Earthquake lights: no reliable case reported for the major 2026 earthquakes, and a mechanism still debated

What is reported

Glows are sometimes reported around earthquakes. According to the USGS, geophysicists do not agree on how many of these reports are true “earthquake lights”, and some cases turned out to be electrical arcs from shaken power lines. A 2014 study (Seismological Research Letters) lists 65 cases since 1600 in Europe and the Americas, 56 of them in rift zones, and proposes an electrical hypothesis; a USGS study published in 2025 proposes, for other cases, gases released and then ignited. No mechanism is established. For the major 2026 earthquakes, no institution or news agency reports any earthquake light: at Mindanao (8 June), the “night lights” tracked by the Philippine space agency are city lighting seen from satellite; in Venezuela (24 June), the “laser beams” video associated with the earthquake had been published in March 2026, three months earlier, and the earthquake took place in daytime; the red sky over Caracas on 30 June was explained by meteorologists (sunset, tropical wave); in Panama (9 October), a daytime earthquake, nothing reported. In France, no official report; only old testimonies compiled by the 2014 study mention a “reddish” sky (Bagnères-de-Bigorre, 1873) or a “reddish glow” (Saint-Geniez-d'Olt, 1876), unverified.