Some Auckland residents have been called out by an arm of their own council.

Lane reductions and other traffic management will stay in place at weekends.

Reports of "earthquake lights" like the ones seen in videos captured before Friday's 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Morocco go back centuries to ancient Greece.

These outbursts of bright, dancing light in different colours have long puzzled scientists, and there's still no consensus on what causes them, but they are "definitely real", said John Derr, a retired geophysicist who used to work at the US Geological Survey.

He has co-authored several scientific papers on earthquake lights, or EQL.

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"Seeing EQL depends on darkness and other favourability factors," he explained in an email.

He said the recent video from Morocco shared online looked like the earthquake lights caught on security cameras during a 2007 quake in Pisco, Peru.

Juan Antonio Lira Cacho, a physics professor at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, who has studied the phenomenon, said mobile phone video and the widespread use of security cameras has made studying earthquake lights easier.

"Forty years ago, it was impossible," he said.

"If you saw them nobody would believe what you saw."

Earthquake lights take different forms

Earthquake lights can take several different forms, according to a chapter on the phenomenon co-authored by Derr and published in the 2019 edition of the Encyclopedia of Solid Earth Geophysics.

Sometimes, the lights may appear similar to ordinary lightning, or they may be like a luminous band in the atmosphere akin to polar aurora.

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Other times they resemble glowing spheres floating in midair.

They may also look like small flames flickering or creeping along or near the ground or larger flames emerging from the ground.

A video taken in China shortly before the 2008 Sichuan earthquake shows luminous clouds floating in the sky.

To better understand earthquake lights, Derr and his colleagues gathered information on 65 American and European earthquakes associated with trustworthy reports of earthquake lights dating back to 1600.

They shared their work in a 2014 paper published in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

The researchers found that some 80 per cent of the EQL occurrences studied were observed for earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 5.0.

In most cases, the phenomenon was observed shortly before or during the seismic event, and it was visible up 600 kilometres from the quake epicentre.

Earthquakes, particularly powerful ones, are most likely to occur along or in the vicinity of the areas where tectonic plates meet.

However, the 2014 study found that the vast majority of earthquakes linked to luminous phenomena occurred within tectonic plates, rather than at their boundaries.

Moreover, earthquake lights were more likely to occur on or near rift valleys, places where – at some point in the past – Earth's crust had been pulled apart, creating an elongated lowland region that lies between two higher blocks of land.

Possible causes of earthquake lights

Friedemann Freund, Derr's collaborator and an adjunct professor at San Jose University and a former researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, has come up with one theory for earthquake lights.

Freund explained that when certain defects or impurities in crystals in rocks are put under mechanical stress – such as during the build-up of tectonic stresses before or during a major earthquake – they instantly break apart and generate electricity.

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Rock is an insulator that, when mechanically stressed, becomes a semiconductor, he said.

"Prior to earthquakes, huge volumes of rock – hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometres of rocks in the Earth's crust – are being stressed and the stresses are causing shifting of the grain, the mineral grains relative (to) each other," he added in an interview via video call.

"It's like switching on a battery, generating electrical charges that can flow out of the stressed rocks into and through unstressed rocks.

"The charges travel fast, at up to around 200 metres per second," he explained in a 2014 article for The Conversation.

Other theories about what causes earthquake lights include static electricity produced by the fracturing of rock and radon emanation, among many others.

At present there is no consensus among seismologists on the mechanism that causes earthquake lights, and scientists are still trying to unlock the mysteries of these outbursts.

Freund hopes one day it might be possible to use earthquake lights, or the electric charge that causes them, in combination with other factors, to help forecast the approach of a major quake.

Police speaking with Parker’s representatives on safety plans after chaos of first rally.

The move by a major Australian bank to phase out cash and cheques appears to be the latest chapter in the relentless march to a cashless society as more people embrace electronic payments.

But while the prospect of a fully digital economy promises a faster, safer and more convenient way to bank, one expert has warned of potential downsides.

Harald Scheule, a professor of finance at the University of Technology, Sydney, spoke with 9news.com.au after the Macquarie Bank announced it was axing cash, cheques and phone payments for customers from next year.

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In a letter written to customers, Macquarie Bank said that by November 2024 customers will be unable to write or deposit cheques (including bank cheques), deposit or withdraw cash over the counter at NAB branches or make a super contribution or payment with a cheque.

Electronic tools such as direct debt, tap and go, credit facilities and bank transfer together with banks taking ATMs out of service were making cashless payments "unstoppable".

"There has been a big growth in the the number of places where you can use card payments.

"Today's it's easier to use card payments for all sorts of location … if you go to a community barbeque you can pay for your sausage sandwich," he said.

But Scheule warned there was signs of a sting in the tail amid the move to more convenient cashless payments.

A growing percentage of card transactions now include payment surcharges passed onto customers as businesses seek to recoup merchant fees.

And the demise of cash poses a threat to the decades-old saving and spending habits of older Australians who may be unfamiliar with the technology.

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Electronic payments are a potential "piggybank killer", for a much younger generation: revolutionising the practice of young children receiving pocket money and saving it.

"There are also the barefoot investors … these books are sold in their millions and their philosophy is to save, spend and donate by putting cash and coins in jars … which tries to teach people an understanding of money," Scheule said.

"But of course you can't do that with cards."

Scheule said he expected cash to be around for a "long time", while the switch to a fully digital economy in Australia was probably 10 to 20 years away.

But he urged governments to start preparing now.

"We still need to create rules … if we just move straight to a digital economy unexpected things may happen."

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The information provided on this website is general in nature only and does not constitute personal financial advice. The information has been prepared without taking into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. Before acting on any information on this website you should consider the appropriateness of the information having regard to your objectives, financial situation and needs.

Auckland Council is now looking at ways to increase capacity at shelters.

“When the gun went off we knew it was serious,” says Harlequins Bar punter.

This luxury mega-penthouse is worth approximately 500 times the price of an Aussie apartment.

The painting is a cultural landmark from an international icon.

Three artworks believed stolen during the Holocaust from a Jewish art collector and entertainer have been seized from museums in three different states by New York law enforcement authorities.

The artworks by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele were all previously owned by Fritz Grünbaum, a cabaret performer and songwriter who died at the Dachau concentration camp in 1941.

The art was seized Wednesday from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Warrants issued by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office say there's reasonable cause to believe the three artworks are stolen property.

The three works and several others from the collection, which Grünbaum began assembling in the 1920s, are already the subject of civil litigation on behalf of his heirs. They believe the entertainer was forced to cede ownership of his artworks under duress.

Manhattan prosecutors believe they have jurisdiction in all of the cases because the artworks were bought and sold by Manhattan art dealers at some point.

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The son of a Jewish art dealer in what was then Moravia, Grünbaum studied law but began performing in cabarets in Vienna in 1906.

A well-known performer in Vienna and Berlin by the time Adolf Hitler rose to power, Grünbaum challenged the Nazi authorities in his work. He once quipped from a darkened stage, “I can’t see a thing, not a single thing; I must have stumbled into National Socialist culture.”

Grünbaum was arrested and sent to Dachau in 1938. He gave his final performance for fellow inmates on New Year's Eve 1940 while gravely ill, then died on Jan. 14, 1941.

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The three pieces seized by Bragg's office are: “Russian War Prisoner,” a watercolor and pencil on paper piece valued at $1.25 million, which was seized from the Art Institute; “Portrait of a Man,” a pencil on paper drawing valued at $1 million and seized from the Carnegie Museum of Art; and “Girl With Black Hair,” a watercolor and pencil on paper work valued at $1.5 million and taken from Oberlin.

The works will remain at the museums until they can be transported to the district attorney’s office at a later date.

The Art Institute said in a statement Thursday, “We are confident in our legal acquisition and lawful possession of this work. The piece is the subject of civil litigation in federal court, where this dispute is being properly litigated and where we are also defending our legal ownership.”

The Carnegie Museum said it was committed to “acting in accordance with ethical, legal, and professional requirements and norms” and would cooperate with the authorities.

In a statement, Oberlin said it was cooperating with investigators and was “confident that Oberlin College legally acquired Egon Schiele’s Girl with Black Hair in 1958, and that we lawfully possess it.

“We believe that Oberlin is not the target of the Manhattan DA’s criminal investigation into this matter,” the statement added.

Before the warrants were issued Wednesday, the Grünbaum heirs had filed civil claims against the three museums and several other defendants seeking the return of artworks that they say were looted from Grünbaum.

They won a victory in 2018 when a New York judge ruled that two works by Schiele had to be turned over to Grünbaum's heirs under the Holocaust Expropriated Recovery Act, passed by Congress in 2016.

In that case, the attorney for London art dealer of Richard Nagy said Nagy was the rightful owner of the works because Grünbaum’s sister-in-law, Mathilde Lukacs, had sold them after his death.

But Judge Charles Ramos ruled that there was no evidence that Grünbaum had voluntarily transferred the artworks to Lukacs. “A signature at gunpoint cannot lead to a valid conveyance,” he wrote.

Raymond Dowd, the attorney for the heirs in their civil proceedings, referred questions about the seizure of the three works on Wednesday to the district attorney's office.

The actions taken by the Bragg's office follow the seizures of what investigators said were looted antiquities from museums in Cleveland and Worcester, Massachusetts.

Douglas Cohen, a spokesperson for the district attorney, said he could not comment on the artworks seized except to say that they are part of an ongoing investigation.