DID you know Mother Nature is a heavy metal rock fan? Imagine the ground violently shifts and shakes beneath your feet, knocking you over as everything trembles and turns to rubble around you.
A loud rumble grows louder as the ground cracks open, turning into chasms and swallowing up whole buildings. As you struggle to get back on your feet amidst all the blood and thunder around you, the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck tingle and rise.
You struggle to breathe as the air around you becomes thick with dust and energy. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning shoots up from the chasm into the black sky, a brilliant terrible flash, lighting the carnage around you.
How's that for a heavy metal album cover? But seriously, can lightning shoot out from the ground in the middle of an earthquake?
Verdict:
TRUE
Yup, earthquakes do cause lightning to shoot up into the sky. It is a geological phenomenon - also known as earthquake lights or EQL - which appears in the sky near areas of tectonic stress, seismic activity, or volcanic eruptions.
Scientists have proposed various models to explain earthquake lightning, suggesting that various factors can be behind the strange phenomenon instead of one single cause.
One proposed cause for EQL is the fracturing of rocks and minerals during a high-stress seismic activity like an earthquake causing high-pressure fluid and gas to rise through the fault lines, getting electrically charged and turned to plasma as it exits.
What is certain is that earthquake lightning has been observed and documented throughout history during many massive earthquakes around the world, including the recent deadly Turkiye-Syrian earthquake which killed tens of thousands of people, seen here.
References:
1. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/640039
3. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-mysterious-luminescence-phenomena-earthquake-lightning.html
4. https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-020-01237-8
