The natural phenomenon of earthquake light
Have you ever been shaken by an earthquake? If so, perhaps you literally clung to others to stay on your feet, and felt very shaken afterwards. It was like that in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a major earthquake in 2011. Afterwards, almost one third of the city’s stressed population left to live in more stable areas.
The photo shows earthquake light during an earthquake in Roumania in 2016
In 2016 there was another large earthquake, about 150 kilometers north of Christchurch in which more than 20 fault systems moved – a world record. That earthquake was in the middle of the night, and security cameras in many places- particularly near the capital Wellington, another 150 km further north still - recorded scattered pale blue flashes of light from the ground, often reflected from the clouds. This seemed new and frightening and apocalyptic – some people thought WW3 had started. When the ground had stopped shaking and the flashes of light had stopped, many people were still very unnerved by the flashes.
Scientists and Classics scholars know of reports of such flashes from the ancient world, and Maori in New Zealand have a 600-year tradition of flashes of light accompanying earthquakes. But it has only been since the advent of security cameras and smartphone video-recorders round 2000 AD, that it has been possible to confirm that these sightings are real, and to research them further.
I have researched and published in this new field. I found the average length of the flash was only half a second. Any kind of rock hosted the light, and only a small proportion of the recorded flashes were from the shaking electrical grid. The most severe harm to humans seemed to be rather mild electrical shocks.
Increasingly, people in the middle of these earthquake flashes have been recording them on their mobile phones, so by the early 2020’s I had I had been able to collect about two hundred videos showing this “earthquake light”, from Chile, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Turkey – all the earthquake-prone regions.
Scientists have been able to produce several geophysical explanations for the light, but the common feature is the production of electric charge from the seismic stresses in earthquakes of Magnitude 6 or more. When electric charge reaches the surface of the ground after production from several tens of meters deep, it interacts with the air to produce white light. This light becomes bluer the further it is from the ground because of a physics principle called Raleigh Scattering. The light is often in the form of hemispherical domes and the size of the dome ranges from a few meters radius to a few hundred meters - as it was in one large Turkish earthquake in 2023.
God seems to have made a world which experiences periodic shake-ups, and the flashes of insight accompanying them may be new and alarming. But don’t run away from the city. Seek a city which cannot be shaken.