Earthquake lights like other posters have said, but I wonder if the exceptional geomagnetic activity caused by the recent X-level CME event has any sort of impact on this too? (Thinking auroral activity, but at far too low of a latitude of course).
why did i get downvoted? seems that hn is populated by a bunch of ufo believers/bitcoin investors like types that would rather believe than fact check https://youtu.be/GL82cKwG8Ik?t=1m9s
This explanation is posted whenever earthquake lights are reported, but it's wrong. I have a few reasons:
First. So the explanation goes, during the earthquake power substation transformers and fuses blow, causing these lights. Problem is, the grid doesn't sustain that level of damage during these earthquakes. Yes, the power usually goes out and there is grid damage, but the amount of damage is nowhere near 'every substation blowing', even in the most severe quakes. So the number of lights and number of grid faults do not equal.
Second. Earthquake lights present in the sky, not on the ground beneath them. If substations were blowing and creating light, they would light objects in their immediate vicinity (e.g. buildings) more than they would illuminate clouds. But that doesn't happen, and in fact the lights appear within the cloud layers themselves rather than appearing as a projection onto them, as they would if the light source was at ground level.
Third. These lights have been witnessed out to sea and over offshore islands, where there is no power grid.
That last point is the most compelling for me, because I personally witnessed earthquake lights, less than a year ago, offshore, during the November 2016 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake. During that earthquake, I had this (night time) view: https://imgur.com/a/Nt2wD
The look is very similar to the videos of the ones in Mexico, and very different to the long-lasting beam of light from the ground that seems to come from generator explosions.
During the same earthquake, my curtain fell down, and I saw lights across Wellington harbour that I'm fairly sure were high voltage lines clashing. from my elevated point of view, the source was below the horizon.
I've seen the same green flashes of transformers blowing during serious hurricanes. Hello Florida, 2004, where I had the pleasure of seeing this during 3 different hurricanes. There were no tectonic plates shifting. The clouds were illuminated; it looked like flashes of green lightning from my front row seats. Though it's not as though I saw a green lightning arc.
Where I was, power was generally restored within 24 hours. I don't believe this would be possible if every substation were blowing. I believe people refer to the transformers on the telephone poles failing.
While this is very plausible, it wouldn't explain the historical accounts of "earthquake lights" that have been reported as far back as the 1600's (http://srl.geoscienceworld.org/content/85/1/159)
Edit: It's also been reported around the world that these lights can occur days, even weeks before an earthquake happens.
There's a lot of different explanations for it, but I understand that it's never been definitively explained.
How much do those things cost? I'd love to see every fireworks show end with blowing one up, watching the world change color for a few seconds is very surreal.
This is what you call "a theory", but it's one with no evidence to back it up. Can you point to other videos of electric grid damage that look similar?
The idea of "Earthquake lights" is also a theory, but it's becoming increasingly more likely these days as evidence piles up.
> This is what you call "a theory", but it's one with no evidence to back it up. Can you point to other videos of electric grid damage that look similar?
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, have you not seen high voltage lines blow up before personally? Or are you just making a point in this regard? Because the flashes of lights you see on the horizon etc during a heavy storm knocking over transformers and main lines is a pretty widely known thing.
I don't understand why you're demanding evidence of it, but:
I saw a transmission line arcing while driving the other night, just over the crest of a hill. It looked like an alien abduction was in progress. I only know it came from a downed line because a minute later I arrived at the scene and was just able to stop before running over the still live wires lying on the freeway.
Many people here in Turkey will think solar eclipse triggered this. Strong 1999 earthquake in Turkey also happened just some weeks after the full solar eclipse. I think it is just a coincidence though.
r/conspiracy aside, looks like the redditor's main theory is that there is some sort of casual link between solar flares and earthquakes. Should be an easy thing for a data scientist to debunk or validate...
He predicted an earthquake in the Philippines and other areas that didn't happen 2 months ago and one in New Zealand 1 month ago. He also made a prediction for a 9.0 earthquake in Nepal after the eclipse and slowly dropped the number over the days to fish out a "prediction". He was also hedging his bets on this earthquake and was giving preference to Japan, not Mexico.
The guy's a charlatan that was basically throwing predictions at the wall till they stuck and is now hoping no one notices his failures.
I disagree. I've read some of his forecasts and he's getting better over time. He put Mexico within the sphere of possibilities.
I think there's something to his solar flare theory. It may not be the only the only piece, but it seems to be a piece. He'll have an uphill battle to fight but it's fun to read his stuff.
Actually, back in high school I did some statistics and found a link between tidal forces and earthquakes. Which is reasonable as the crust does flex a little.
An eclipse means the moon earth and sun are in a line which maximizes the net tidal forces. However, you can get the same impact from a lunar eclipse. It's also not much stronger than a normal full moon.
Anyway, the effect was not that strong, but I have seen it validated by other studies. The problem is say a 50% increase in odds for the next hour can be statistically significant, but the odds for a random hour are so low it's just not that useful.
PS: Best data was actually micro quakes near volcano's, but they are so tiny as to be mostly meaningless.
Sort of; they found that the probability of a quake along shallow thrust faults increases about 3x during full and new moons in general (of which an eclipse is a special case, with no special risk):
Tides have an influence on earthquakes [1], but spring tides due to Sun and Moon lining up happen about twice a month, so I don't think that the Eclipse is a likely cause.
How do they appropriately measure earthquakes so deep?
It had a magnitude of 8.1 on the surface level, however it happened at a depth of 32000 meters! so was it a magnitude 9 earthquake down there, or does the 8.4 already take into account the depth?
32 Kilometers is not very far in earthquake terms. Machines all over the world can feel small earthquakes no matter where they happen, and this is a very big earthquake.
Yes, the reported numbers account for the distance between the seismometer and the epicenter of the earthquake, they are the maximum intensity of the quake.
One side if the tectonic plate at Japan and indonesia have had movement, now the otherside at mexico, so North Western America must be under more and more strain.
Each point release just about doubles the force of the earth quake. Makes me wonder how my mom handled the Good Friday one in Anchorage, which was at 9.2.
Magnitude is a pretty useless scale for the human-level impact of an earthquake (since you have to take into account location, depth, geography etc).
I prefer the Shindo scale in Japan, which better informs you how people actually felt it/it affected infrastructure. Each earthquake doesn't get "one" shindo scale, you get a map of shindo readings for each location it was felt in. Then you can say "this earthquake was up to shindo X" if you want to tell somehow the worst effects of it, or "at my house it was shindo X-2" and people understand "oh so you were pretty far away huh"