![]() They may also look like small flames flickering or creeping along or near the ground or larger flames emerging from the ground.Ī video taken in China shortly before the 2008 Sichuan earthquake shows luminous clouds floating in the sky. ![]() Other times they resemble glowing spheres floating midair. Sometimes, the lights may appear similar to ordinary lightning, or they may be like a luminous band in the atmosphere akin to polar aurora. “If you saw them nobody would believe what you saw.”Įarthquake lights can take several different forms, according to a chapter on the phenomenon coauthored by Derr and published in the 2019 edition of the Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics. “Forty years ago, it was impossible,” he said. Juan Antonio Lira Cacho, a physics professor at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, who has studied the phenomenon, said cell phone video and the widespread use of security cameras has made studying earthquake lights easier. He said the recent video from Morocco shared online looked like the earthquake lights caught on security cameras during a 2007 quake in Pisco, Peru. “Seeing EQL depends on darkness and other favorability factors,” he explained in an email. He has coauthored several scientific papers on earthquake lights, or EQL. ![]() These outbursts of bright, dancing light in different colors have long puzzled scientists, and there’s still no consensus on what causes them, but they are “definitely real,” said John Derr, a retired geophysicist who used to work at the US Geological Survey. Reports of “earthquake lights,” like the ones seen in videos captured before Friday’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Morocco, go back centuries to ancient Greece.
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