Solar flares may be triggering earthquakes, controversial study claims
Solar flares often disrupt Earth’s upper atmosphere and help power stunning aurora borealis. Now, scientists suggest that these same bursts of solar energy could also influence earthquakes.
When a solar flare bursts towards our planet, it can subtly reorganize charged particles in Earth’s space. ionosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere filled with electrically charged gas. In a new study, researchers suggest that these changes could slightly alter electrical forces within the Earth’s crust and affect the stability of faults where earthquakes can occur.
An electrical circuit the size of a planet
Our planet is full of naturally produced electricity. In particular, highly stressed cracks in the Earth’s crust contain pockets of water so hot and so pressurized that it is neither liquid nor gas. This supercritical fluid is full of charged ions, meaning the cracks behave like a capacitor storing electrical energy.
These cracks in the crustFaults, or faults, are also key regions that trigger earthquakes because they mark where tectonic plates collide and move, accumulating mechanical energy that can lead to earthquakes.
In the new study, researchers created a model that treated the Earth’s crust and the ionosphere – a charged layer 402 kilometers above Earth – as two ends of a giant leaking battery.
They then connected the crustal “capacitor” to the ionosphere with an electric field.
The scientists used their model to predict that when electrically charged particles from a solar flare hit Earth, they move electrons from the ionosphere downward, concentrating them at lower altitudes, forming a negatively charged layer. This charge, in turn, increases the electrostatic force acting on charges present in the Earth’s crust, producing pressure changes, the model showed. The researchers argue that these pressure changes are comparable to other forces that affect fault stability, such as gravity Or tides.
Essentially, increased electrostatic force in the crust results in increased pressure on the surrounding crust, pushing a fault to shift and cause an earthquake.
Difficult to test
Researchers suggest that the Noto Peninsula earthquake in 2024 in Japan confirms the results of their model, to the extent that the earthquake was superimposed on strong solar flare activity. However, validating a crust-ionosphere connection is difficult in practice.
On the one hand, the US Geological Survey has long emphasized that earthquakes do not follow those of the sun 11 year solar cycle clearly and repetitively.
There is also a problem of coincidence. Solar flares and earthquakes are quite common, so by chance there will be some overlap between the two types of events, even if they don’t necessarily influence each other.
Other researchers noted that the study’s model does not reflect the full complexity of the Earth’s crust.
“The proposed model is greatly simplified,” said Viktor Novikovgeophysicist from the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study. He added that researchers have not fully taken into account the resistance of many rock layers to the conduction of electricity, which could suppress the electric field before it contributes to an earthquake. “The observational results do not support the proposed idea,” Novikov told Live Science in an email.
Despite this, researchers continue to search for a connection between space weather and plate tectonics, however subtle it may be.
For now, the study is best viewed as a proposed avenue that could be tested with better observations and deeper analysis, the researchers noted.
Whether the Sun can reliably shake up Earth’s flaws remains an open question and a reminder of a fundamental scientific rule: correlation does not equal causation.
Mizuno, A., Kao, M., and Umeno, K. (2026). Possible mechanism of ionospheric anomalies triggering earthquakes — Electrostatic coupling between the ionosphere and the crust and the resulting electrical forces acting within the crust. International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and Technology, 20(1), e01003. https://doi.org/10.34343/ijpest.2026.20.e01003
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