The sky ‘flashed’ before the earthquake in Morocco… Premonitory symptoms?

An image of a flash of light presumed to be ‘seismic light’메이저놀이터 was shared online in the sky of a residential area just before the strong earthquake in Morocco, which caused numerous casualties. According to the New York Times ( NYT

) on the 11th (local time) , a blue flash was observed on a closed-circuit ( CC ) TV camera in a residential area located in southwestern Agadir at approximately 11:08 pm on the 8th before a strong earthquake occurred in Morocco. It looks like lightning falling one after another from the left to the center of the screen. Three minutes later, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake occurred about 71km southwest of Marrakech, about 210km from Agadir. Speculation was raised that this was ‘seismic light’. This refers to a phenomenon in which the sky flashes before and after an earthquake. It is known that seismic waves transmitted to a rock emit electrons inside the rock, and the electrons that rise into the atmosphere cause a flash, but this is only one of the hypotheses, and it is a mysterious phenomenon whose origin is not even known yet. Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University who saw the video, said, “People are curious about ‘seismic light,’ but it is one of those mysteries that continues to persist. “It can never be determined,” he said. Some argue that seismic light is a precursor to a large-scale earthquake. However, there is some counter-argument that it is difficult to regard it as a ‘premonitory symptom of a major earthquake’ because the phenomenon itself appears very rarely and occurs randomly and inconsistently.

Meanwhile, this phenomenon has also been captured during the Great Turkiye Earthquake in February and the Mexico Earthquake in 2021. However, there is an opinion that the phenomenon captured during the Great Turkiye Earthquake was an electric spark caused by shaking high-voltage power lines.