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IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy<br />

(S) - <strong>IASPEI</strong> - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's<br />

Interior<br />

JSS010 Poster presentation 2087<br />

On the physical causes of enhanced infrared emission known as Thermal<br />

Anomalies<br />

Prof. Friedemann Freund<br />

Earth Science Division, Code SGE NASA Ames Research Center IAGA<br />

Akihiro Takeuchi, Bobby W.S. Lau, Nevin A. Bryant<br />

Ever since large, rapidly changing areas of enhanced infrared emission have been noted in night-time<br />

satellite images in association with impending seismic activity, the search has been on to find an<br />

explanation for this intricate phenomenon. We pursue a different line of inquiry - different from what<br />

has been proposed before - which comes from the recognition (1) that deviatoric stresses activate<br />

dormant electronic charge carriers that exist in rocks in form of peroxy links, O3Si-OO-SiO3. They<br />

release defect electrons, highly mobile charge carriers in the oxygen anion sublattice (positive holes or<br />

pholes for short), chemically O-. The pholes propagate at speeds on the order of 20050 m/sec,<br />

propagate through dry and wet rocks, through sand and soil. They become trapped at the surface. It<br />

costs mechanical energy to dissociate peroxy at depth. Some of this energy is recovered when pholes<br />

recombine at the surface, leading to vibrationally highly excited O-O bonds, which can get rid of their<br />

excess energy (i) by emitting photons at specific wavelengths in the mid-IR region, (ii) by kicking and<br />

exciting their neighbors, thereby thermalizing and causing a very thin surface layer to heat up. The<br />

theoretically predicted narrow mid-IR emission bands due to the deactivation of highly excited O-O<br />

bonds have been experimentally confirmed with a large block of anorthosite, a feldspar rock, measuring<br />

the IR emission ~50 cm from the stressed rock volume (2). (1) Freund et al. 2006, Phys. Chem. Earth<br />

31, 389-396; (2) Freund et al. 2007, eEarth, 2, 1-10.<br />

Keywords: earthquake precursors, thermal infrared anomalies, stimulated infrared emission

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