‘Blue lights’ flash in sky moments before Morocco earthquake

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/23911027/mystery-blue-lights-morocco-earthquake/

by svenfaw • 3 years ago

171 166 3 years ago

thesun.co.uk

revscat• 3 years ago

This phenomenon is common enough that it has a Wikipedia entry [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light

uoaei• 3 years ago

Wow, 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

jrockway• 3 years ago

I 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.

jscottnz• 3 years ago

Wow. I was watching this, then looked at the title… what the?! I live there!

beepbopboopp• 3 years ago

This 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.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

Except, 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• 3 years ago

How is that not transformer explosions?

It looks exactly the same to my eye. https://youtu.be/q1_ZtCXLnes

wackget• 3 years ago

50% of that video is waiting for something to happen.

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

Even in that one you can see some electrical equipment blowing at 08:47

wheelerof4te4• 3 years ago

Common enough but it still lacks an explanation. They don't know what causes these flashes.

That is the point.

mholt• 3 years ago

Why 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.

VincentEvans• 3 years ago

If they wanted to create a clickbaity ominous sounding article that hints at otherworldly, mysterious, or alien nature of the observed and otherwise fairly easy to explain phenomena associated with a dramatic event to drive traffic to their site - they could make up various claims.

thrownaway561• 3 years ago

Its' just a transformer blowing up.

macinjosh• 3 years ago

Why does it blow up _before_ the quake?

0xDEF• 3 years ago

Maybe the quake caused the arching powerlines in the distance before the quake reached the location of the camera?

genter• 3 years ago

It takes time for the earthquake to propagate, much slower than the speed of light.

Anechoic• 3 years ago

It could be in response to the p-wave, which arrives before the higher-amplitude shear wave.

gennarro• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light

First recorded incident was in the year 869

elpool2• 3 years ago

Yeah but this video is clearly just transformers blowing. A block of street lights goes out the exact same time as one of the flashes.

fennecfoxy3• 3 years ago

Because we're wont to trust people's opinions and perceptions from the year 869 ha ha.

I hear there's a recorded incident of a dead man who got buried in a cave and then resurrected and walked out of the cave some time later.

jnxx2• 3 years ago

That's entirely possible, as speeds are about several thousand meters per second, and differ significantly between several types of waves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismic_wave

doodlebugging4• 3 years ago

This was my first guess though I have to wonder what the weather was just before the quake and how this camera is oriented relative to the quake epicenter.

It has the same intensity of a transformer shorting out and the color is very similar but it also looks like local lightning strikes along a line of storms.

As a geophysicist, I am in the crowd that believes that earthquake lights are a real phenomena related to the earthquake and they may eventually be utilized as a predictive tool. The technology is not mature enough to be able to understand their method of generation and the sensor network that would be necessary to use them as a predictive tool is too sparsely distributed.

I wonder whether every earthquake has a spectral signature but the only ones we are able to see directly are those that dip deeply enough into the blue end of the spectrum to fall within the limits of our own vision.

Perhaps a UV detector array deployed in an active region could help us understand whether we miss these signals because we can't see them unless the quake is powerful enough to cause a wide-bandwidth event that bleeds into the visible spectrum. This may also help explain why some animals that can see UV or spectral components outside our own visual limits are disturbed before earthquakes. Maybe they can see these signals and the combination of seeing these signals and feeling ground motion precursors could trigger the animal behavior that has been observed globally.

I think this is an interesting problem that requires further study.

robocat2• 3 years ago

quake epicenter

An epicentre is just a human generated approximate coordinate - it has little to with the physical quake itself.

jnxx2• 3 years ago

Just a note, there are warning that the earthquake is used to spread disinformation.

drewda• 3 years ago

From 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-disinfo...

738362628• 3 years ago

You don't need bad actors for a disinfo campaign. There's a certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media, and they're fairly common. I've seen it a few times now and it's crazy. They'll make things up that could jepordize people's lives for the likes, I guess.

Also, having seen FEMA at work first hand, they are approximately useless. I could see a lot of anger happening organically.

bboygravity• 3 years ago

Well that's very ironic comong from the NYT, lol.

glonq• 3 years ago

I have a friend who claims that the Maui wildfires were fake. I intend on slapping my friend upside his stupid head next time I see him.

dredmorbius7• 3 years ago

Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, got her start investigating crisis communications and disinformation which would emerge during crises, at the University of Colorado Boulder.

See: <https://fsi.stanford.edu/events/beyond-%E2%80%9Cbots-and-tro...>

She discusses this in some of her online presentations on YouTube. If you're interested in those, I'd suggest looking prior to ~2020 and ~2016 specifically as later discussion gets more caught up in COVID-19 related and Trump-related topics. Which are interesting in their own right but not the sources I had in mind.

(I'll see if I can locate a representative video, there's a lot to comb through.)

matonias• 3 years ago

A little rapid but a warning is there.. so to seem!

anonymousiam• 3 years ago

This 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

xattt• 3 years ago

Not 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• 3 years ago

I 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).

jjulius• 3 years 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.

orwin• 3 years ago

3 minutes before the seism hit agadir, or three minutes before the seism happened? Because light is way faster than seismic waves.

burnte• 3 years ago

Yeah, the article was pretty clear about it, it was absolutely before the quake hit the surface by a significant margin. Fascinating.

doodlebugging4• 3 years ago

I was wondering how well synchronized the camera clock is with the clock used to establish event timing in picking the earthquake arrivals.

There are several seconds between my smart watch time and the network time displayed on my workstation. There are several minutes between those two times which I consider accurate and the time displayed on the battery powered clock on the wall. There are hours between those times and the time displayed on my coffee-maker.

Where does the camera get its time stamp?

seiferteric• 3 years ago

Then why does there appear to be an entire block whose lights go out at about 10 seconds into the video (about in the center)?

EdwardDiego2• 3 years ago

Yeah, the fact that they've often been observed immediately prior to a rupture makes me think piezoelectric effect.

finikytou• 3 years ago

a weapon is also a possible explanation until proven false.

US government already experienced with weather and climate and even in SF fog where they were successful spreading pathogens. why isnt something that could be considered?

wheelerof4te4• 3 years ago

Whatever it is, it has happened to the Philippines now.

These huge earthquakes are becoming more and more common ever since Turkey.

Hate to be that guy, but either the Earth decided to completely renew it's surface or someone is playing God. And they don't have to be human, if you know what I mean.

hinkley2• 3 years ago

Natural Gas fracking is destabilizing plates, by design.

ziknard• 3 years ago

I do not believe this perspective is supported by evidence.

sgt• 3 years ago

Is this related to ball lightning? My mother witnessed that once - a glowing ball slowly moving through the kitchen.

PedroBatista• 3 years ago

That might have been a tab of acid or some special mushrooms added to the rice.

aaomidi• 3 years ago

Ball 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.

dathinab3• 3 years ago

I think there is a non small chance that it was ground to sky lightning cause by electric charged caused through the friction/pressured accumulated just before the quack erupted.

When googling for images for ground to sky lightning video cameras often perceive it in similar colors as what was seen on the video, the form also somewhat matches if you consider that the bottom isn't visible (covered by houses) from the distance.

hackerfactor1• 3 years ago

Triboluminescence? Could it be the quake breaking light-emitting crystals?

doodlebugging4• 3 years ago

Which 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• 3 years ago

The 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...

netsharc• 3 years ago

But 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.

Buttons8402• 3 years ago

Do 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?

smusamashah• 3 years ago

From 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.

JoblessWonder2• 3 years ago

Sorry 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

xwdv2• 3 years ago

You bursted very few bubbles. Most people here would have already guessed the “blue lights” were just transformers.

JoblessWonder2• 3 years ago

I'm going to be honest... I was slightly concerned with the amount of people who seemed to think it was legit.

runeofdoom• 3 years ago

Oh, 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?

doublerabbit• 3 years ago

well, they were real the last time I took DMT.

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

Scrolling with the scrubber makes it extremely obvious

Taniwha• 3 years ago

During the Loma Prieta quake I heard about it on the radio (I was driving) before it arrived .... light from electrical discharges is always going to arrive before the shockwave so the 'before' part is not at all surprising.

The cause of course could easily be from the electricity distribution infrastructure, or from some piezo/etc effect from the earth moving - it's likely not presaging the quake itself

dredmorbius7• 3 years ago

Compare to a known transformer explosion in NYC:

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nMcFOfouVk4>

Earthquake P waves travel at roughly 10,000 kph (6,700 mph), and will take about 9 seconds to travel 50 km (30 miles), a typical distance to the horizon.

During an earthquake, transformers may be disrupted over a wide region, and will be seen as precursor lights from regions further from the epicenter. Despite that, they're a human and technological phenomenon, not a natural and geological one.

tim333• 3 years ago

It does look rather like the incident in NYC https://youtu.be/OHoQguzMJBQ?t=12

kyledrake4• 3 years ago

The 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_unreli...

junon• 3 years ago

Despite 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.

EdwardDiego2• 3 years ago

I'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.

HWR_14• 3 years ago

Probably because the vast majority of people on the internet don't know anything about British newspapers or their quality.

Sharlin2• 3 years ago

I'd say The Sun and Daily Mail are (in)famous enough that knowing their worthlessness is essentially media criticism 101. Certainly on a site like HN where the participants aren't "the vast majority of people on the internet".

mdp20215• 3 years ago

I'd like to have a survey done, "What would you associate to the expression 'Page 3'".

the_af2• 3 years ago

"bat boy" quality

Was bat boy an invention of Weekly World News? If so, WWW was satirical, with intentionally bizarre made-up stories. People were supposed to read it for the comedy, but I guess a version of Poe's Law applies and some people took it seriously. I remember one article of WWW claimed Saddam Hussein was hiding in a submarine in an American lake -- and I bet some people believed this.

The Sun I imagine pretends to be a serious newspaper though.

glitchc• 3 years ago

submarine in a lake

Made me spill my coffee!

labrador2• 3 years ago

I come from a poor working class area so believe me people didn't get the comedy. It was an early version of "muh space lasers started the Maui fire"

jeffwass• 3 years ago

I had some fun back in College in the 90’s cutting out articles from Weekly World News and tacking them to the bulletin board just outside the physics library. This board was full of cutouts of interesting real science articles, regularly thumbtacked by the librarians.

One example WWW headline was something like “Scientists discover black hole the size of a head of a pin in the Nevada desert.”

kromem• 3 years ago

Actually, there was more to it than satire and comedy.

WWN was made into what it was by the same guy as was behind the creation of the National Enquirer as a tabloid - Gene Pope.

A graduate of MIT in just 3 years, when he bought up the Enquirer he'd been employed in the CIA's psychological warfare department immediately prior.

This was in 1952, the same year the CIA and other military groups met to discuss the increase in UFO sightings (like the ones making front page news over Washington DC that same year), and started project Blue Book.

Suddenly Gene Pope buys up a struggling periodical, turns it into a tabloid putting stories of UFO sightings next to sightings of Elvis being alive. This was expanded in 1979 to the WWN, where the paired stories became even more outrageous (Bat Boy).

For decades the mere mention of UFOs was typically associated with tin foil hats, and was the result of a likely intentional domestic propaganda effort that took on legs of its own as successful tabloids in their own right.

stevev• 3 years ago

Poor suggestion based on articles that you disagree with and how it was presented. I don’t understand why people jump to censorship as a solution to their own biases.

If you read the article, they’re only reporting on the light. No explanation was given. Are you now denying it never happened or that you just don’t like the outlet; since they’re two different things.

kyledrake4• 3 years ago

You think a user's ability to have a choice in where their content comes from is censorship? Do you think the block feature on Twitter is censorship as well?

HN is not an "everything goes" platform, it has specific guidelines and policies designed to drive a higher quality conversation and higher quality sources of information, which is one of the reasons it stands out as a good aggregator for me. And I'm of the opinion that UK tabloid spam doesn't meet the criteria, not because of their political bent (I don't know what it is *), but because of their consistently wobbly and expedient relationship with the truth when it happens to be incompatible with their business model.

* I'm guessing faux conservative, since at least one of them is owned by Rupert Murdoch, same owner of the famously high quality Fox News who just lost a high profile $787.5 million defamation lawsuit for false reporting on voting machines.

mdp20215• 3 years ago

I am not sure, many times in front of The Onion¹ I get the drive "I should post this on HN".

Maybe we could have a parallel twin site for non serious "news"?

Edit: ¹or other sources mixed with the serious ones: for example, the pages from Andy Borowitz on The NewYorker. This just came out in real time... https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-calls-...

shaoonb• 3 years ago

I remember a while back there was a Twitter account called "Hacker News Onion". My favourite headline: Developer accused of unreadable code refuses to comment.

geocrasher• 3 years ago

    Maybe we could have a parallel twin site for non serious "news"?

https://fark.com

Yep, it's still around

mnd9992• 3 years ago

Wikipedia has such a list of sources it considers reliable and unreliable, and The Sun is very much in the unreliable category.

kyledrake4• 3 years ago

Could you post the link? I would actually love to have this as a resource.

mdp20215• 3 years ago

Wikipedia has such a list of sources it considers reliable and unreliable

Russell suggests to check where Wikipedia ranks in that list.

Well, the "credibility discrimination problem" is much easier on some sources (the "Rockstar ate my Hamster" headlines runners for example).

mcpackieh2• 3 years ago

The Sun [...] were also reporting (incorrectly) that Ebola was spreading at Burning Man

Can you substantiate this claim? I'm searching for such an article from The Sun and can't find anything. I have found numerous stories about the burning man ebola hoax, but none of them say The Sun participated in it.

I'm not saying you're lying, but maybe you fell for some fake news about fake news. I found this Reuters article about a faked screenshot of a Forbes article, purporting to show Forbes spread the hoax (they didn't): https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-burning-man-forbes...

kyledrake4• 3 years ago

They may have removed the text, regardless I removed the reference to it in my comment. They also alleged that people were getting "trench foot", or as they described it at the time, "a world war one disease".

I was at Burning Man during the rain/mud, went bare foot for a few days, did not get "trench foot", nor did anyone else I knew there. Their unbelievably trashy reporting during that (everybody is fighting and getting trench warfare diseases, etc) is one of the reasons I'm unusually motivated to comment on their reliability as a source of information today.

all22• 3 years ago

"ancient city of Sodom was blown up by an atomic weapon"

This is hyperbole at best. Sodom and Gomorrah have been confirmed to have experienced a "heat event" that caused pottery to exhibit the same chemical glazing that happens in a nuclear blast. Note that a nuke is not required for this form of glazing to appear, just very high temperatures.

See https://youtu.be/SDiYb20iAsM for an informal discussion.

I guess a partial truth is easier to sell than a complete fabrication.

Obscurity43404• 3 years ago

ancient city of Sodom

God, I can't even. People are in desperate need of media literacy classes.

Also, what non-right wing conservative person is baited by that headline? Its so fing transparent to whom they are appealing.

7952• 3 years ago

Those kind of storys are not written seriously and tend to be a bit satirical. They are mocking the "boffins" who do this kind of research. They don't expect the reader to believe a word of it.

bodelecta• 3 years ago

It'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.

dathinab3• 3 years 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/) it color and form wise can "close enough" match the observed behavior

chasing• 3 years ago

"In sky" is a weird way to describe something that's clearly "on the ground."

mountainboy2• 3 years ago

1. 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.

mountainboy2• 3 years ago

1. 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.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Anything to get the /UFO guys pants wet

ericfrazier• 3 years ago

Lived in FL and electrical infrastructure going boom and lighting blue was common during hurricanes

padjo• 3 years ago

What’s next articles from the weekly world news? Has elvis been sighted again?

badrabbit• 3 years ago

Was just reading about this the other day: 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.

fennecfoxy3• 3 years ago

For those that don't know, "The Sun" is not exactly a trusted news source, it's just another red top.

mr_spothawk• 3 years ago

Looks like electric universe to me.

https://thehonestscientist.com/electric-universe/

‘Blue lights’ flash in sky moments before Morocco earthquake

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