In reply to H Veeder's message of Thu, 9 Jan 2014 15:23:02 -0500: Hi, [snip] >Mysterious Earthquake Lights Linked to Rift Zones > > >http://www.weather.com/news/science/mysterious-earthquake-lights-linked-rift-zones-20140107 > ><<The team found 65 cases that were well documented from North and South >America and Europe. Of those cases, 97 percent seemed to happen at faults >within continental plates, rather than at subduction zones, or the >boundaries where one plate is diving below another. That's despite the fact >that most big earthquakes happen at subduction boundaries. > >Instead, about 85 percent of the time, lights seemed to happen at places >where the tops of thecontinental plates buckle, creating fissures, or >rifts, where the Earth pulls apart.>>
...not really surprising. To create the lights, the air needs to be ionized, which requires high static fields, or fast particles. The piezoelectric effect produced by moving plates can produce the required fields, but it would be shorted out by the salt water which usually covers the places where subduction occurs. On land however the fields can exist. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
