Mexico earthquake: Mysterious green flashes light up the sky after tremor



Mysterious green and blue flashes were seen by witnesses in Mexico City after it was rocked by a magnitude 8.2 earthquake.

The powerful quake set off a tsunami warning for at least eight countries – and at least six people have been confirmed dead in the most powerful quake to strike the country for 100 years.

A video of the earthquake lights was captured by a witness – capturing a strange, little-understood phenomenon.

Earthquake lights have been reported around the world for decades – with some claiming it’s a natural phenomenon, and others claiming it’s due to structural damage.

http://twitter.com/hebertuz/status/906026110214782977

I have seen this before (on tv ) some scientists say it is to do with friction of the ground movement causing a build up of static, I think some could be transformers exploding after shorting out.
Looks impressive what ever caused it!

Makes one wonder if there's any correlation with this and the fact that

Kim Jong Dumbazz keeps blowing up crap along the ring of fire..just saying..

I think that's how animals sense the earthquakes before they happen...

Well, I guess it's possible! Not sure how far Mexico is from Korea?

I think that the whole Pacific has an underlying rim that moves, one plate over another. They say, one day it's do a serious shift.

all the biggest earthquakes have been in the "ring of fire", from Japan to new Zealand to West coast of both America's, Alaska back to japan

Kim is supposed to do another one tomorrow.

sort of the same thing that happens when a Crystal gets struck!
Piezo-Effect!

i read the fault moved over 32 feet in that 8.4quake...

imagine the force involved to cause that!

staggering... each number raises the force by a factor of 1000...so an 8 would be 5000 times stronger than a 3...

The way I see it is that the world is sitting on floating plates.
That movement at the plates in one area of the world puts stress on the plates at different points on the rest of the world.
Even in the mid-plate regions changes occur (mountains).

Thinking about it all, has anyone tried to determine the butterfly effect of it? Is all this activity putting excessive pressure on the San Andreas fault and subsequently changing the stability of the Yellowstone Super-Caldera?

Could it all be leading to a major California quake that triggers a Yellowstone super-eruption?

Put pieces of Styrofoam in a bathtub and clump them together, move one and they all move.



The action of water relocation over the mid-Atlantic trench by these storms is pushing the water off balance into the middle of the North Atlantic plate. This weight change pushes down on the plate in a new spot then the water drains and the pressure is returned to normal. It flexes the plate.

As the plate flexes, it allows movement of other plates at its boundaries. Resulting in earthquakes.

I predict more quakes both along the western edge and in the center of the North American plate. The Gorda-California-Nevada Orogeny will be effected, which is smack dab where Yellowstone Super-Caldera resides.

There may also be quakes at the Caribbean plate.

Didn't one quake cause change in the tilt of the earth slightly?
Can't remember.

I think the quake that caused the Christmas tsunami at Sir Lanka was said to have effected the Earth's rotation. Can't recall the details tho. Could have been the axis?

I'm telling you people is Little Green Men from outer space

most all the big ones do... that Japan 9.0 caused the earths spin to speed up,shorting the day....

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/japanquake/earth20110314.html

Earthquake light
What makes skies over quakes glow?

IMPACTO El Diario/YouTube

By Mika McKinnon

After an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mexico on 7 September, videos of fuzzy green smears in the night sky went viral online.

Earthquake lights are a phenomenon so unusual that they border on myth. The first known reports of them are from 89 BC, with spotty descriptions over the centuries.

Recently, they’ve been seen during foreshocks and the main earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009, and as flashes of blue lightning over Wellington, New Zealand, in 2016.

Read more: Taking Earth’s pulse – Predicting earthquakes from space

“These phenomena are well-documented because of so many security cameras running day and night now,” says Friedemann Freund at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Glowing globes, and other phenomena

Earthquake lights are electric discharges that come out of the ground and can rise up to 200 metres in the air, says Freund. Lights are sometimes observed in the days and hours leading up to an earthquake, and at other times during or after it. But how they work is still mysterious.

Part of the challenge in getting to the bottom of this is that earthquake lights have been described in so many ways: as glowing globes, flickering flames from the ground, or even branching lightning that sparks from Earth instead of the sky.

And in many instances, they could be explained by other phenomena, such as volcanic flames from fissures, streaking fireball meteors or auroras.

“It’s a little bit difficult to ferret out what is a real one and what is not,” says Troy Shinbrot at Rutgers University in New Jersey. But what’s happening at those times when nothing else makes sense?
Electric lights

One idea is that when igneous or metamorphic rocks are under stress, the molecular bonds break and release ionised oxygen that travels through the rock. “The faster we stretch the rocks, the more of these positive-charge carriers are released,” says Freund.

In this line of thinking, some of these ions can create charged layers at or just below the surface, generating localised electric fields. The strongest fields cause coronal discharges – brief bursts of visible light.

In some conditions, defects in the mineral structure mean that rocks can even behave as semiconductors that explode as a flash of light when hit by seismic waves. This state lasts only for fractions of a second, says Freund, and then charged particles “can break through Earth’s surface and discharge as an electric discharge into the air”.
Crushed quartz

Another possibility is that earthquake lights are a manifestation of “triboluminescence”, which refers to light released when chemical bonds are broken through rubbing, crushing or scratching. This effect has been demonstrated under certain circumstances by tumbling mixed grains in small-scale laboratory experiments.

Similarly, squeezing quartz pushes surface ions out of position, generating a tiny electric current. It’s plausible that the same processes could create earthquake lights when faults move and crush rocks together, given that quartz is one of the most common minerals in Earth’s crust.

No matter the idea, it would be difficult to test in the real world. “However you do the experiment, there’s going to be an inevitable big gap between how large an experiment can be – a metre, 2 metres – and tens of kilometres which occur in earthquakes,” says Shinbrot.

But one thing is clear – with more viral footage emerging every few months, scientists will have plenty of data to sift through.

Read more: Mexico on tsunami alert after biggest earthquake in 85 years
http://www.newscientist.com/article/2147401-mysterious-lights-in-the-sky-seen-after-mexicos-huge-earthquake/