Earthquake Lights

Summary

People have reported light in the sky before and during earthquakes for as long as there have been earthquakes and people. Glows on the horizon. Flashes. Luminous bands.

For most of the history of seismology this was treated as folklore, and the reason was reasonable: an earthquake is a very frightening thing, at night, and human witnesses under terror are not instruments.

Then everybody got a phone.

Earthquake lights are real. They have been filmed. What has not been established is how they work, and a great many of the videos people cite are not earthquake lights at all. They are power lines exploding.

What is documented

The reports. Luminous phenomena reported before, during and after earthquakes, in many countries, across centuries. Descriptions include diffuse glows near the ground, flashes, luminous bands in the sky, and globes of light.

The dismissal, and why it made sense. No instrument had ever recorded one. The witnesses were, without exception, people in the middle of an earthquake. Fear, darkness, falling debris, and failing electrical infrastructure are all present at once, and each of them can produce something that looks like a light.

The catalogue. In 2014, Robert Thériault and colleagues published a systematic study in Seismological Research Letters, cataloguing sixty-five documented cases from the Americas and Europe between 1600 and 2010.

The finding that mattered was not that the lights exist. It was that they are not randomly distributed. They occur disproportionately in rift environments and near subvertical faults: places where the geology is of a particular kind.

A phenomenon that correlates with geology is a physical phenomenon. Fear does not know what kind of fault it is standing on.

The recordings. Luminous phenomena have been captured on camera in association with several earthquakes, including at Pisco in Peru in 2007, in Sichuan in 2008, at L'Aquila in 2009, and in Mexico in 2017.

Leading explanations

Stress-activated charge carriers in rock. Proposed, demonstrated in the laboratory, not confirmed in the field.

Friedemann Freund and colleagues have proposed a mechanism. Certain igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks contain what are called peroxy defects: flaws in the crystal structure, formed when the rock cooled, which hold latent electronic charge.

When such rock is placed under stress, those defects release mobile positive charge carriers. The charge flows through the rock, reaches the surface, and accumulates. If enough of it accumulates, it ionises the air above the ground, and ionised air glows.

Freund has produced the effect in the laboratory, in blocks of rock under a press.

That the mechanism works in a laboratory does not establish that it is what happens beneath a city during an earthquake, and the registry does not treat it as established.

Piezoelectricity. Frequently proposed: quartz under stress generates charge. There is a real objection to it. Quartz grains in a rock are randomly oriented, so their individual contributions should very largely cancel out. The net effect is expected to be small.

Most of the videos are not earthquake lights. This needs stating clearly, because it is the correction the popular version most needs.

During an earthquake, electrical infrastructure fails. Power lines whip and arc. Transformers short and explode, throwing enormous blue-white flashes into the sky. Substations fail spectacularly.

A great many of the viral videos of earthquake lights, including a substantial share of those from Mexico in 2017, show precisely this. They show the grid dying.

That is not a marginal caveat. It is most of the visual evidence people cite, and it means the honest evidentiary base is much smaller than it appears.

Current status

Partially explained. The phenomenon is real, is catalogued, and correlates with specific geological settings, which is the strongest argument for its physical reality. A mechanism exists, has laboratory support, and is unconfirmed in the field. Much of the popular evidence is infrastructure failure and should be set aside.

The registry keeps this record alongside AR-0057 and AR-0016, and the three together make the archive's most useful point about witnesses.

Sprites were real, and the witnesses were dismissed for a century. Ball lightning was real, and the witnesses were dismissed for longer. Earthquake lights are real, and the witnesses were dismissed too.

And in all three cases the sceptics were right on the evidence available to them, and the thing that changed was not that anybody became more open-minded. It was that somebody got an instrument to the right place at the right time.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.