Talk:Earthquake light

Examples

• Examples of Mainstream science include Diamagnetism, Cherenkov radiation, Geodesy, and Evolution. Policies such as WP:FRINGE and WP:PARITY do not apply. Related fringe topics such as Flat Earth are generally left out of the article.
• Examples of fringe theories include Flood geology, 21 grams experiment, Flat Earth, and Torsion field. Policies such as WP:FRINGE and WP:PARITY apply. Related mainstream science topics such as History of Earth are generally prominently mentioned and linked to.
• Examples of unsettled questions include Dark matter, Mpemba effect, Magnetic monopoles, and The Hum. Policies such as WP:FRINGE and WP:PARITY apply if skeptical sources categorize the question as fringe or pseudoscience, but must be attributed and not used while excluding WP:SCIRS sources.

--Guy Macon (talk) 18:26, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Ground Rules

Because of the history of disruption on this topic, editors are asked to abide by the following voluntary ground rules. If you disagree with any of these rules, post your objection in the threaded discussion section. If there appears to be consensus for the change, an administrator will be asked to evaluate the consensus and modify the ground rules as appropriate.

• No incivility or personal attacks. In fact, it would be best to avoid saying anything about any editor. Stick to the RfC questions and post your personal comments somewhere else.
• Do not attempt to dominate the discussion. If you are about to repeat a point you made before, don't. If you have posted more comments than anyone else, slow down. If your post count is over twice that of whoever is in second place, just stop.
• This RfC is only about whether earthquakes cause lights in the sky. If this confuses you, please read Correlation does not imply causation before posting.
• One post per editor in the survey section. Any editor is invited to move any second post to the threaded discussion section, as allowed by WP:TPOC. Consider using the {{Moved discussion from}} template. If you see someone replying in the survey section, do not reply in the survey section. Reply in the threaded discussion.
• No editing the RfC outside of the threaded discussion an survey sections by anyone involved. Propose changes in the threaded discussion section and let an administrator make the change.

--Guy Macon (talk) 18:26, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Survey

• Option C: Unsettled question. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 18:32, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. No reliable sources characterize earthquake lights as psuedoscience or fringe, so it would fail WP:RS, WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:NOR to characterize it as that in the article.Katzrockso (talk) 18:36, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. If we have to ask, then WP:SERIOUSLYCONTESTED applies. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:46, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
• All of the above. fiveby(zero) 19:31, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. There's no doubt that people have reported seeing lights in contexts they associate with earthquakes. Whether these reports are describing anything with some sort of causal relationship with said earthquakes is clearly undetermined. There have been multiple attempts to explain such reports of lights in scientific terms, though none of the explanations seems to have been seen as particularly persuasive: not least because of a lack of real data (as opposed to anecdotes) to test such explanations against. One could argue that the explanations are 'fringe science' in that they are very much a minority pursuit, but there doesn't seem to be any overall 'fringe theory' being pushed. As long as the article makes it entirely clear that whether there is a real phenomenon at all is still an open question, and as long as the article avoids giving undue prominence to primary-source 'explanations' which seem to take it as read that the lights are real, our readers can be left to decide for themselves how much credibility to attach to it all. 'Nobody really knows' is a perfectly credible way to present a topic, and in this case the only justifiable one. AndyTheGrump (talk) 20:03, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C "Unsettled questions" per quality sources. The WP:FRINGE position would be these questions are settled (in any direction). Bon courage (talk) 06:37, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C Unsettled question Google Scholar features many many sources treating these as potentially real, and offering many hypotheses. Some sources mention or actually show photographs of alleged earthquake lights (e.g this one, not a very good one though), and some folks have attempted to catalogue them while discarding probable lightning and other confounders . This is clearly not fringe or made-up, but similar to ball lightning where there are many observations including photos, physical theories but no start-to-finish (as in, theory empirically proven by the scientific method) theory. A bit less reliable than ball lightning perhaps, but I'd call this "unsettled". Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:54, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C: When editing on UFO topics, I have read news articles in various major newspapers. Earthquake lights sometimes come up as a potential explanation. Major newspapers treat them as an unresolved question, noticeably different from widely-accepted explanations (balloons) or widely-unaccepted explanations (time travelers). Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 16:13, 20 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C: per Thebiguglyalien. JerryGraf (talk) 19:42, 22 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C with logic similar to AndyTheGrump. There isn't agreement on "does it happen or doesn't it happen" but there is something that can be tested. Red Fiona (talk) 13:50, 23 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. In agreement with AndyTheGrump. Seems that the topic is unsettled based on the sources in the article that I have checked. Edittttor (talk) 22:20, 25 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. Caveat, I work on triboelectricity, but will try and stay NPOV. The explanations mentioned in the article are mostly completely valid science which have been tested and verified at the much smaller scale. The WP articles are not all the best, but we do have something on triboluminescence, which does not do enough on fractoluminescence (light from fracture). There are a host of mechanical terms which couple strain and polarization including electrostriction, piezoelectricity and flexoelectricity. There are some newer areas such as the photoflexoelectric effect which have not made WP yet. Hence the underlying science is solid, the uncertainty is which terms dominate. (refs available in request).Ldm1954 (talk) 19:55, 31 May 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. Earthquake lights are a reported mystery with possible scientific explainations, but not a settled "earthquakes definitely causes lights". So not fringe, not proven, more like "strange lights show up, and science still chewing on why". NicoR8 (talk) 15:04, 6 June 2026 (UTC)
• Option C. Brought here by RFC/A Neither widely accepted nor widely regarded as fringe. lizthegrey (talk) 21:17, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

I’m a bit late, but 0.97 of C and 0.03 of B. _{In solidarity} Wikipedian12512 (Talking is fine | contribs) 01:11, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

There's a there there, no one knows or agrees for sure what is there, and the article obviously must be agnostic/non-committal neutral to what is or is not there, because it's an unsettled question. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 18:32, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for those. I think it would be helpful to be more specific. Could editors identify a reference or two, hopefully of highest quality, that support each of the RfC options, if they exist? --Hipal (talk) 18:44, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Honestly, it will be hard to. I'm pretty sure at least every source used by me and the way I've used it either just detail/describe historic reports and facts about earthquake light history, public belief, and that sort of thing. The rest are just "this is what people think it can be" and a number of "no one knows/unsettled". The entire article is Option C as written right now.

Per @Katzrockso below no worthwhile sources exist at all that support option B - pure nonsense. There may never have been post the 1960s.

As to option A, the research OF earthquake lights is obviously mainstream science if done scientifically, which... no one seems to dispute. The dispute is whether or not the existence OF earthquake lights is universally agreed upon, at all, or what level (which I'm not personally interested in at all).

So every source is either C so far, doesn't actually address the real vs not question whatsoever... and apparently nothing for B or A that matter. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 18:52, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Addendum: If helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20200319031602/https://www.ijgeophysics.ir/article_85871_d26385846fcea66085492b485e3538f1.pdf

I just came across this review paper and have it here now, with apparently a boatload further utility ouf it. I would appear (eyeballing and tossing full text of both the article and the paper into LLMs) that there is around 40-50% overlap already between the two.

Unless I'm crazy, that means that I'm pretty much with what I've been doing on track with mainstream... thinking? — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 19:33, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

I came across that Iranian Journal of Geophysics article too, but it is published in a fairly low impact-factor journal (169/177 ranked in SCOPUS), so ideally we'd look for something with greater eminence. Katzrockso (talk) 19:38, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

And a better source can replace it on that particular citation should it turn up, like that one turned up to replace a different reference. It's fine meanwhile to also affirm (as the last one did) that people ascribed these reported phenemena to meteors. That's not us saying it WAS meteors, it's reporting that this was simply once of the theories. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 19:41, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

While I think this specific sentence should be included, this is going about writing the article backwards. We shouldn't check the lowest quality sources and add whatever information might be verifiable in those, but rather look for the highest quality sources and start building the article from what those sources say about the subject, using lower quality sources to fill in the gaps and supplement. Just because something is verifiable doesn't meant it needs to be included (WP:VNOT). Katzrockso (talk) 19:47, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

But an article also is an interative process, and a useable source is fine until a better one (if it exists) is OK. I'm not saying build it a certain way; I'm simply building it. There's no special rule on how to do basic assembly of different classes of pages. That's all I'm saying. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 19:52, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

WP:BACKWARDS and WP:Sources first both offer good advice on how to write articles, but I would go even further and say that you should start with the WP:BESTSOURCES on the subject.

I don't agree with your statement a useable source is fine until a better one (if it exists) is OK here; just because a source has information and the source is reliable doesn't mean that the information needs to be included on Wikipedia. As I already noted, WP:VNOT explicitly supports this, as well as WP:NOTDIR/WP:NOTDB, WP:DUE and WP:BALASP. If you add every bit of trivia or piece of information cited in the lowest-quality, least reliable (but still reliable) sources, an article can become bloated and fail to properly explain the subject by getting bogged down in the minutiae. Katzrockso (talk) 19:58, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

For example, I found this source Moving on from the genuinely odd, or somewhat suspect, phenomena of Earth Lights we enter still mysterious but extremely well documented earthquake lights (EQLs). Like Earthlights these lay on the fringes of mainstream science for decades but their existence is now becoming more widely accepted. from The Exo-Weather Report (2016), page 173, which I thought be a useful source to add to the existing statements of this information. However, when I looked into the source, I found a mostly negative review that highlighted that the author's background was in biology and the intended audience for the book appeared to be amateurs , so I decided against adding the source in favor of looking for better ones. Katzrockso (talk) 20:02, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

What is the purpose of this RfC? As in what article content should or would change as a result of the outcome? fiveby(zero) 19:33, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

[1] It was requesting by an administrator at WP:ANI.

[2] It determines whether removing skeptical sources, loading up the article with material supporting the theory that earthquakes cause lights in the sky, and deleting or minimizing material suggesting that earthquake lights aren't a thing will be allowed.

[3] It gives you a place to post a joke response in the survey section. Everyone^{[Citation Needed]} loves a good joke. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:03, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Well thanks for the opportunity but it wasn't all a joke. Seems like good mainstream science to me, reputably published and taken seriously. There's lots of discussion here about whether EQL are "real" or not and it seems to me that they are "real enough". But WP should be conservative and not out in front of other tertiary sources, there is quite a bit of criticism of observations and as yet no real satisfying theory as to mechanism. And as always there are fringe concerns to watch out for, some mentioned by Hough, amateurs opining, physicist sticking their oar in and maybe not taking into account the work of seismologists, bureaucratic involvement in Japan. And i believe the initial concern you raised at FTN is still valid, even though we have located better sources than the parity ones which have been removed. I thought we were already trending to a C-ish approach in the discussions but maybe best to confirm that. fiveby(zero) 13:57, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

• I strongly agree with AndyTheGrump's comments in the survey section. If, as seems likely, the consensus will be for option C, I would hope that anyone who doesn't think AndyTheGrump's comments reflect the consensus would speak up now rather than after the RfC closes. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:10, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

  You will need a 2nd RFC to deal with so many reputable sources saying for years that earth quake lights have been photographed and recorded … they all seem to assert it as real. ~2026-30154-29 (talk) 20:33, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

  Nobody disputes that lights have been reported and photographed. The question is whether the earthquakes cause the lights. Photographs cannot answer that question. Feel free to cast a !vote in the survey. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:10, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

  This is a good point. For all we know, it's the lights that cause the earthquakes, or some third phenomena causes both. Some of these seem less likely then others, but that would be original research since this seems unsettled for now. That doesn't mean it will always be though. Edittttor (talk) 22:24, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Not questioning the ground rules, but the format. Can you please move the § Survey section above the § Threaded discussion? As the survey section will remain compact per the rules, and the § Threaded discussion could in theory become quite long (and is already showing signs of that at this early stage), it will become increasingly tedious to scroll down to the Survey section. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:56, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Seems uncontroversial and makes sense, Done. If anyone objects feel free to revert and discuss per WP:BRD. --Guy Macon (talk) 04:57, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

• I think a large part of the problem with this article is the #Proposed theories section. As written that is a jumble of terms which, I suspect to many people, all appear to be different. That gives the impression that there are 2**N models and nobody knows (anything?). In reality this is not the case, and some careful rewriting will, I think, make the article much better. Almost everything in that section is really the creation of charge/polarisation which then gets translated into light. For instance piezoelectricity is an established mechanism for triboelectricity in non-centro symmetric materials as is (now) flexoelectricity; all of these connect to stresses. All the electrokinetic terms are liquid analogues of the above terms. In fact almost everything in that first paragraph is different ways of combining mechanical deformation and polarization, excepting Exoelectron emission (which I wonder about on a science basis). Some clarification and better writing with sources which show the connections of the basic physics (they exist) would help. It can still be stated that there is, as yet, no full concensus but in a more positive way.Ldm1954 (talk) 21:18, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

  I believe that you are right. Alas, this opens up a huge problem for the proponents of the overall theory that earthquakes creating lights in the sky is real. Let's assume for a moment that something about the earth moving or about rock being squeezed causes the lights. Can it cause the lights a week before or a week after the movement/squeezing? Or 500 miles away? We aren't talking about foreshocks or aftershocks. That's just more moving/squeezing. Many of the reports have zero evidence of anything happening in the ground at the time and place where the lights are observed. And some of the more recent ones happened above ground that is heavily instrumented and would catch any earth movement or squeezing. That's why I originally expressed a concern about the removal of WP:PARITY skeptical sources. it promotes a pro-fringe POV. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:41, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

  Actually a see no inconsistency. You are referring to plastic deformation, when there are movements from microns to meters; the terms I referred to and (I think) are in the article are more at the nanoscale and mainly elastic deformation. There is no physical inconsistency between high strain at one place but failure somewhere else. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:04, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

  That doesn't solve the problem. Both plastic deformation and elastic deformation can be measured. There exists no reliable source that establishes that any sort of deformation was measured at the time and place where many of the sightings occurred. Nor has it been established that deformation causes lights in the sky, although there are theories. For historic sightings we have to rely on people feeling the ground move, and again there exists no reliable source that establishes that anyone felt the ground moving at the time and place where many of the sightings occurred. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:12, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

  All I said before and now is that the #Proposed theories section is poorly written. It does not make it clear that the same physics that creates lightning has been suggested to explain earthquake light. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:22, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

@Ldm1954: which sources are you referring to in your C !vote? Thanks! — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 20:34, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

I am on travel, so can only give a couple of recent, meaty reviews related to triboelectricity, DOI:10.1088/1361-6633/ae08cb and DOI:10.1002/smtd.202501782. You can probably pull some sources from Triboelectric effect. Note, all of these are on the underlying science and do not specifically discuss earthquake lights. Ldm1954 (talk) 20:49, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Would this edit cover some of your concerns? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Earthquake_light&diff=1360644205&oldid=1360110721 — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 19:12, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

I am busy working restructuring results for a conference from Sunday. It is on my "to do" list to rewrite that section. While I know the physics, I have to look at the relevant sources here first so it wont happen that quickly. Ldm1954 (talk) 19:17, 22 June 2026 (UTC)