This is the moment an eerie blue light flashes in the night sky as buildings creak and groan during the Turkey-Syria earthquake.

The terrifying footage was filmed on a mobile phone from a vantage point in Turkey’s southern Hatay Province early on 6th February.

As the rumble of the quake can be heard all around, bright blue lights intermittently light up the night sky.

Boffins believe the low-pitched rumbling sounds heard in the footage were caused by high-frequency seismic waves passing through the ground.

And they think the mysterious lights may have been caused by electric induction in the air along the earthquake source.

Experts say so-called ‘earthquake light’ generally appears during quakes measuring five or higher on the Richter scale.

The phenomenon has been observed in powerful temblors across the world, such as the 2003 Colima, 2007 Peru, 2009 L’Aquila, and 2010 Chile earthquakes.

In the 2004 research article ‘Ancient and modern earthquake lights in Northwestern Turkey’, the late astronomer Richard B. Stothers writes: “A search of European and Middle Eastern literature for the period before A.D. 600 has turned up 12 possible cases of earthquake light, of which one case, occurring at some date in the interval A.D. 395-402 just to the east of Constantinople (Istanbul), is so strong as to be almost certain.

“The details of this case resemble the phenomena reported for the 1999 Izmit (Kocaeli) earthquake in the same area.

“For both earthquakes, the reported atmospheric light may have arisen from the burning of natural gas or from electrical discharges in the air.”

The disaster that hit southern and central Turkey was actually two earthquakes of magnitudes 7.8 and 7.5 a few hours apart.

At the time of writing, more than 5,000 people had been killed and more than 23,000 injured in the catastrophe.

The double quake is the deadliest to hit Turkey since the 1999 Izmit earthquake, which killed as many as 18,373.