The amazing lights that lit up the skies of Mexico during the earthquake

Green and blue flashes they conquered the skies of Mexico in the magnitude 7.1 earthquake on the Richter scale, which had its epicenter 11 kilometers southeast of Acapulco and which rocked the Federal District and its surroundings on Tuesday evening.

The show looked like a movie with amazing special effects. But it was realthe. At first glance, the mysterious lights could have been mistaken for the usual discharges that conventional thunderstorms produce, albeit with a somewhat different hue. But the explanation of what was seen in Aztec territory is another.

It is a natural phenomenon called triboluminescence or “earthquake fires”, that in addition to being infrequent, it can occur during earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Tonight, his presence during the earthquake did not go unnoticed on the networks.

Questions about what was going on have multiplied among different Twitter users, despite the fact that a similar phenomenon occurred during the earthquake that this country suffered in 2017.

Surprise and astonishment were a constant among users, who they were looking for an explanation in the midst of the panorama of uncertainty that presented itself during the earthquake.

There were even those who raised a “doomsday” scenario when wondering where the sky lights were coming from.

Through a graphic, user @pictoline presented a “possible explanation” for the phenomenon.

Scientific explanation

According to a publication of the Institute of Physics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in April this year, triboluminescence is “a phenomenon in which, by mechanical actions such as friction, grinding, agitation , friction or deformation, breaks occur in the chemical bonds of a certain material, thus producing flashes of light ”.

In that case, friction has been generated in rocks present in the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust, which when they came into friction generated electric discharges which rose to the surface and, when they came into contact with the atmosphere, manifested themselves in the form of light beams.

For his part, in a study published in 2001, Friedemann Freund, a NASA researcher, warned against the existence of latent electric charges in the rocks that make up the earth’s crust and have detailed their response to friction. “If the level of fatigue is high, electrical charges appear, giving the rocks the properties of a semiconductor body,” he explained.

“What happens when these electric charges reach the surface of the earth? These charges modify the nature of the terrain. A reasonable prediction would be that these emerging electrical charges would cause the earth’s surface to acquire a positive charge covering a large area that would measure tens to hundreds of kilometers. The ionosphere would therefore reflect these changes“, He declared about the zone which is located in the Earth’s atmosphere, between 90 and 300 kilometers of altitude.

Dimitar Uzunov, Freund’s collaborator at NASA, summed up: “When the surface of the earth acquires a positive charge, the plasma of the charged ionosphere reacts”.

Alarm in Mexico

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake on the Richter scale rocked Mexico City and surrounding areas on Tuesday evening, with a toll of at least one dead, several areas without electricity and damage to some structures and buildings, according to the authorities.

The earthquake had its epicenter 11 km southeast of Acapulco, in southeastern Mexico, according to the National Seismological Service. The earthquake, late in the Mexican night – almost Argentinian morning, was also perceived moderately in parts of the state of Puebla and with intensity in other cities of the state of Mexico. So far it has been recorded that the movement has also been seen in Michoacán, Morelos, Oaxaca and Veracruz.

The earthquake caused nervous breakdown in the center of Mexico, whose inhabitants still have the tragic memory of the 7.1 degree earthquakes recorded on September 19, 2017 and that of September 9 of the same year – date almost exact to the present – that they have shook the center of the country and killed 369, the majority in the capital. Images of panic have also invaded social networks.

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