The speed of lightning While the flashes we see as a result of a lightning strike travel at the speed of light ,, mph an actual lightning strike travels at a comparatively gentle , mph.
When lightning strikes a beach When lightning strikes sand or sandy soil, it fuses together the grains to create a small glass-like tube known as a fulgurite.
The most lightning-struck location in the world Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is the place on Earth that receives the most lightning strikes. That's as many as 40, lightning strikes in one night! Helicopters cause lightning Recent research from the Met Office revealed that helicopters can cause an isolated lightning strike. Investigating and predicting helicopter-triggered lightning strikes 5. That's around 44 strikes every second. Lightning destroys trees Trees can often be destroyed by lightning strikes.
But it can help plants grow While nitrogen is in the air all around us, for plants to be able to absorb it a process vital for their growth they rely on a process called Nitrogen fixation. The width of a thumb and hotter than the sun While the intensity of a lightning strike can make them appear as thick bolts across the sky, the actual width of a lightning bolt is only about cm. Volcanic lightning While lightning storms are impressive in their own right, they don't quite compare to the spectacle when volcanic eruptions trigger lightning strikes.
Counting lightning To tell how far away a thunderstorm is, simply count the number of seconds between the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder that follows. And finally You might also like. Read more. Thus, the ability to make better calculations of lightning bolt length could improve nitrogen oxide estimates and lead to more accurate climate forecasts.
Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres , doi Citation: Stanley, S. Published on 4 November The authors. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
Iddris et al. But as increasingly sophisticated mapping techniques have revealed, some truly colossal bolts are crackling above our heads. These recent discoveries raise an interesting question: How big can lightning actually get?
And should we be worried about these atmospheric heavyweights? Lightning arises in storm clouds when strong positive charge develops in one region of the cloud and strong negative charge develops in another, creating electrical forces between them.
They become strong enough that the air can't withstand the electrical force anymore and breaks down," said Don MacGorman, a physicist and senior researcher at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration NOAA , and an author of the paper about the megaflash.
That means that as the electric force grows, it breaks down the air's insulating power, which usually keeps areas of different charge separate from each other.
Researchers thinks this occurs because the build up of the excessive electrical force starts to accelerate free electrons in the air — those not attached to an atom or a molecule — which in turn knock other electrons loose from their atoms and molecules, explained MacGorman. This continues, accelerating more and more electrons: "Scientists call this process an electron avalanche, and it's what we mean when we say the air breaks down," MacGorman told Live Science.
This eventually creates a very hot channel in the air that acts like a wire, whose ends grow outward toward the positive and negative charges that caused the breakdown. The growing channel eventually connects the positive and negative charges, and when it does, it triggers the immense electric current we know as a lightning flash. Sometimes, the lower region of a cloud, which usually contains positive charge, does not have enough charge on its own to stop the channel.
So the lightning bolt continues growing, stretching downward toward the ground. As it does so, it draws an upward spark from the ground to meet it - triggering a lightning flash with huge electric currents that transport some of the storm's charge to the ground.
These cloud-to-ground channels are what most of us commonly picture when we think of lightning; those vivid forks that strike Earth. Researchers have been trying to answer this question for decades.
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