Posted on 08/27/2014 6:24:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin
MOUNTAIN VIEW (KPIX 5) – Several people called the KPIX 5 newsroom after Sunday morning’s magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Napa, reporting mysterious flashes of light in the sky. Witnesses said the strange phenomenon looked like lightning.
Similar flashes of light have been reported in earthquakes around the world, from Japan to Peru
Friedemann Freund, a scientist with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, said the same thing happened during Sunday morning’s earthquake. And it wasn’t a transformer blowing up or UFOs.
“What they are, are a consequence of the stresses building up deep below the earth, seven miles like in the case of the Napa Valley earthquake,” Freund told KPIX 5.
He calls the phenomenon “earthquake lights,” the quick buildup of stress that causes an electric current to flow to the surface and burst through the earth. This typically happens before or during an earthquake.
Several North Bay witnesses contacted Freund at the SETI Institute about seeing several flashes around the time the Napa quake hit. They said there was one or two seconds between each one.
Historical accounts confirm this.
Try to find a copy of “Unusual Natural Phenomena”. I believe the author was ?___ Corliss ?
When you crunch down on a candy, you shatter its sugar crystals. (Chemists define a solid crystal as a substance where each unit of matter repeats with a regular pattern. Think: salt or diamond) Scientists believe that the structure of a crystal determines whether or not it will emit light when broken, a phenomenon dubbed triboluminescence.
Crystals in which every unit is symmetrically arranged around a center point don’t tend to have this feature. But crystals that don’t have this symmetry or are impure often do. This second class includes sugar. When you break a sugar crystal, one half of the crystal ends up with more electrons than the other. The electrons leap across the gap to the more positively charged side. “There is a little bolt of lightning that shoots between the faces,” says Arnold Rheingold, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego who has studied triboluminescence. (Recent research suggests that the sparks’ energy is powerful enough to trigger chemical reactions such as combustion.)
In your mouth, these jumping electrons crash into nitrogen atoms, which is abundant in the air. The nitrogen briefly absorbs the energy from the collision and then spits out some energy — in the form of ultraviolet light.
So far, all of this could happen with many hard, sugary candies. But we humans can’t see ultraviolet light. What bumps certain sweet suckers into the world of blue, visible lightning is their flavoring. Wintergreen oil (or, in the case of the ones I just tried staring into the bathroom mirror in the dark, “artificial flavor”) will absorb the energy from the ultraviolet light and then emit blue light.
Possibly. Or it could just be the Big Sky Daddy warming up for
‘Sodom Redux’.
William A. Corliss
Me too. I recall reading that more than once.
God is telling them how pissed he is at how Kaliforinistan has turned out!
Wintergreen lifesavers- a good excuse to get alone in the dark with a girl.
Yes, I think earthquake lights are a similar process, without the girl.
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