As a reader told Spaceweather, these “avalanche lights” were also described by polar expedition guide Rustyn Mesdag who had the opportunity to observe them with the naked eye while camping in Antarctic.
Blue lightning on the ice
On October 27, astrophotographer Shengyu Li sets up his camera behind Mount Xiannairi in Sichuan, China, to create a timelapse of the stars (a video capture technique made using multiple photos taken in series). . However, it is a completely different phenomenon than the course of the stars that he ends up immortalizing.
We never saw a snow avalanche with blue lights at night. As he observed #China On the night of October 27, 2024, astrophotographer Shengyu Li climbed Xiannairi in Sichuan. The phenomenon is called “triboluminiscencia”.
Via https://t.co/17PlOHmjeT pic.twitter.com/JUXLNj6INB— RAM Revista del Aficionado a la Meteorología (@RAM_meteo) November 26, 2024
Indeed, his device records an avalanche, caused more precisely by a serac, a large block of ice, which detaches from the hanging glacier. Within the avalanche, the viewer can observe some sort of blue lightning which easily stands out from the white of the falling ice. The blue disappears as suddenly as it appeared, vanishing as the ice crashes below Mt.
The phenomenon of triboluminescence
“We have never found a documented case of such an event, which makes this discovery both exciting and intriguing to us. Our initial hypothesis is that luminescence may result from friction-induced light during ice fragmentation”, relates the astrophotographer to the thematic media Spaceweather.
This phenomenon captured by the astrophotographer is called triboluminescence. According to a definition from the CNRTL, it is a “ emission of light by certain crystals when they are broken, and which is due to the disruptive discharge in the air caused by the separation of the electrical charges on the two fragments”.
Electromagnetic emissions
As Richard Feynman, an American physicist, explains, it is possible to reproduce this bluish glow at home, by breaking a piece of sugar in a room devoid of light using tweezers. If the reasons for this light remain quite mysterious, old scientific articles mention electromagnetic emissions when the cracks in the ice grow. The faster the cracks grow, the greater the load accumulation.
This phenomenon is illustrated during practical work carried out at the University of Paris Saclay and transcribed in an article entitled “When light is born from mechanical constraints”. Here, the triboluminescent compound is “capable of emitting light if subjected to a force”.
However, seeing such intense electric blue light in avalanches remains very rare. While showing his film to other astrophotographers in China, one of them showed him a similar event, which took place in October in Xinjiang, China. There too, the blue lightning is there on the Muztagh Ata this time.
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