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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Possible. 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.
Yup! 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.
Sounds 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.
Yeah 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
You 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.
Without 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I've experienced it once myself, and I'm not 100% sure.
There was a large power substation about 5km away in roughly that direction, and that was my original assumption. But I don't think it tripped (at least not completely), as we didn't lose power.
It was also far brighter than I would expect from an arc at a substation (it drowned out local street lights), higher in the sky, with multiple flashes covering much more of the sky than a single substation.
So I strongly lean towards it being earthquake lights, which is a documented phenomenon.
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.
>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.
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.
Are you suggesting that the lights recorded in the video are actually happening during the earthquake? Wouldn't it be easy to tell when the earthquake occured due to camera shaking?
The link in this comment[0] shows the camera shaking well before the lights are flashing. Also, you can see the arcs of electricity in the flashes. Lightning is purple not bluish. Human made electrical systems make the bluish color. The flashes do not start until ~20s into the 39s video. How are we even coming close to these being "before" the earthquake?
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
P-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps I should not have left that sentence as it ended up since it is lacking context. I was wondering out loud which direction the camera was pointing relative to the epicenter of the quake and where the camera was located so that one could attempt to place the observed lights relative to the epicenter and perhaps determine whether there is a surface expression of the ruptured fault that one could tie to the lights. The initial assumption in this case would be that the lights observed are in the sky and are caused by the quake perhaps as a precursor or as a direct result of ground motion generating energy sufficient to cause lights to be seen during the quake through some energy transfer mechanism that is currently poorly defined.
I'm not sure why you think the epicenter is unimportant in describing the "physical quake". To the geologist it helps establish rock types present in the rupture zone based on their knowledge of tectonic history and stratigraphy of the region. The characteristics of the overburden also help to understand how each wave mode in the full wavefield of the earthquake with be manifest at the surface as the energy propagates from the source (at the epicenter). The initial estimation of the magnitude of the earthquake may be revised as data from more sensors is factored in to the location determination, that is true. That does not mean that it is just a wild guess or that it is poorly constrained.
There is no center to an earthquake - it is like an average.
> as the energy propagates from the source (at the epicenter)
That just isn't how earthquakes work.
Let's assume a slip along a plane cutting through the ground. The earthquake waves are generated at all parts of the surface slip (all parts of the plane). At different times as the rupture propogates. There is no center - that is merely a simplification.
Earthquake 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.
There 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.
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.
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.
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.
Fascinating, and concerning in light of Grusch. Given this, (which I concur about just from my brief review of Pope & National Enquirer wikipedia articles), then I'd be interested in seeing a data science approach to quantifying proportion of UFO coverage in the Enquirer year by year since its founding, as well as some measure of 'outlandishness' across its entire coverage base over the same period.
As a consumer in supermarkets, it's hard to overstate how powerful the effect of stifling rational interest in the UFO/ UAP topic is when one passes those tabloids in the checkout line every week, which contain any number of random claims in the headlines alongside presumably legitimate and illegitimate UFO-related coverage.
To this day the term "UFO" tends to be related to "Alien Flying Saucers", rather than "Exaggerated reports of military testing", which seems to be the most related facts we know decades later.
I think despite the bizarre and made up stories on occasion the national enquirer has actually dug up some good scoops. Not often… but it’s surprising!
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.”
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.
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.
The 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.
Yes, I played on the term "source", as "witness" vs "reporter", to stress in theory the human factor and in practice the paradox (inherent in the difficulties Wikipedia has to have in providing quality).
(I'd thought of noting that it's not secondary either, decided to keep it simple.)
What Wikipedia is generally good at is in providing a synoptic presentation of a topic and identifying sources that document the points, facts, or arguments it presents. I'll often mine it for resources when doing a shallow dive on a topic.
For deeper dives, I'll try to branch out further from both those and other points.
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.
> "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.
> 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...
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.
> immersion foot syndrome[6] and as a nonfreezing cold injury (NFCI)
quote of cause:
> It can occur in temperatures up to 16 °C (61 °F) and within as little as 13 hours. Exposure to these environmental conditions causes deterioration and destruction of the capillaries and leads to damage of the surrounding flesh.[7] Excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis) has long been regarded as a contributory cause. Unsanitary, cold, and wet conditions can also cause trench foot.[8]
Idk. how warm it was there, but looking at other clothes worn probably not ~<16C, additionally even if the mud is that cold as long as you take brakes to warm up your feed e.g. in the mid day sun and don't walk through the night it still would be very unlikely. Then not having to walk in the same wet boots you have been wearing (wet) since weeks also helps.
And even if some one got NFCI it likely was only a case which comparable with what people had in WW1 was quite harmless. I.e. not really what people think about when mentioning trench foot (and knowing what it's about).
So all in all misleading and in a very intentional and knowing manner.
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.
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".
You have to understand that this is (likely purposefully on both sides) not compulsory or well-attended. Hell, it really should be a grade 9 required class but that would make it harder to lie to future constituents. Can't have that. Same with law and various other essential life skills like drivers ed which are conspicuosly absent from general curricula.
I didn't mean it literally but in the idiomatic sense of being common knowledge if you're at all media literate (which I hope most HN readers are!) Where I'm from, media criticism has a fairly strong emphasis in the highschool (equivalent) curriculum, but definitely should be even stronger, especially in this post-truth era.
(Drivers' ed is hardly an essential life skill in many parts of the world, btw.)
Its far more important than most of the compulsory stuff you learn first of all, and second, its better to have thr schools manage it and get it done early when its easy to provision all the materials and obviously a car which not everyone has.
Lastly, media literacy is basically (as far as I'm aware) not really compulsory or required for most students. I'm saying it should be. They are the perfect age to learn about how these systems subjugate and weaponize their personal data, emotions, etc
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.
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.
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.
This article does not prove the existence of ball lightning, it just proves the existence of the claim. People claim a lot of things…
It seems unlikely to me that with the quantity of video being recorded globally on people’s phones that not a single instance of ball lightning has been captured at this point.
Lots of people are also adamant that spirit overcomes them and causes an episode of speaking in tongues. We have quite a few instances of this and other religious experiences, none of which passes any sort of scrutiny.
There are more cameras pointed all over the place than ever, and somehow there has never been a recording of this phenomena, despite the Wikipedia claiming upwards of 5% of people having experienced this?
It 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.
That'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.
I've never tried that, maybe I'd have to before I could ever understand how someone could feel like it's more real.
I've avoided psychedelics because all I have is my brain, and I'm scared I could screw something up in my mind. I kinda want to keep my mind safe, it's all I am. Losing the consistency of my mind that I've always known is scary.
> I've avoided psychedelics because all I have is my brain, and I'm scared I could screw something up in my mind. I kinda want to keep my mind safe, it's all I am. Losing the consistency of my mind that I've always known is scary.
Psychedelics probably won't permanently screw you up. On the most common ones, like psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, you may even still feel very much yourself while tripping.
That said, if this is your attitude about psychedelics, they would probably be a bad time for you. It's one of those things where the more you stiffen up and brace yourself, the scarier and more uncomfortable the changes in your perception that come with tripping will seem to you. You definitely want to approach them with more openness and curiosity, and if you don't feel like that's available to you with respect to psychedelics, opting out of them is a totally sound choice.
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.
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.
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.)
Does Kate or any of her peers ever discuss the particulars of how language is used by those on both sides of various disagreements to imply certain facts without asserting them outright (as in the GP comment)?
I'm not sure if she discusses that specific element of disinformation, though her research covers a number of dimensions, from disinfo-at-scale in social networks to types of disinformation.
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.
> certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media
They're the "everything happens for a reason" types. Their belief system doesn't properly integrate chance events, so when confronted with one, they create a bogeyman. Because somebody being in control, even a bad somebody, is more comprehensible than nobody being at the wheel.
Sometimes, but not always. There are PLENTY of "highly" rational people who do similarly as they utilize reasoning at the "close enough" level as is the cultural (and culturally enforced) norm in their country/era. And if you protest based on a more strict approach, expect to be dismissed ("debunked") via culturally ingrained, rhetorically persuasive memes.
Avoiding all errors in cognition is often extremely difficult, ain't nobody got time for that sort of "pedantry".
There are also just those who actually always had kooky beliefs, but normally they weren't relevant so even their acquaintances didn't know, but after a disaster they feel they're obligated to help, which manifests in them espousing their kooky beliefs on social media.
> FEMA giving victims in Maui a measly $700 while other parts of the US federal government spend billions upon billions to fund not only the war in Ukraine
You’re comparing cash handouts to military aid. (Also, the $700 figure is incomplete [1].)
>WASHINGTON -- One week since President Biden declared a major disaster declaration for the state of Hawaii in the wake of the devastating wildfires, the Biden-Harris Administration and voluntary agencies provided survivors with immediate needs such as food, water and shelter and approved millions of dollars in disaster relief. To date, FEMA has approved more than $3.8 million in assistance to 1,640 households including more than $1.57 million in initial rental assistance.
https://twitter.com/Eyaaaad/status/1700621598456234148