On the sixth of February, a violent earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, measuring 7.8 degrees on the Richter scale, leaving more than 41,000 dead and 85,000 injured, and led to the collapse of about 7,000 residential buildings, causing cracks in the ground, and resulting in displacement. The land is a few meters to the west.

Mysterious bright lights

In conjunction with the occurrence of the earthquake, many separate cameras recorded the appearance of bright blue lights resembling lightning in the areas hit by the earthquake. power lines.

Some claimed that the earthquake was fabricated by the program affiliated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) known as the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), and that the bright lights are evidence of that. What is the reality of these lights?

By carefully reviewing the records, it appears that the bright lights that appeared during the earthquake were from the earth and not the sky, and therefore the assumption that the light is just lightning accompanying the blizzard is an incorrect assumption, as the source of the light is the earth and then it was reflected on the clouds of the sky, and it clearly shows that the direction of The bright light is from the bottom up, not the other way around.

As for the hypothesis that the light is an explosion in the power lines, it can be answered by the fact that the lights were also seen outside residential areas, far from electrical wiring lines and power stations, and they were not followed by any fires, but were flashes of bright light that appeared and then disappeared in one place to reappear and disappear in another place. Another one in a row, and it continued to appear even after the electricity was cut off from the area.

A new type of weapon?

As for the assumption that these lights are caused by the "Harp" program, it is a hypothesis for which there is no scientific evidence, as it is a program that uses a high-energy, high-frequency transmitter to study the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, and it cannot be responsible for the earthquake in Turkey or anywhere. Because it does not have such capabilities, according to the information verification website of the Reuters news agency.

According to the FAQ section of the Harp site, the program cannot control or manipulate the weather. natural disasters," it's a radio transmitter larger than most other radio transmitters, according to David Heisel, professor of engineering at Cornell University, and it's not theoretically possible for a "HARP" device to create earthquakes.

natural phenomenon

In fact, there is a scientific explanation for these lights, which can be considered a natural phenomenon that accompanies violent earthquakes that cause cracks in the earth's crust, and these lights were also observed in previous earthquakes that occurred in more than one place, and were monitored by eyewitnesses over several centuries, and they were called "lights Earthquakes" (Earthquake Lights), but scientists could not ascertain their exact causes for several reasons.

An article on the National Geographic website - published on April 19, 2019 - states that on November 12, 1988, people reported a bright pinkish-purple ball of light along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada, 11 days earlier. From a strong earthquake, in Pisco, Peru in 2007, the lights were bright flashes that lit up the sky captured in surveillance camera video before the magnitude 8 earthquake struck.

Before the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, 10-centimetre-long flames were seen flashing over a stone road, and when an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck Mexico in 2017, eerie images of green and blue lights in the sky appeared on social media.

In 2014, Friedman Freund, associate professor of physics at San Jose State University and senior investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, published research findings that To him and his colleagues in the journal "Seismological Research Letters" (Seismological Research Letters), stating that when analyzing 65 light events of earthquakes, Freund and his colleagues assumed that they were caused by electrical charges that are activated in certain types of rocks during seismic activity.

When the charges resulting from the collision of rocks reach the Earth's surface and interact with the atmosphere, they create a glow (Shutterstock)

rock pressure

The article states that basalt and gabbro rocks, for example, contain small impurities in their crystals that can release electric charges into the air, and scientists have estimated that the conditions that led to the emergence of the lights are present in only less than 0.5% of earthquakes worldwide, which is what They explain why such earthquakes are relatively rare, and point out that earthquake lights appear more commonly before or during earthquakes than after them.

The authors of the study believe that during an earthquake, the pressure of the rocks that collide generates electrical charges that travel upwards along the near-vertical geological faults common in the rift areas, and when the charges reach the Earth's surface and interact with the atmosphere, they create a glow.

"Earthquake lights are a real phenomenon," says Robert Theriault, the lead author of the study, a geologist at the Quebec Ministry of Natural Resources. "They are not eccentric objects, and they can be explained scientifically."

chemical reaction

Freund believes that it all starts with defects in a rock, where the oxygen atoms within the chemical composition of the metal lose an electron, and when the earthquake stress hits the rock, it breaks the chemical bonds contained in these defects, and creates holes with a positive electric charge, and a series of "positive holes" can flow vertically Through the rift to the surface, creating strong local electric fields that can generate light.

early indicator

Laboratory experiments have shown that electric fields can be generated in certain types of rock by pressure, but Freund's idea is just one of many possible mechanisms to explain earthquake lights.

"It makes sense enough, but that doesn't mean it's true," says John Ebel, a geophysicist at Boston College in Massachusetts who was not involved in Freund's study.

More generally, this talk of earthquake lights may lead to greater awareness of them as a potential earthquake warning, says Theriault. The phenomenon had alerted people before near L'Aquila, Italy, in April 2009, when a man saw white flashes reflecting off his kitchen furniture in The early hours of the morning and took his family outside, and two hours later the devastating earthquake occurred.