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‘Blue lights’ flash in sky moments before Morocco earthquake
- sbate1987 3y ago[dead]
- revscat 3y agoThis phenomenon is common enough that it has a Wikipedia entry [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light
- uoaei 3y agoWow, some of the examples on YouTube are quite spectacular. Here's an example that shows the peculiar blue color pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjqxiSxhNCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjqxiSxhNCw
- jrockway 3y agoI think these are just electrical infrastructure shorting out. It's pretty obvious for the ones that occur at ground level on the horizon. The cloud lighting up blue is something obscured at ground level but reflected by the clouds. Similar effect as "power flashes" from tornadoes; tornado blows on power lines, power lines short out, blue arc is produced, everything is bright blue for miles for a bit.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoI don’t think there was electrical infrastructure in 869 CE.
- 1234letshaveatw 3y ago[flagged]
- lunarimiso 3y agoNor did substantial evidence
- dboreham 3y agoPossible. A few years ago a 33KV line came down onto the interstate near me, very early in the morning as I was heading out onto the road a couple of miles away and over a hill. From my viewpoint it looked like an alien abduction scene. In fact that was my best guess until I crested the hill and started to understand what had happened.
- ethbr1 3y agoI've never seen a high voltage line come down, but I did see a residential neighborhood distribution line start arcing. The color and sound were unlike anything I've ever seen or heard. From memory, something like a blue'd lightning bolt without thunder + the sound of 100 giant hornets shifted down in frequency. If you've ever seen welding light in person, imagine that intensified a couple orders of magnitude.
- Aachen 3y agoThe wind makes that it probably doesn't come across as as loud as it was, but something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNaIChPiiww&t=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNaIChPiiww&t=11
- ethbr1 3y agoYup! That's missing some of the low frequencies I remember, but captures the mid-high. I guess "incredibly loud sheet of paper tearing" would have been another description.
- bluescrn 3y agoSounds like it'd be intense enough to illuminate the base of low clouds at night, which would explain (most of?) what seems to be visible in that video.
- hadlock 3y agoYeah we would see these in Texas during snow storms. That blue green flash is typical for transformers. I took a video many years ago (with a consumer grade camera, which were terrible back then, especially in low light), you can see the flash just after the 1:50 mark https://youtu.be/UXf2N1iQ0Wc?si=d6QwBqqY9j1xl_7R&t=109 https://youtu.be/UXf2N1iQ0Wc?si=d6QwBqqY9j1xl_7R&t=109
- Aachen 3y agoHow do you know that's transformers? And doesn't this shut them down / why is it so regular that you knew to start filming?
- hadlock 3y agoYou see them blow during thunderstorms driving down the highway or across a bridge. Dallas gets an alarming amount of thunder during the summer as squall lines sweep across the state every week or two. I would imagine this was a cascade failure. I was reading a book of watching a movie and saw them out of the corner of my eye and finally decided to start filming.
- dekhn 3y agoWithout commenting on this specific set of videos, it is already generally considered established that there are bright sky flashes before earthquakes that are not related to electrical infrastructure, but rather, natural in origin.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoOh yeah they are 100% electrical arcs.
- jscottnz 3y agoWow. I was watching this, then looked at the title… what the?! I live there!
- beepbopboopp 3y agoThis is crazy. I vividly remember being a child during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake (Los Angeles) and driving with my father (who had to pick me up from a friends) and seeing the sky more of a flashing fuschia color.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoI was in the same quake and the sky looked glowy green to me. But I was out by the Paramount Ranch so less densely populated than most areas.
- dylan604 3y agoExcept, aren't these occurring during/after the shaking, not moments before. It really hurts my brain to try to even get to the level of thinking some people can just accept as a-okay
- randomdata 3y agoHow is that not transformer explosions? It looks exactly the same to my eye. https://youtu.be/q1_ZtCXLnes https://youtu.be/q1_ZtCXLnes
- wackget 3y ago50% of that video is waiting for something to happen.
- fredoliveira 3y agoIt is a 39 second video. You'll live to see it in its entirety.
- twobitshifter 3y agoEven in that one you can see some electrical equipment blowing at 08:47
- wheelerof4te 3y agoCommon enough but it still lacks an explanation. They don't know what causes these flashes. That is the point.
- mholt 3y agoWhy are these flashes definitely not transformer stations or similar? Seems like an obvious answer from my armchair at least. Earthquake wave travels from epicenter to camera, and on its way it shorts out power infrastructure.
- Izkata 3y agoThe wikipedia page mentions occurrences in the years 869 and 1888.
- almostnormal 3y agoEven back at those times earth quakes (2 miles/s) were a bit slower than the speed of light.
- Izkata 3y agoI don't know about 1888, but I'm fairly sure that electrical infrastructure didn't exist over a thousand years ago.
- lunarimiso 3y agoWell, with that attitude it didn't
- wheelerof4te 3y agoIt did exist before the Younger Drias period, though. Atlantians used it to power their space ships.
- 3y ago
- skymast 3y ago[dead]
- thrownaway561 3y agoIts' just a transformer blowing up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- macinjosh 3y agoWhy does it blow up _before_ the quake?
- 0xDEF 3y agoMaybe the quake caused the arching powerlines in the distance before the quake reached the location of the camera?
- genter 3y agoIt takes time for the earthquake to propagate, much slower than the speed of light.
- mcpackieh 3y agoEarthquake lights have been reported minutes, hours, even days before the quake, and also after them. It's not transformers blowing up, although that also happens and can also light up the sky. The light seems to somehow be caused by massive increases or releases of stress in crystalline bedrock, possibly piezoelectrically in quartz, or similar mechanisms.
- rich_sasha 3y agoThere was a paper posted here on HBO that claimed some correlation between cosmic waves and seismic activity. At face value correlation was very strong. One feature was the asynchronicity - one of the variables had to be lagged, I can't remember which one. Not sure what to make it but possibly related to lights in the sky.
- Anechoic 3y ago
- nicechianti 3y ago[dead]
- jnxx 3y agoJust a note, there are warning that the earthquake is used to spread disinformation.
- drewda 3y agoFrom a New York Times article yesterday about a different natural disaster (the wildfire in Maui): > Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/us/politics/china-disinformation-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/us/politics/china-disinfo...
- matonias 3y agoA little rapid but a warning is there.. so to seem!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anonymousiam 3y agoThis phenomena has a few possible explanations: One likely possibility is that power lines are shorting because they've become "guitar strings" and are touching each other while vibrating from the quake. Another interesting possibility is that some of the underground rocks may be exhibiting the piezoelectric effect, generating high voltage electricity when squeezed, and the resulting sparks are observed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity
- xattt 3y agoNot to be a clever clogs about it, but the same pattern of blue flashes are often seen in significant freezing rain conditions when transformers or wires flash over. I believe the possibility of a piezoelectric effect, but the specific blue colour is what makes me think of a power lines versus fracturing rocks. You can see that sections of the grid flicker in line with the transformers shorting out. However, there is a distinct short white flash at the 12 second mark, before the longer blue flashes start which I would presume has a different cause.
- namenottaken1 3y agoI think that the "specific blue color" you see is explained with the composition of the atmosphere (nitrogen and oxygen mostly). The origin of such phenomenon won't change the colors (as long as it doesn't contribute with another elements).
- hinkley 3y agoThe 'specific blue color' you get from crunching life savers to see the piezoelectric effect is due to excitation of nitrogen, so yeah.
- jjulius 3y ago>One likely possibility is that power lines are shorting because they've become "guitar strings" and are touching each other while vibrating from the quake. From the article, emphasis mine: >The intriguing bursts of light were captured on CCTV at a home in Agadir approximately three minutes before the disaster.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sgt 3y agoIs this related to ball lightning? My mother witnessed that once - a glowing ball slowly moving through the kitchen.
- PedroBatista 3y agoThat might have been a tab of acid or some special mushrooms added to the rice.
- aaomidi 3y agoBall lighting will never cease to fascinate me. The deniers vehemently deny, and outright insult people’s experiences. The people who say they’ve experienced will be adamant that they have. Honestly, I hope it’s real and we find a way to replicate it only because it’s so cool.
- ChrisClark 3y agoIt seems like they're is a lot of things that polarize like that. Like near death experiences. People say that their death experience of reality was so much more real than ours, like when we wake from a normal dream and intuitively know we are in reality. That our everyday reality is just a simple simulation compared to true reality. To them it is completely obvious and real. That this life is a mere shadow, a simulation. Nothing will convince them otherwise. But we (general public without that experience) can't possibly believe it, come up with many theories on what the brain is doing. I've never experienced ball lightning but I can believe the ones who have most of the time. Death experiences, I can't even imagine something more real than my current reality, how could I possibly start to believe it? Despite how obvious it is to those who went through it, it's impossible for me to even begin imagining something like that.
- jmstfv 3y agoThat's akin to a psychedelic experience: that reality feels more real than the everyday reality we live in, which, in comparison, comes across as quite shallow.
- hackerfactor1 3y agoTriboluminescence? Could it be the quake breaking light-emitting crystals?
- doodlebugging 3y agoWhich rocks or minerals fluoresce in the ultraviolet to near ultraviolet end of the spectrum? I'd have to look that up but it could help understand the origin of the lights that are observed which can't be tied to infrastructure issues, weather, etc.
- divbzero 3y agoThe 23:08 timestamp on the video is 3 minutes before the earthquake struck at 23:11 [1]. If we understood this phenomenon well enough to be predictive, it would be much longer than the few seconds that current early warnings [2] provide. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Marrakesh-Safi_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Marrakesh-Safi_earthquake [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...
- netsharc 3y agoBut how accurate is this device's timestamp? Even with NTP, there could be a lot of skew if it only syncs once in a while and has a bad internal clock otherwise. The font of the timestamp/label is familiar though, so it's probably a cheap Chinese device, and I'd guess they're so widely used that they've managed to make the clock to be quite accurate.
- Buttons840 3y agoDo you suspect that the time was wrong and the footage shown was actually shot during the 6.8 earthquake? Wouldn't the camera shaking make it clear when the earthquake was happening?
- dredmorbius 3y agoP-waves can take several seconds to travel from the visible horizon (or beyond, as transformer explosions are visible for a long distance) to your location. If the camera is on the far-side of the transformer from the epicenter, then it could take from 5 to 30 or more seconds for ground shocks to be apparent. Speed of travel through solid rock is about 10,000 km/h, slower through softer or more disrupted geology.
- smusamashah 3y agoFrom the video it looks like spark from some electric thing blowing up. You can see city lights around that spark going dark right after that flash. I think because earth quake travels as a wave, it might have shaken up that area first causing something to blow up.
- JoblessWonder 3y agoSorry to burst everyone's bubble... but if you look at the source video you can see that a large neighborhood loses power. Looks like it is just power lines going down or transformers blowing. https://twitter.com/Eyaaaad/status/1700621598456234148 https://twitter.com/Eyaaaad/status/1700621598456234148
- xwdv 3y agoYou bursted very few bubbles. Most people here would have already guessed the “blue lights” were just transformers.
- JoblessWonder 3y agoI'm going to be honest... I was slightly concerned with the amount of people who seemed to think it was legit.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- runeofdoom 3y agoOh, sure, give us the boring, mundane explanation that makes sense. What's next? Claiming that sprites, and elves (and probably even Steve) aren't real either? /s
- kyledrake 3y agoThe Sun, like the Express and the Daily Star, are "bat boy" quality UK tabloids and should probably just get blocked from being posted on HN. They were also reporting (incorrectly) that "world war one diseases" were spreading at Burning Man, and there's an article in the Daily Star this morning that alleges the "ancient city of Sodom was blown up by an atomic weapon". These are not reliable sources of information, please help me in preventing them from receiving more ad revenue by not aggregating their junk news. Similarly to the scientific method, sources of information should be appropriately vetted based on past performance. Slightly off topic but I've pondered making a plugin that blocks and removes certain "news" sources of my choice from loading on my browser and showing in news aggregators and search engine results. I can avoid them on my desktop and on HN easily because I see the URL preview, but it's much harder on my phone. Someone below has also pointed out that most of these UK tabloids are noted in the Wikipedia list of potentially unreliable sources https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Potentially_unreliable_sources https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Potentially_unreli...
- junon 3y agoDespite that being true, "earthquake lights" are a real phenomenon and do indeed have varied theories with no proven explanation. They have been captured and documented, etc.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoI've always gone for "sudden stressing of rock causing piezoelectric effect on a rather large scale that ionises gases in the atmosphere" as my Just So story of why.
- all2 3y agoThe earth has massive electrical fields running in it. I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of electrical discharge occurred between the ground and sky during an even that breaks conduction of said currents.
- HWR_14 3y ago
- foreverobama 3y ago[dead]
- bodelecta 3y agoIt's not some phenomenon, it's shitty sensationalism from the UK's worst "newspaper". I'm still surprised it didn't go the same was as the news of the world. The UK would be a better place without media like this including the people who work for them.
- dathinab 3y ago> It's not some phenomenon, I would say probably depending on the kind of earthquake and sediment/ground/stone it can involve a bunch of friction not just in the crust which could create electric charge which could lead to ground to sky/cloud lightning which would make it a (normal non mystical) natural phenomena if you look at this random googled photo of ground to sky lightning (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/567172146806422809/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/567172146806422809/) it color and form wise can "close enough" match the observed behavior
- chasing 3y ago"In sky" is a weird way to describe something that's clearly "on the ground."
- mountainboy 3y ago1. there is a an electromagnetic connection between the sun and the earth. 2. lightning is constantly equalizing voltage from space to earth. 3. earthquakes are probably caused by electrical imbalances, not the reverse. 4. most everyone here probably will deny 1..3 above and downvote me to oblivion. 5. read Christian Birkeland's biography. Or Hannes Alfven. then come back.
- mountainboy 3y ago1. there is a an electromagnetic connection between the sun and the earth. 2. lightning is constantly equalizing voltage from space to earth. 3. earthquakes are probably caused by electrical imbalances, not the reverse. 4. most everyone here probably will deny 1..3 above. 5. read Christian Birkeland's biography. Or Hannes Alfven. then come back.
- m3kw9 3y agoAnything to get the /UFO guys pants wet
- ericfrazier 3y agoLived in FL and electrical infrastructure going boom and lighting blue was common during hurricanes
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- padjo 3y agoWhat’s next articles from the weekly world news? Has elvis been sighted again?
- _8j50 3y agoWas just reading about this the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboluminescence To those blaming it in power infra, I have not see any proof if that, especially before the actual shock.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoFor those that don't know, "The Sun" is not exactly a trusted news source, it's just another red top.
- mr_spothawk 3y agoLooks like electric universe to me. https://thehonestscientist.com/electric-universe/ https://thehonestscientist.com/electric-universe/