Lori Dingler | Mysterious lights in the sky after earthquakes are real but we still don’t know exactly why – Times-Standard

I enjoy hearing people narrate their experiences of the earthquake. No matter how old or young you are, the theme always stirs up memories.

Larry Carstedt, an old friend and fellow emergency response, commented after a column last week about the 1992 Cape Mendocino earthquake: “What about those lights? What caused them?” Good topic for a column that I thought about and promised to address the question today.

“Luminosity” is the name for the optical phenomena observed after earthquakes. It is not new. Descriptions of earthquake-accompanying light are mentioned in Aristotle’s “Meteorologica” that dates back to the third century BC. The lights were included in the early groups of earthquakes published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the observations coincide with the feeling of vibration, but some were reported seconds to weeks before the earthquake, and soon after.

Earthquake lights were no longer favored in the instrument age when seismology shifted towards seismic analyzes of earthquakes. But observations continued during earthquakes from all over the world, including the Great Tangshan China earthquake in 1976 and the Napa earthquake in California in 2014. The only common denominator in all reports is that the earthquakes occurred at night. After that, the observations vary widely.

In April of 1992, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake occurred in bright daylight, so luminosity was not reported. But the aftershocks M6.5 and 6.6 provided the ideal conditions. Both occurred in the early morning hours of April 26 and produced strong earth tremors in northern Mendocino County and South Humboldt. In the days and weeks after the earthquakes, I spoke to several people about their experiences, and when it came to nocturnal aftershocks, they often mentioned seeing lights.

There were different types of notes. Some have mentioned bright flashes of blue and white light, like an old-fashioned camera bulb that goes out. Many of these transformers can be attached to the blasting and bending of electrical lines. This was the common response from the experts to flashing notes when I was in school. But much of the 1992 reports were from remote areas as there were no transformers to detonate them. And blue and white were not the only color observed.

The strongest earthquake was in 92 aftershocks in sparsely populated areas. The night was clear, the electricity went out, and some people chose to sleep outside due to the many aftershocks. Many have described a glow traveling across the sky that appears to coincide with the passage of the seismic waves. This may seem a strange idea at first glance. Seismic waves travel in solid ground, right? Yes, but piezoelectric waves (P waves) like sound can travel in any liquid or gas. If not, we would not be able to speak to each other because the sounds are nothing more than pressure waves generated by our larynx and received by our ears.

For a seismic wave, the Earth’s surface is nothing but an interface between two different materials. The waves won’t move at the same speed, but P waves can still travel through the air. If you’ve heard a very deep rumble as the earthquake waves approach you, you have experienced this phenomenon. Most of the frequencies of seismic waves are below the ability of your ear to detect, but a little bit of the wave energy may register at the lowest frequency of your ear’s range. There is no doubt that large earthquakes produce vibrations in the atmosphere. Vibrations mean that currents and currents sometimes cause light.

The other notes in 1992 were very different. A woman in Ferndale described a glowing orange bubble falling from her backyard while shaking. Some people saw bursts of orange glows in the distances. The most bizarre description came from a fisherman many miles off the coast that night. Both aftershocks were felt by M6.5 and 6.6. P-waves travel in water as well as air, and he said it felt like the boat had suddenly fallen a foot or two. Then something wonderful happened. The water started to glow. The glow increased even after a few minutes it was in the middle of a glowing watery ocean. The glow lasted for over an hour before slowly starting to fade away.

Various phenomena are likely to contribute to the occurrence of earthquake lights including sources located in the rupture zone, near the surface and in the atmosphere. Fault rupture is a dynamic process that produces high temperatures and pressures as the fault grows. A 2014 paper published by Thériault and colleagues in Seismology Research Letters suggests that complex chemical reactions take place in that environment, producing outward-flowing currents, some of which reach the Earth’s surface. The currents may be strong enough to ionize the air and excite the emissions in the visible range.

Another known source of light emission is the result of thermal heating when a landslide occurs. The temperatures called landslide light, by frictional heating as the slide block moves, produces light emissions. There were dozens of slides produced by the aftershocks of the 1992 earthquake and some mild observations may have come from that source.

I don’t think any of these explanations work for the Hunter’s report. But here’s one that might be. Bioluminescence is produced by living things that emit light. You may have seen this evening walk along the shore during the red tide. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of photos of scary water waves breaking off. The glow can last for hours and is produced by the millions of microorganisms excited by the wave’s vibrations. If the waves can cause bioluminescence, it is not an exaggeration to think about the possibility of seismic waves as well.

Earthquake lights are difficult to study quantitatively. Most of them are very short and by the time you see them, they are gone. Perhaps in the era of early earthquake warning, some young, sharp seismologists will develop a detection system that can quickly turn on in the few seconds before the vibration arrives and we can really start dealing with the flashing.

Note: For anyone wanting to dig deeper, here’s an up-to-date summary of gloss studies at https://bit.ly/3tgO8LS

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