animals might be able to pick up some of the previously listed precursors such as unusual gas emissions or changes to the magnetic field but as we discussed in a previous video humans have a tendency to see patterns even where there aren't any so going by anecdotes is not a good idea the major issue with those reports is the lack of control groups if a herd of sheep acts funny and no earthquake happens no one writes a headline about that but some scientists have looked into the idea that animals can tell when an earthquake is coming up already in NUMBER_TOKEN ranchol a geologist from the university of california davis did a statistical analysis to test whether the number of newspaper ads about lost pets was a sign of an imminent earthquake he compared more than NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN reports of missing pets with the times of about NUMBER_TOKEN earthquakes of magnitude NUMBER_TOKEN or larger in the san francisco bay area he found no significant correlation more recently in NUMBER_TOKEN a paper by a group from the german research center for geosciences analyzed more than NUMBER_TOKEN reports of claim correlations between earthquakes and anomalies in animal behavior those reports were from more than NUMBER_TOKEN different species fish mice elephants cows snakes and various pets the researchers found that the number of claimed observations increases close to the seismic event almost NUMBER_TOKEN percent of reports come from the last five minutes before the earthquake this makes it possible that the animals might be detecting the p wave which humans usually fail to notice but NUMBER_TOKEN of the reports related to only three earthquakes and the details of the reports are insufficient for a rigorous scientific analysis the german group concludes that they can't conclude anything because the data are rubbish so more work is needed basically before we talk about earthquake lights i want to briefly thank all our supporters and especially our tier NUMBER_TOKEN supporters on patreon your help is so important to keep this channel going and you too can help us go check out our patreon page or have a look at our gift store link is in the info below now let's talk about the mysterious earthquake lights some people claim to have seen strange lights on the sky before during or shortly after large earthquakes up to several kilometers away from the epicenter the lights typically last a fraction of a second to several seconds anecdotes about this can be found already in ancient egyptian chinese and japanese documents those earthquake lights are definitely a real thing indeed you can see them yourself in this video this footage was captured by a security camera at the university in san miguel in peru during a NUMBER_TOKEN earthquake it had a magnitude of eight the researchers who captured this video were later able to directly compare it with the recorded seismic activity in a paper published in NUMBER_TOKEN they showed that the time of the lights not only coincided with the time of the earthquakes but that they coincided with peaks of ground acceleration as you can see in this graph earthquake lights have been reported mostly for a certain type of earthquake the so-called shallow earthquakes of high magnitude some of the reports are probably something else like sparks and electricity lines but earthquake lights seem to be a real thing it's not presently well understood what causes those lights but one hypothesis that seismologists are investigating is piezoelectricity so that is an electric response that some solid materials have to stress however some of the observed earthquake lights last too long for that explanation to work so that's probably not the full story as you see seismologists know quite a few
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN before we talk about earthquake lights i want to briefly thank all our supporters and especially our tier NUMBER_TOKEN supporters on patreon your help is so important to keep this channel going and you too can help us go check out our patreon page or have a look at our gift store link is in the info below END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN