Experiments at Rutgers lend credence to existence of ‘earthquake lights’ - The Washington Post

More on the earthquake light phenomenon,,,

The air suddenly feels different. Dogs begin to howl, and the horses become restless. A burst of bright light, and seconds later, the ground starts to rumble and shake.

Earthquake precursors — from strange animal behavior to temperature anomalies — may sound like urban legends, but new findings have lent some scientific credence to one phenomenon called earthquake lights. The aerial flashes of light seen before or during temblors may have to do with large jumps in electrical activity as the earth cracks open.

The results were presented at the American Physical Society’s March Meeting in Denver on Thursday by Rutgers University biomedical engineer Troy Shinbrot. His lab has created a miniature model of earthquake-like jamming and cracking, and has found huge voltage jumps that result from the shifting of granular material used to mimic the earth.

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Although at times mistaken for UFO sightings, observations of earthquake lights date back hundreds of years. But most reports are for quakes with high magnitudes, of 5 or greater on the Richter scale.

Boston College seismologist John Ebel, who studies earthquake forecasting and patterns, has reviewed reports of electromagnetic precursors to quakes. Generally, the timing, strength and duration of the observed lights vary widely — but he is nevertheless “comforted” by these recent findings of Shinbrot and his colleagues.

“I personally think that there are legitimate observations of lightning-like dis­charges — electrical glows of some sort — that occur before earthquakes,” said Ebel, who was not involved in the study. “There’s too much evidence to discount their existence.”

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But many questions remain. While earthquake lights are sometimes reported days before the event, the experiment clearly shows electrical jumps with each crack and uncrack. Also, the actual measured currents with each movement are tiny.

Physicist Friedemann Freund of the NASA Ames Research Center in California nevertheless applauded the work: “The observation is really well done, the experiments are well conducted, but the full understanding is not yet available.”

Freund is conducting experiments this summer that he hopes will pull together all known information about earthquake lights in a way that makes sense given Shinbrot’s results — but he isn’t prepared to talk about them just yet.

Experiments at Rutgers lend credence to existence of ‘earthquake lights’ - The Washington Post