Subject: Fwd = Quaking lights
From: Frits Westra <fwestra@...>
Date: 22 Jan 2002 20:02
Forwarded by: fwestra@... (Frits Westra)
URL: http://www.adn.com/life/story/753386p-803392c.html
Original Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 05:35:09 -0800
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Quaking lights
Scientists drawn to legends of luminous displays that precede temblors
By Alberto Enriquez
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: January 21, 2002)
When it comes to earthquakes, the earth doesn't just move. It often
roars. It broadcasts at radio frequencies. And if the conditions are
right, it even produces a visible glow.
So-called "earthquake lights" are nothing new. The Greek historian
Thucydides wrote that "immense columns of flame" foretold the
destruction of two ancient cities, Helice and Burls, by earthquake.
Far across the ancient world, the author of a traditional Japanese
haiku recorded:
The earth speaks softly
to the mountain,
Which trembles
And lights the sky.
What's new is the possibility that scientists may be able to reliably
duplicate these extraordinary effects, including earthquake lights or
"coronal discharges," under artificial conditions in the lab. Because
some earthquake-related effects occur hours and even weeks before the
quakes themselves, further research into the nature of the earthquake
precursors holds the promise of one day -- no one says this will be
soon -- predicting quakes.
In a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, physicist
Friedemann Freund theorizes that positive charges can be generated
when huge stresses are generated along faults in the Earth's crust.
The rocks in the crust normally act as insulators that conduct
electrical charges only poorly. But under the severe stress generated
before an earthquake, these rocks may behave briefly like "p-type
semiconductors" found in computer chips, capable of releasing large
numbers of positive charges referred to as "holes."
These charges speed upward toward the surface of the Earth at between
220 and 660 mph.
Freund, a professor at San Jose State University in California, thinks
they ionize the atmosphere upon reaching the air, accounting for the
bizarre effects -- radio interference and colored streamers, flashes
and glows reported by thousands of observers. Among them:
Radio interference reported in the days before the worst quake
recorded (magnitude 9.5), in Chile in 1961, as well as Alaska's
magnitude 9.2 Good Friday quake in 1964.
Thirty-eight luminous displays seen by Quebec residents before, during
and after the earthquakes of November 1988.
The first photographs of earthquake lights during the Matsushiro
"earthquake swarm" in Japan between 1965 and 1967, collected and
published by Japanese researcher Yutaka Yasui during a period when
thousands of seismic events were being recorded each day.
Lights during a Chinese quake in 1976 that reportedly turned night
into day near the epicenter and awakened people nearly 200 miles away.
Freund's most recent publications detail how he has moved beyond
theory and developed an experimental means to generate stresses in
rocks, which "can account for earthquake-related electrical signals
causing electric discharges and earthquake lights."
Duplicating earthquake lights in the lab is important because science
deals with reproducible events.
Experiments that can't be repeated -- like the "cold fusion" craze a
few years back -- soon drop into the dustbin of scientific history.
As Freund says, it's tough to do basic research while waiting for the
Earth "to repeat the experiment."
Earthquake-light research remained beyond the pale of Western science
throughout the 1970s, classed by some as largely anecdotal even after
the publication of Yasui's extraordinary photo collection. U.S.
research continued largely along conventional seismological lines.
By 1986, however, seismologist John Derr described in the scientific
journal Nature experiments by Brian Brady and Glen Rowell of the U.S.
Bureau of Mines in which they broke rocks in darkness.
As the rocks broke, the men detected light that did not have the
characteristic spectrum of the minerals in the rock, but of the air.
The observations suggested that something given off by the breaking of
the rocks ionized the air.
Derr, who has put forward an alternative theory of earthquake lights
based on hydrological effects, also mentioned Freund's then-purely
theoretical work based on semiconducting effects.
Though science was slow to recognize earthquake lights for what they
are, Derr thinks accounts of them are more common in history and
prehistory than generally appreciated but often were interpreted as
spiritual experiences, ghosts or unidentified flying objects.
Among the candidates:
On the Alaska Peninsula, a brilliant glow often seen in the mountains
south of Lake Iliamna and visible up to
45 miles away, described by Native peoples as the work of ghosts.
Floating lights seen on the sacred mountain of Wu T'ai Shan in China,
interpreted by Buddhists as a manifestation of a saint.
Around A.D. 33, a report of luminous figures, at the time of an
earthquake, in the crucifixion passage of the Gospel of Matthew,
28:51-53: "The earth shook, and the rocks were split and the bodies of
the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and seen coming out of
tombs."
Reports of an egg-cup- shaped thing chasing a car and of a UFO buzzing
a fishing boat, both in Australia, two days before a series of
earthquakes.
Despite mounting documentation of luminous and electromagnetic
phenomena associated with quakes, resistance to scientific study of
these events as signs of impending earthquakes remained strong.
As recently as 1998, prominent American seismologist Wallace Campbell
editorialized against a United Nations grant to Chinese researchers
who published a guide to forecasting earthquakes based on
geomagnetics.
Thrashing numerous misunderstandings and errors in the Chinese
researchers' work, Campbell concluded that the manual was
"pseudoscientific nonsense" that raised false hopes in the public.
In the gloves-off world of scientific debate, Freund fired back his
own public riposte in the EOS Forum newsletter. While acknowledging
the limitations of the Chinese researchers, Freund blasted Campbell
for using "innuendoes to discredit the interdisciplinary search for
the subtle signals by which the Earth may divulge an impending
disaster."
The entire blistering exchange can be found at
www.globalwatch.org/ungp/
http://EOS_98.htm and http://www.globalwatch.org/ungp/friedemann98.htm
Such candor hasn't always brought Freund friends, but two years after
the debate he says he remains more confident than ever. As he puts it,
"I have told people that they have overlooked something fundamental,
and people don't like to be told this!"
Publication in the prestigious and rigorously peer-reviewed Journal of
Geophysical Research may signal a pending scientific groundswell in
Freund's favor.
The Japanese and Taiwan-ese long ago committed millions to research,
including the installation of sensor networks.
Have Freund's ideas gone mainstream?
"I wouldn't go that far, just looking at my success rate getting
funding," he says. "In four years, I've had one small grant of $10,000
out of NASA."
Journal of Geophysical Research reviewer Malcom Heggie of the
University of Sussex in England writes of Freund: "His work is
adventurous and may or may not be correct, but the ideas he has, the
concepts he explores and the careful work he puts into them deserve
attention."
Derr, chief of the Global Seismograph Network, at the U.S. Geological
Survey laboratory in Albuquerque, said Freund's proposed
semiconducting theory "looks like an important paper."
And among the converts to the newly emerging field of
"seismoelectromagnetics" is professor Masashi Hayakawa, who heads one
of two large research projects funded by the Japanese government.
"I was also a newcomer in this field -- I am here 10 years," Hayakawa
writes. "Because I thought this field was not a science the scientists
who published papers on (seismoelectromagnetics) were not so
qualified."
Since that time, he says, Japanese researchers have confirmed seismic
effects not only in the Earth's crust, but to the atmosphere's highest
reaches, the ionosphere.
Hayakawa thinks those "seismic effects" may be propagated by very
low-frequency radio emissions from the Earth, consistent with Freund's
theory of the emission of positive charges.
He plans to invite Freund to Japan to address the International Union
on Radio Science in August.
Earthquake light effects are less pronounced at transverse faults like
the San Andreas in California, where plates mainly rub alongside each
other.
Nevertheless, before the 1906 San Francisco quake, a "flickering haze"
appeared over the ground.
Earthquake lights are much more pronounced near the far more dangerous
thrust faults, such as those that occur in Alaska -- where 51 percent
of all U.S. quakes occur -- and in Japan.
In May 1978, residents of Homer awoke to a "false sunrise" over the
western side the Cook Inlet -- several hours before the real sunrise.
About that time, Anchorage bush pilot Sumner Putnam reported to the
Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys that he saw
greenish-white flashes in Nondalton that coincided with bursts of
static on his plane's radio.
State seismologists report no current research in Alaska on earthquake
lights or the prediction of quakes.
Daily News reporter Alberto Enriquez can be reached at
aenriquez@... or at 1-907-257-4328.
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 2002 The Anchorage Daily News
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