Why Strange Lights Sometimes Precede Earthquakes
L'Aquila earthquake damage Lights were reported prior to an earthquake that struck near L'Aquila, Italy, in April 2009. Emergenza Terremoto Abruzzo via Wikimedia Commons For centuries people have observed strange phenomena before large earthquakes, such as light emanating from ridges and mountaintops. These reports were once dismissed by many scientists, in part because they are often entangled in unscientific theories. For example, some who reported the lights thought they were produced by UFOs. But the lights are not (necessarily) hallucinations nor created by E.T. "Earthquake lights are a real phenomenon--they're not UFOs," researcher Robert Thériault, a geologist at Quebec's Ministry of Natural Resources, told Nature. "They can be scientifically explained." In study published in the January/February issue of the journal Seismological Research Letters, Thériault and colleagues pulled together reliable sightings of these lights since 1600, and found some strange similarities....