Sparkly Mints May Help Explain Puzzling “Earthquake Lights”

Sparkly Mints May Help Explain Puzzling “Earthquake Lights”.

In a recent study by scientists at Rutgers University, researchers found that clumps of granular particles can spontaneously generate electrical voltages just before they break apart into smaller clumps. They first demonstrated the effect by grinding up Tylenol into a fine powder and putting the grains in a slowly spinning cylinder. As the powder stuck to the sides, clumped, and spun, it would reach a certain height and then break up in a mini-avalanche back down to the bottom of the cylinder. Each time it did, it briefly generated 100 volts. That voltage spike sometimes happened as many as five seconds before the actual avalanche occurred. They then showed something even stranger: that the effect worked with a huge range of insulating materials, from plastic disks to glass beads to baking flour. This, they argue, could be what’s causing the lights that people see just before earthquakes.

The authors of the paper acknowledge that this is a very strange effect. “If you take a Tupperware container filled with flour and tip the container, when the flour shifts, voltages of around 100 volts inexplicably appear,” lead researcher Troy Shinbrot told Charles Choi at Our Amazing Planet. “Except for the fact that we cannot get these voltages to go away, I would call this ‘crackpot physics,’ and even as it is, I wish I could hedge my bets, but the voltages are very repeatable, and we have so far failed to account for a spurious influence that might cause them.”