Skyquakes

S

serpentdebunker

Member
I recently came across an article originally posted by the Daily Mail on the subject of "Skyquakes". In it, it says that skyquakes cannot be accounted for by any natural phenomena, and they have been baffling scientists for 200 years.

Mysterious 'skyquakes' have been heard around the world for more than 200 years, but scientists have yet to uncover the cause and origin of the bizarre noises.

The sounds could be mistaken for a gunshot or a car backfiring, and have been heard in areas ranging from Belgium and Japan to the Finger Lakes region in New York.
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The first skyquakes were documented in 1811 after people in New Madrid, Missouri heard the strange sounds during a 7.2-magnitude earthquake.

Residents reported hearing 'artillery-like sounds' before or during the quake hit.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but quakes are caused by movement of tectonic plates, and there are no tectonic plates which exist in the sky. I have seen certain Flat Earthers who suggest we are living inside a hollow dome with a sky that is painted onto said dome, and I didn't hear about these skyquakes until the resurgence of Flat Earth theory took hold.

When I search skyquakes on Reddit, I see a lot of posts made on religious or conspiracy subreddits. I have also never seen a video of a supposed skyquake that did not later turn out to be edited to include a sound that was taken from a movie.
 
I've experienced a skyquake before, when I was a teenager and on an Outward Bound course in the Colorado Rockies. A group of us were rock climbing, and suddenly there was what sounded like a tremendous explosion. We scanned the horizon for a mushroom cloud or other sign. We thought that perhaps a distant chemical factory had exploded or something. Nothing. Just the explosion noise. I suspect it is some kind of atmospheric phenomenon and not something too extraordinary.
 
The only thing I can think of that might best be described as a "sky quake" is the palpable and visible shock wave from something like an explosion. The source of the shock waves that I've seen in videos were terrestrial (e.g. @Todd Feinman's suggested factory explosion) but I think it would also be possible from atmospheric or subterranean sources, such as lightning strikes or (as mentioned by @serpentdebunker) earthquakes.

Here's a single explosion in a tunnel, with multiple reverberating shock waves.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSJhrRY-Pc
 
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It's hard to imagine the kind of atmospheric forces that could cause that noise on such a nice sunny day in the Rockies. I've considered some kind of vacuum caused by wind shear or some kind of standing wave or turbulence caused by "mountain waves", but it is hard to imagine them generating such an explosive sound.
 
Todd Feinman said:
It's hard to imagine the kind of atmospheric forces that could cause that noise on such a nice sunny day in the Rockies. I've considered some kind of vacuum caused by wind shear or some kind of standing wave or turbulence caused by "mountain waves", but it is hard to imagine them generating such an explosive sound.
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Article:
What is a "bolt from the blue"?

A "bolt from the blue" is a cloud-to-ground flash which typically comes out of the side of the thunderstorm cloud, travels a relatively large distance in clear air away from the storm cloud, and then angles down and strikes the ground. These lightning flashes have been documented to travel several miles away from the thunderstorm cloud. They can be especially dangerous because they appear to come from clear blue sky.

A helmeted bicyclist experienced a lightning strike to the head under fair weather conditions with a cloudless sky. It was determined that the bolt probably originated in a thunderstorm that was about 16km (approximately ten miles) away and obscured by mountains.

Via https://lpsfr.com/en/lightning-on-a-clear-day-an-intriguing-meteorological-phenomenon/ :

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs41H0WWXt4


Article:
A bolt from the blue is still cloud to ground lightning. However, in contrast to a negatively charged lightning strike, a bolt from the blue usually starts from the top of a cloud which is positively charged. As such, it is a positive charge which flows, not a negative. It occurs when there is too much positive charge at the top of the cloud and a discharge is needed for balance. As a result of the charge being positive, the strike carries more power, can reach longer distances, and is hotter than a negative strike.

A bolt from the blue can strike as far as 40 km away from the nearest storm cloud.


If you do not see the lightning, the thunder (and its echoes, especially in the mountains) appears to come out of nowhere.
 
Mendel said:
Article:
What is a "bolt from the blue"?

A "bolt from the blue" is a cloud-to-ground flash which typically comes out of the side of the thunderstorm cloud, travels a relatively large distance in clear air away from the storm cloud, and then angles down and strikes the ground. These lightning flashes have been documented to travel several miles away from the thunderstorm cloud. They can be especially dangerous because they appear to come from clear blue sky.

A helmeted bicyclist experienced a lightning strike to the head under fair weather conditions with a cloudless sky. It was determined that the bolt probably originated in a thunderstorm that was about 16km (approximately ten miles) away and obscured by mountains.

Via https://lpsfr.com/en/lightning-on-a-clear-day-an-intriguing-meteorological-phenomenon/ :

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs41H0WWXt4


Article:
A bolt from the blue is still cloud to ground lightning. However, in contrast to a negatively charged lightning strike, a bolt from the blue usually starts from the top of a cloud which is positively charged. As such, it is a positive charge which flows, not a negative. It occurs when there is too much positive charge at the top of the cloud and a discharge is needed for balance. As a result of the charge being positive, the strike carries more power, can reach longer distances, and is hotter than a negative strike.

A bolt from the blue can strike as far as 40 km away from the nearest storm cloud.


If you do not see the lightning, the thunder (and its echoes, especially in the mountains) appears to come out of nowhere.
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Something like that is certainly possible, especially in the Rockies at that altitude. I've been also right under a thunderstorm on top of a mountain high up in the Rockies on that same trip, and it's a miracle that no one was hurt. When the storm was right on top of us, the thunder was so loud it was like having gunshots fired right by your ears.
Perhaps if the sound was carried and transformed it would sound more like the explosion we heard. It almost seemed like there was a shock wave.
 
Todd Feinman said:
Perhaps if the sound was carried and transformed it would sound more like the explosion we heard. It almost seemed like there was a shock wave.
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If you have one of these lightnings, it's going to generate thunder all along its horizontal path, which, if several km long, will take even more seconds to reach an observer, plus echoes generated by rock faces in the mountains. It's not just the sound that carries, it's also the lightning that creates it which travels far afield from its originating cloud.
 
Mendel said:
If you have one of these lightnings, it's going to generate thunder all along its horizontal path, which, if several km long, will take even more seconds to reach an observer, plus echoes generated by rock faces in the mountains. It's not just the sound that carries, it's also the lightning that creates it which travels far afield from its originating cloud.
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Right, air is displaced along the path. Could possibly be an explanation. Some years ago I did some searching in the newspaper databases for old accounts of skyquakes, found a number of them, and posted them online, but now I can't find them.
 
Artillery fire is one example of sound that can be heard tens of miles away from no readily visible source. Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton regularly issues noise advisories: https://www.pendleton.marines.mil/Main-Menu/Base-Information/Noise-Advisory/
Note: Depending on atmospheric conditions, the sound of the explosions may be amplified and heard up to 50 miles away.
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Plus the occasional "mystery boom" heard across the region, which might be artillery fire or some miscreant jet: https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/l...iego/509-2e52670e-a275-48c1-8754-c722cafa054f

Nightly fireworks from Sea World San Diego can also be heard 15 to 20 miles away, to the dismay of dogs across the San Diego metropolitan area.
 
There are quite a few cases in the old newspapers. Here is a selection of results from TROVE.
Here is an interesting one.

Northern Miner (Charters Towers, Qld. : 1874 - 1954), Saturday 28 February 1925, page 3:

skynoise.png
 
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Ann K said:
If you feel like driving someone crazy with an earworm, please note that you can use that music to sing Jabberwocky. . .
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"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" also works well, though you have to repeat the "burbled" and its analogs to make it work... If you want a more soulfull and heartfelt earworm, suitable for a choir...
 
The "Bell Island Boom" of 1978 in Newfoundland, Canada might be an example of a skyquake. Possibly caused by an unobserved superbolt, an unusually powerful lightning strike.

Wikipedia article "Bell Island (Newfoundland and Labrador)":

External Quote:

Bell Island Boom

On Sunday, April 2, 1978, a huge bang was heard at Bell Island just before noon. The bang was so loud that people reported hearing it as far as 100 km away. The blast sent a shock wave that shook buildings on the island and killed some animals. The energy release was so powerful that the Vela satellites (which the US government used to detect nuclear tests by other powers) noticed the phenomenon, now known as the Bell Island Boom.

There were multiple reports of damaged electrical wiring and destroyed electrical appliances. The epicentre was around the Bickford family farm in the hamlet of Bickfordville, near Lance Cove. They claimed to have seen a gigantic bluish flame and both their television set and fuse box had exploded. The chicken coop was completely destroyed and all the chickens had died. Neighbours soon discovered three large pits in the snow behind the farm, which were considered "epicentre". The son who was cycling nearby at that time also stated that he saw two luminous spheres flying by.

All sorts of hypotheses about the cause quickly emerged, from rational explanation attempts to conspiracy theories. In general, based on the evidence, it is assumed that it was a superbolt, a rare and very powerful type of lightning occurring only about once per two million lightning strikes or so, normally high in the atmosphere or above the ocean. This was also the conclusion of two scientists at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory who detected "superbolts" using data from the Vela satellites and therefore conducted an on-site investigation shortly after the incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Island_(Newfoundland_and_Labrador)#Bell_Island_Boom.

Brian Dunning wrote about the incident on his Skeptoid website in 2010 (he refers to Warren and Freyman, who were scientists from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, now called the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who visited the site):

External Quote:
Warren and Freyman had been monitoring imagery from the Vela satellites. This fleet of four satellites kept the globe under constant surveillance, looking for the distinct signatures of nuclear bomb detonations. They also picked up large lightning flashes, and it was in part from the Vela satellites that we learned about lightning superbolts. About five of every ten million bolts of lightning is classified as a superbolt, which is just what it sounds like: An unusually large bolt of lightning, lasting an unusually long time: About a thousandth of a second. Superbolts are almost always in the upper atmosphere, and usually over the oceans. Often these upper atmosphere storms can occur with people on the ground being completely unaware, perceiving nothing other than a clear sunny day. Dr. William Donn, chief atmospheric scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory, compiled reports from airline pilots of extremely high-altitude flashes that corresponded with nighttime Mystery Booms. He said the daylight booms may have high-altitude flashes as well, but if they do we wouldn't be able to see them from below because of the daylight.
From "The Bell Island Boom", Brian Dunning, 26 January 2010, Skeptoid Podcast #190
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4190?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIr5Clg6vD-QIVg4xRCh0MngADEAAYASAAEgJt6vD_BwE
 
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JMartJr said:
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" also works well, though you have to repeat the "burbled" and its analogs to make it work... If you want a more soulfull and heartfelt earworm, suitable for a choir...
Click to expand...
O frabjous daaaaaaaaaaaay
Callooooo, callaaaaaaaaaaaay
 
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jdog said:
Artillery fire is one example of sound that can be heard tens of miles away from no readily visible source. Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton regularly issues noise advisories: https://www.pendleton.marines.mil/Main-Menu/Base-Information/Noise-Advisory/
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The deeper the noise, the longer the wavelength and the better the sound carries. But that is also true, as far as I can tell, with light waves. I think that's the reason that red lights are most often used by emergency vehicles. Anecdotally (again), a nearby village always puts up thousands of colored lights on huge pine trees at Christmas. As I first sight them in the distance I see only red lights, then yellow as I get closer, but the green and blue don't show up at all until I'm within just a couple of hundred yards of them.
 
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Ann K said:
The deeper the noise, the longer the wavelength and the better the sound carries. But that is also true, as far as I can tell, with light waves. I think that's the reason that red lights are most often used by emergency vehicles. Anecdotally (again), a nearby village always puts up thousands of colored lights on huge pine trees at Christmas. As I first sight them in the distance I see only red lights, then yellow as I get closer, but the green and blue don't show up at all until I'm within a just a couple of hundred yards of them.
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I believe that's a function of the sensitivity of the eye—if we were more sensitive to blue, the daytime sky would be blinding.

Over here, emergency vehicles have blue lights exclusively—but fire trucks are still painted red.
 
Ann K said:
The deeper the noise, the longer the wavelength and the better the sound carries. But that is also true, as far as I can tell, with light waves. I think that's the reason that red lights are most often used by emergency vehicles. Anecdotally (again), a nearby village always puts up thousands of colored lights on huge pine trees at Christmas. As I first sight them in the distance I see only red lights, then yellow as I get closer, but the green and blue don't show up at all until I'm within just a couple of hundred yards of them.
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Makes sense, as red light scatters the least. Another good reason would be the psychological associations with the color red.
 
Ann K said:
The deeper the noise, the longer the wavelength and the better the sound carries. But that is also true, as far as I can tell, with light waves. I think that's the reason that red lights are most often used by emergency vehicles.
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In water visible blue light travels further than red,
External Quote:
Colors with shorter wavelengths, like those on the blue and violet end of the spectrum, have more energy than colors with longer wavelengths. Red light has the lowest energy. In water, colors with lower energy, such as reds, oranges, and yellows are filtered out quickly.
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/edu/materials/light-and-color-fact-sheet.pdf, "Light and Color in the Deep Sea", NOAA

Not sure if the same holds true in the atmosphere (Rayleigh scattering), at dawn and dusk sometimes the blue light is so scattered by its acute path through the atmosphere that the sky might appear pink/orange/ red.
Subjectively, if I can make out the colours of an aircraft's lights, I tend to see the red before the green even though green light is more energetic (though that doesn't mean a green lightsource is necessarily brighter than a red one).

I've heard that we react faster to red signs, and many warning signs around the world are on a red background or have a red border. Picked up a hypothesis from somewhere that bright red -the colour of blood- is something humans might have evolved to rapidly attend to.
Did a quick net search about reaction times to different colours- surprised how little good information there was.

Mendel said:
Over here, emergency vehicles have blue lights exclusively—but fire trucks are still painted red.
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Yes, in many (western) European countries most emergency vehicles use blue lights; in UK/ France/ Ireland roof-mounted beacons/ lightbars on police, fire service, ambulance vehicles are almost exclusively blue AFAIK (some rare exceptions/ variants).
Greek fire engines, ambulances use red lights IIRC.
Japan's police cars have used red beacons and lightbars for many years.

On looking, there's a lot of variation around the world, sometimes within one country (e.g. the USA),
some examples given on Wikipedia, Emergency vehicle lighting.

Todd Feinman said:
Makes sense, as red light scatters the least.
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...Wow, glad I checked back on the thread before posting this! Todd must be right, while reading through the Wikipedia link above, found this,

External Quote:
...cobalt blue was regulated to replace the red color used until 1938 in German emergency vehicle lights. Due to the scattering properties of the blue color, it is only visible to lower altitudes and is therefore less easily spotted by enemy airplanes.
 
I did a deep dive into figuring out all the potential causes of mystery booms, often called "sky quakes" as a snappy "sciencey" term. The world is a very noisy place these days. Just recently, the rash of booms noticed across Idaho were a popular topic. A few dudes with time on their hands called themselves "boom chasers". https://sharonahill.com/idaho-mystery-boom-chasers/

The full extent of all the potential causes of land-based booms may be undefinable but the most common include the following:
  • Lightning/thunder (particularly positive strikes which are exceptionally loud)
  • Explosions (accidental and deliberate, such as use of tannerite or fireworks)
  • Industrial noise
  • Train or truck-related sounds
  • Military artillery exercises
  • Sonic booms
  • Quarrying or rock blasting
  • Shallow earthquakes
  • Other geological-related events including frost quakes
From: https://sharonahill.com/mystery-booms-and-skyquakes/
 
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