Morocco is in shock after mysterious blue lights flashed above Agadir on Monday night just hours before a devastating 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region.
The strange lights, which were seen and recorded by many witnesses, have stumped experts, with some suggesting it could be a UFO, lightning, or even an earthquake warning.
“The earthquake happened at nighttime,” Dr Friedemann Freund, a geophysicist at The Washington Post, explained.
“The condition for earthquake lights to be seen by people and maybe even recorded by cameras would be relatively high,” he added, suggesting that the mysterious blue lights might be a phenomenon called “earthquake lights.”
Scientists have long debated the existence of earthquake lights, which are said to take place amid the changes occurring to Earth’s magnetic field during an earthquake or volcanic eruption.
These unexplained lights can take on a variety of forms, ranging from pink spheres to four-inch “flames” found above the pavement.
For instance, it is believed that a bright purple globe of light moved along the sky of Quebec in 1988, 11 days before a powerful earthquake struck.
In 2014, Dr. Freund and his colleagues studied 65 unexplained reports of these lights that date as far back as 1600.
They found that 85% of these sightings took place near breaks in the Earth’s crust, commonly referred to as “rifts.”
Moreover, most of these lights were seen before or during an earthquake but rarely were they seen after.
This led scientists to believe that a built-up of seismic stress is behind these phenomena.
They theorize that electric charges found in rocks at the crust ionize air molecules as they come to the surface, thus creating the unusual lights almost like a battery.
Though we still don’t know much about these lights, Robert Thériault of the Ministère des Ressources Naturelles of Québec, who worked on the study, believes they have the potential to offer some warning to future earthquakes.
“Earthquake lights as a pre-earthquake phenomenon, in combination with other types of parameters that vary prior to seismic activity, may one day help forecast the approach of a major quake,” he explained.
It’s clear that more research is necessary to understand the remarkable phenomenon of earthquake lights and, considering the deadly Morocco earthquake, perhaps now is the time to make progress.
🇲🇦🔵🌍🇹🇷🌐🌩️ – Once more, reports of enigmatic blue lights have surfaced, preceding seismic events in the land of Morocco. A similar phenomenon was witnessed earlier this year in Türkiye, mere moments prior to earthquakes striking both Türkiye and Syria. pic.twitter.com/V7Ht2Xq3qp
— Aprajita Choudhary 🦋 (@aprajitanefes) September 13, 2023
