Watch: Colourful 'earthquake lights' illuminate New Zealand skies

In the wake of the earthquakes that rocked New Zealand overnight, videos have begun to emerge of a peculiar but pretty phenomena.

The videos depict the night sky startlingly lit up with colourful flashes "during the peak" of the earthquakes which measured up to 7.5 in magnitude, uploader Zachary Bell wrote on YouTube.

The spectacular lights are allegedly the result of the electrical properties of certain rocks in very specific settings.

"The lights happened right on the peak of the shaking … of colours mainly green and blue and white, but a bit of yellow and other colour was there too [sic]," Bell wrote.

A 2014 study published in Seismological Research Letters posited that the long-recorded phenomena of lights in the sky during an earthquake, is the result of a "positive charge generated along stress gradients that accumulate at the surface."

Scientists said accumulated charged atoms with a high density, ionise pockets of air which form light-emitting plasma.

That's mother nature for you. When the chips are down and your region is facing intense earthquakes, she send some spooky special effects in, just to make it even more dramatic.