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Originally Posted by turtle
I have in mind to experiment with my multimeter grounded & swinging a piece of wire on the other lead. Will the needle deflect?
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I doubt it. Typical multimeters are low impedance devices and they will effectively short out the small differential presented by the atmospheric gradient. At sea level the earth-to-air atmospheric gradient is approximately 100 volts/meter and I would hesitate to state what the potentials source impedance would be.
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Originally Posted by racoon
But with the link you provided, are you also perhaps suggesting a correlation of Lightening activity and Seismic activity?
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Lightning has not been reliably identified but many other types of atmospheric phenomena have been observed.
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A light or glow in the sky sometimes heralds a big earthquake. On 17 January 1995, for example, there were 23 reported sightings in Kobe, Japan, of a white, blue, or orange light extending some 200 meters in the air and spreading 1 to 8 kilometers across the ground. Hours later a 6.9-magnitude earthquake killed more than 5500 people. Sky watchers and geologists have documented similar lights before earthquakes elsewhere in Japan since the 1960s and in Canada in 1988.
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http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/2367
Anytime you place a conductive material within an electric field the characteristics of that field will be altered. A kite (ala Ben Franklin) or a helium balloon could hoist a thin wire such that a greater potential would be present, but you would still need a very high impedance measuring device. Also, Ben didn't have powerlines to worry about. The beauty of the field mill is that, except for its presence, it doesn't interject a large disturbance into the electric field.
