• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Earthquake Lights Have Been Reported In Morocco, But What Are they?

September 14, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains on Friday, September 8, 2023, making it the biggest to hit the country in 123 years. Some who witnessed the disaster first-hand have reported seeing flashing lights shortly before the earthquake began, and it’s a phenomenon that isn’t unfamiliar to scientists.

Earthquake lights is the name given to a range of weather phenomena that have been reported in association with earthquakes, including sheet lightning, balls of light, streamers, and steady glow, reports the United States Geological Survey. Despite having been reported for centuries, they are rare, and often unexplained, but there are some leading theories as to why we sometimes see strange lights shortly before, or during, an earthquake.

Advertisement

“These luminous phenomena occur in different shapes, forms and colors, as diffuse airglows in the sky, as sudden outbursts of light from the ground, as cold flames licking up ankle-high, as luminous objects described as fiery pillars rising from the ground, as glowing balls floating through the air, and other rarer manifestations,” reads a 2019 paper on the underlying mechanism of earthquake lights by physicist Friedemann Freund, who was once based at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

Doubts surrounding the legitimacy of earthquake lights were dampened following the first photos, which Freund says were obtained during the Matsushiro earthquake swarm near Nagano in Japan between 1965 and 1967. Now that surveillance, dashcam, and doorbell cameras are becoming increasingly common, we have all sorts of ways to capture strange phenomena on film, making it easier to study.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Footage from the devastating earthquake in Morocco does appear to show flashing lights, and similar footage has been obtained from the Aquila earthquake in Italy in 2009, and the 2021 earthquake in Acapulco, Mexico. While some have suggested that tectonic activity could disturb electrical lines causing earthquake-associated light shows, it was Freund’s idea that instead, the source lay in the Earth’s crust.

Advertisement

Earthquakes generate mechanical stress for the Earth’s crust as tectonic forces push plates together – in the case of Morocco, this was the African plate moving north and colliding with the Eurasian plate. It’s possible this stress generates electric charge carriers that can move through the crust to create electric currents, and when these reach the surface, they ionize the air and create luminous phenomena similar to lightning.

The exact mechanism behind earthquake lights remains up for debate, and given that the light shows that have fallen under the umbrella term often look very different, it may be that there’s more than one legitimate explanation. Understanding how and why they occur could be pivotal in the way we predict tectonic activity, as scientists are always on the lookout for ways to pre-empt events like the earthquake in Morocco in the hope that we can save lives.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Analysis-Diverse boards to pick the next Boston and Dallas Fed bank chiefs
  4. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It

Source Link: Earthquake Lights Have Been Reported In Morocco, But What Are they?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Saturn And Neptune Will Reach Their Brightest In Days – And Look For Saturn’s Temporary Beauty Spot
  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version