A controversial study claims that solar flares may cause earthquakes

Solar flares often disrupt Earth’s upper atmosphere and help fuel spectacular auroras. Now, scientists suggest that the same bursts of solar energy may also influence earthquakes.

When a solar flare blasts toward our planet, it can subtly rearrange charged particles in Earth’s ionosphere, a region in the upper atmosphere filled with electrically charged gas. In a new study, researchers suggest that these changes may slightly alter the electrical forces within the Earth’s crust and affect the stability of faults where earthquakes can occur.

If this connection can be proven, it would link space weather to earthquake risks in a way that scientists do not currently consider. But other researchers caution that the model used in the study, published February 3 in the International Journal of Environmental Plasma Science and Technology, is too simplistic, and that real-world geology may reduce the effect to almost nothing.

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Our planet is full of naturally generated electricity. In particular, high-pressure cracks in the Earth’s crust contain pockets of water so hot and pressurized that it is neither liquid nor gaseous. This supercritical fluid is teeming with charged ions, which means the slits act like a capacitor, storing electrical energy.

These cracks in the Earth’s crust, or faults, are also prime areas that trigger earthquakes, because they mark where tectonic plates collide and move, building up mechanical energy that can lead to earthquakes.

In the new study, the researchers created a model that treated the Earth’s crust and the ionosphere — a charged layer located 250 miles (402 kilometers) above Earth — as two ends of a giant leaky battery.

They then connected the shell’s “capacitor” to the ionosphere with an electric field.

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The scientists used their model to predict that when electrically charged particles from a solar flare hit the Earth, they would transport electrons in the ionosphere downward, concentrating them at lower altitudes and forming a layer of negative charge. The model showed that this charge, in turn, increases the electrostatic force affecting the charges in the Earth’s crust, leading to changes in pressure. The researchers believe that these pressure changes are comparable to other forces that affect fault stability, such as gravity or tides.

Essentially, an increase in electrostatic force in the crust translates into more pressure on the surrounding crust, forcing the fault to move and triggering an earthquake.

It’s hard to test

The researchers point out that the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake in Japan supports their model’s results, as the earthquake overlapped with strong solar flare activity. However, validating the crust-to-ionosphere connection is difficult in practice.

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For one thing, the USGS has long maintained that earthquakes do not follow the sun’s 11-year solar cycle in any clear and frequent way.

There is also the problem of coincidence. Solar flares and earthquakes are fairly common, so there will by chance be some overlap between the two types of events, even if they don’t necessarily affect each other.

Other researchers pointed out that the study model does not reflect the full complexities of the Earth’s crust.

“The proposed model is greatly simplified,” said Viktor Novikov, a geophysicist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study. He added that the researchers did not fully take into account the resistance of many rock layers to conduct electricity, which could lead to the suppression of the electric field before it contributes to the earthquake. “The observational results do not support the proposed idea,” Novikov told Live Science in an email.

Despite this, researchers continue to search for a link between space weather and plate tectonics, no matter how precise.

For now, the study is best viewed as a proposed path that can be tested with better observations and deeper analysis, the researchers noted.

Whether the Sun can reliably overcome Earth’s imperfections remains an open question and a reminder of a basic scientific rule: correlation does not equal causation.

Mizuno, A., Kao, M., and Umino, K. (2026). Possible mechanism of ionospheric anomalies to trigger earthquakes – electrostatic coupling between the ionosphere and crust and the resulting electrical forces acting within the crust. International Journal of Environmental Plasma Science and Technology, 20(1), e01003. https://doi.org/10.34343/ijpest.2026.20.e01003

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