Telluric lights were long thought to be a myth, but geologists have recently grown convinced of their existence. They were also reported during the earthquake that struck Turkey on the morning of February 6, 2023. There is now an explanation.
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| Telluric Lights: Lightning during the earthquake |
Several social media videos immortalize the sky full of lightning following last night's big earthquake that ravaged the Middle Eastern area between Turkey and Syria.
There is an explanation: the telluric lights were long thought to be a fiction, but scientists were convinced of their existence when they were observed near Nagano, Japan during the Mitsushiro earthquake swarm in 1965 and 1967. Then, during earthquakes, the expansion of social networks and cellphones "lightning in the sky" was filmed multiple times. So it was today, February 6, 2023, when a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Anatolia along one of the world's most deadly fault lines on the boundary between the European and Asian plates.
The hue of the flashes, like in the past, often ranges from white to blue and may be observed from tens of kilometers away. If the reasons have not been scientifically determined, numerous ideas have been proposed, the most current being that telluric lights are caused by ionization in certain types of rocks as a result of high voltages that occur before and during an earthquake. Ions would travel up the fissures in the rock until they reached the atmosphere, ionizing certain layers of air and creating a plasma capable of generating light.
Other hypotheses look more at the consequences of the event in urbanized areas such as the collapse of power lines which can create lightning and electrostatic discharges.