon,
accompanied by terrifying consequences,
a number of explanations have come to light (pardon the pun).
Actually, this might be a good time to tell you this.
as we head back to the video.
One of the most compelling theories stems from Yuji Enomoto, a Japanese seismologist at Shinshu
University. In a paper published in July 2024, he proposed that earthquake lights could result from
the chemical interactions of gases, like radon and methane, released from underground. The article
proposes that earthquake lights are primarily caused by physio-chemical changes in fault zones
within the Earth's lithosphere, where deep Earth gases, like the radon and methane I mentioned,
are present. These changes interact with the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and ionosphere,
leading to those puzzling earthquake lights. Could an “Earth-fart”, to use a colloquial term,
really be the cause of one of the greatest unexplained phenomena on planet Earth?!
Well, so in-depth is this article that Enomoto breaks down 11 separate instances of earthquake
lights in Japan from 1965 explaining how his theory ties in to each and every one. For example,
in the Matsushiro swarm, which had a staggering amount of earthquakes over
a relatively short period of time, the focus is on a small volcano called Mt. Minakami,
near Nagano in central Japan. When the volcano ceased to be active, the magma cooled down,
leaving numerous microcracks in the surrounding crust. In that environment, high-temperature,
high-pressure carbon dioxide-bearing water was released from the cooled magma reservoir deep
underground, causing felt earthquakes. As the felt earthquakes continued, mysterious lights often
appeared silently on Mt. Minakami, illuminating the dark night sky, and captured by our dentist
friend Dr. Kuribayashi. Enomoto proposed that this may have been caused through the crack fronts at
the epicenter of the earthquake becoming negatively charged due to the interaction
of fracturing rock with deep Earth gas, inducing a positive charge on the ground surface through
electrostatic induction. At the same time, the opposite is happening in the thunderclouds above,
where the meteorological front tends to charge the ground surface negatively.
This results in rapid fluctuations in the Earth’s potential, competing with
the electrical fluctuations from the underground interactions from the gas,
potentially creating the earthquake lights.
Whilst Enomoto’s theory is widely accepted, the exact mechanism behind earthquake lights
is still not fully agreed upon. Indeed, our inability to explain earthquake lights has been
going on for so long that understandably, because they’re not always present during an earthquake,
there are still (despite all those examples!) those who question if it’s even real. Thankfully,
for the sake of this video at least, they are “definitely real,” according to John Derr,
a retired geophysicist who used to work at the US Geological Survey.
And there is another theory alongside Enomoto’s that offers us some clues.
Perhaps the leading theory currently available proposes that piezoelectricity,
a process where certain materials produce an electric charge when subjected to mechanical
stress, is responsible for the lights. Friedemann Freund, John Derr’s collaborator,
and adjunct professor at San Jose University and a former researcher at NASA Ames Research Center,
based his findings not on the gases emitted, but rather around the rocks deep in the ground,
and what the stress of an earthquake does to them. According to Freund, tectonic stresses preceding
or during significant earthquakes cause defects or impurities in rock crystals to fracture,
which consequently generates electricity. In other words, the rock is an insulator that,
when mechanically stressed, becomes a semiconductor; an example of piezoelectricity.
Derr and his colleagues gathered information on 65 American and European earthquakes associated with
trustworthy reports of earthquake lights dating back to 1600. The researchers found that some
80% of the light occurrences studied were observed for earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 5.0,
which corresponds to a medium-sized earthquake. In most cases, the phenomenon was observed shortly
before or during the seismic event, and it was visible up to 600 kilometres from the
quake epicentre. It’s worth noting that from this particular study, the lights only seem to happen
before or during an earthquake, not after, and we’ll come to the reasons why shortly.
They also found that the vast majority of earthquakes linked to earthquake lights occurred
within tectonic plates, rather than at their boundaries or outside of them. To add further
intrigue, the team found that 97% of earthquake lights were associated with subvertical faults,
which only cause about 5% of the Earth’s total seismic activity. Now, of those 5%, earthquake
lights are only present in less than 0.5% of the quakes! Subvertical faults occur in regions
where tectonic plates undergo extensional stress, leading to the formation of vertical fractures or
rifts in the Earth's crusts. So, could this be a clue as to why they occur in the first place?
Well, prior to earthquakes, huge volumes of rock, and I so mean huge volumes - hundreds of thousands
of cubic kilometres worth in the Earth’s crust are being stressed. All that stress causes the
grains in rocks to shift, relative to each other. It’s a bit like switching on a battery, generating
electrical charges that can flow out of the stressed rocks into and through unstressed rocks.
In an article he wrote for The Conversation in 2014, Freund said the charges travelled
incredibly quickly, at up to around 200 metres per second, and they travel far too - easily
metres in lab experiments, and up to tens of kilometres in the field. In the same piece,
he describes the process of charges flowing through the Earth’s crust,
and as they do so they emit ultra-low frequency electromagnetic waves.
Once they reach the Earth’s surface, they produce a range of secondary reactions;
this includes infrared light, massive air ionization, and corona discharges,
which in turn produce ozone and broad-band radio noise. So, where do the lights come from?
Well, producing earthquake lights requires special conditions, which we are only now
slowly beginning to understand. Stress on metamorphic and igneous rocks likely
generates mobile positive charge carriers, which in turn cause the earthquake lights
we’ve observed over time. But for this to happen, there are a few things that need to be present.
Firstly, the makeup of the rock itself must contain many peroxy bond defects - these are
tiny glitches in the rock's atomic structure, where two oxygen atoms are joined in a way
they wouldn’t normally, under stable conditions. You’d find these defects in volcanic rocks which
contain crystals that can fracture under stress. Rock types like basalts and gabbros, which have
tiny defects in their crystals, mean that when a seismic wave hits, electrical charges in the rocks
may be released. This resulting positive charge, or hole, can then move freely through the rock.
In some areas, basalts and gabbros are present in vertical structures called dikes, which formed as
magma cooled along vertical faults and can reach as deep as 97 kilometres underground. These dikes
may even funnel electrical charges along the magma corridor, expediting the process further.
The second condition is that those rocks must be stressed very quickly. Under these conditions,
so much electrical charge can be generated that the rocks enter a rare physical state
known as ‘solid state plasma’. This basically means that although the rock is still solid,
because it’s solid there are way more particles than something like gas,
so you get more charge from a smaller volume; there’s more bang for your buck. As a result,
the tiny particles inside are moving super fast and acting wild, like they would in plasma.
At this point, when the positive or negative charge-carrying particles generated by the rapid
stressing of the rock reach a critical density, they can move through the rocks as plasma.
Once this cloud of electrical charge reaches the Earth’s surface,
it can burst through and discharge into the air like a fireball of energy. And the result? The
luminous earthquake lights! The visibility of the light and the infrared emissions that the
positive charges on rock surfaces emit depend on the charge density and the surface topography.
Ionisation, resulting in visible light, is more probable over peaks and crags,
for example. That’s because these features have a larger surface area, leading to a thinner charge
layer. A thinner layer with the same charge would create a stronger electric field,
increasing the likelihood of electrical breakdown of the air. This would explain why there are more
eyewitness reports of earthquake lights in mountainous regions, or areas at altitude.
Interestingly, when lights appear prior to an earthquake, Robert Thériault of Quebec’s
Ministry of Natural Resources and his colleagues believe this indicates a relation between the
lights and the speed at which the stress deep underground builds up prior to a fault rupture.
Whereas when lights and earthquakes occur at the same time, the team believes the phenomenon
is related to changes in stress that occur as transverse shear waves spread through the crust
as the earthquake strikes. To imagine this effect, picture people in a line holding hands (they are
the atoms in a solid). Now, if one person jumps up, they pull the next person up with them and
so on as it travels down the line like a wave. That is a transverse shear wave, and that’s the
thinking behind why earthquake lights occur during an earthquake, according at least to Thériault.
There are multiple, well thought out theories and countless pieces of evidence of earthquake lights…
So why can scientists still not pin down a single, satisfying explanation? Well, the answer is a
pretty simple one; these phenomena are ultra, ultra-rare and so despite the evidence amassed
over the decades it's extremely hard to test any of these hypotheses in the field; the lights
appear so disproportionately before or during earthquakes, rather than afterwards so you’d have
to get very, very, very lucky to be in the right place at the right time, with all the equipment
ready to roll…and as such, the conditions are virtually impossible to replicate in a lab.
But perhaps earthquake lights could have another purpose…given that they occur
during and prior to the earthquake striking, could they help predict an earthquake before
it even strikes in the first place, like a multi-coloured alarm system?
Earthquake lights have popped up all around the planet,
but the most documented cases have occurred in Italy, Greece, France, Germany, China,
Japan and parts of South America. It makes total sense in theory, right? If you live
in a region prone to earthquakes and you see bright, unexplainable lights in the sky, you
may have some extra time to prepare for what’s to come. The reality, however, is a little different.
Despite our working knowledge of earthquake lights, neither the United States Geological
Survey nor any other scientists have ever accurately predicted a major earthquake. But
surely, if the sky lights up like a Christmas tree, this must be able to help in some way?
Well, opinions are divided. While Freund is working with other scientists on a
global earthquake forecasting system that includes earthquake lights as an indicator,
Bruce Presgrave from the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Centre does not
think earthquake lights are useful signs. He suggested that, simply because of how incredibly
rare they are, they cannot currently be a reliable predictor. Earthquake prediction is actually a
pretty divisive conversation in itself. For more than a century, early warnings of earthquakes have
remained a dream for seismologists. There are records of many different types of signals that
the Earth seems to produce during the weeks, days and hours leading up to a major seismic event.
Yet, nobody has been able to “read” these signals, or say how they may be connected.
In better news, there have been instances where the spectacle has potentially saved lives.
Just before Italy's L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, a man in his kitchen saw bright
flashes of light. Having reportedly read about earthquake lights before,
he took it upon himself to move his family to a safer place, thus avoiding much of the damage they
would have otherwise been exposed to. Similarly, during an earthquake in China in 1976, a geologist
took shelter after seeing earthquake lights, which were followed by the deadly Tangshan quake.
While scientists clamour to explain the reasoning behind these intoxicatingly beautiful displays,
earthquake lights, with their elusiveness and ethereal beauty, continue to captivate both
scientists and the wider world. There are many prevailing theories, but it seems like
the electrical impact on rocks and indeed what’s inside those rocks dotted around that world feels
like the most plausible, and the closest explanation as to what causes earthquake lights.
Whether these luminous preludes may serve as harbingers of impending disaster or not,
Earthquake Lights remind us of the awe-inspiring wonders and untamed mysteries
that still exist within our world, waiting to be illuminated by the light of understanding.