44 Fun Facts About Lightning

Roughly how hot does the air around a lightning flash get?

About 30,000 C: roughly five times hotter than the Sun's surface, hot enough to flash a tree's sap into steam that can blast off its bark.

What causes thunder?

Air heated so fast it explodes outward: thunder rolls on because sound from different parts of the long lightning channel reaches you at slightly different times.

In Greek myth, who gave Zeus his thunder and lightning after he freed them from imprisonment?

The Cyclopes: armed with the thunder and lightning they gave him, Zeus overpowered the Titans and went on to reign in heaven.

Which kind of lightning is the most common, far outnumbering the familiar cloud-to-ground bolt?

Intra-cloud: even the bolts that do reach the ground start with a breakdown between charged regions inside the cloud.

Cloud-to-ground lightning is started by what moving down from the cloud?

A stepped leader: it zigzags downward in short, jerky steps and splits into branches as it goes, which is why a lightning bolt looks forked.

What is the most luminous part of a lightning discharge called?

The return stroke: the bright flash you see actually races up from the ground to the cloud, even though the bolt seems to strike downward.

Rare but powerful positive lightning is largely blamed for triggering which flashes high above storms?

Sprites: aircraft pilots reported glimpsing flashes above storms for years before researchers finally documented sprites with sensitive video cameras.

Lightning that exits the side of a storm and strikes miles away is known as what?

Bolts from the blue: they can strike ground under a blue sky, so hearing any thunder at all means you are within striking distance.

Roy Sullivan, recognised by Guinness as struck by lightning seven times, worked as what?

A park ranger: Sullivan worked in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, and one of the strikes, in 1972, set his hair on fire.

In a thunderstorm, collisions between ice crystals and which soft hail particles separate charge?

Graupel: in lab tests, whether it ends up positively or negatively charged after these collisions depends partly on the temperature of the cloud.

Which region of a thunderstorm cloud holds its main positive charge?

The top: winds high up spread that positive charge out sideways into the storm's anvil.

Metallica's album Ride the Lightning took its title from a line in which author's novel?

Stephen King: Kirk Hammett was reading The Stand, where a death-row prisoner talks of waiting to 'ride the lightning', slang for the electric chair.

Where on Earth does most of the planet's lightning strike?

Tropical land: sunshine heats land faster than the sea, and that warmed air rises into the thunderstorms that make lightning.

Over which lake does the Catatumbo lightning occur, which Guinness World Records named the world's most concentrated?

Maracaibo: displays there can last nine hours at a stretch, yet in early 2010 the lightning stopped for months.

The village of Kifuka, one of the most lightning-struck places on Earth, is in which country?

DR Congo: humid Atlantic air sweeps across the vast Congo rainforest and meets the first mountains there, setting off violent thunderstorms all year.

What is a 'megaflash'?

An exceptionally long horizontal flash: by 2022 megaflashes had been recorded only over North and South America, partly because few other regions were watched by the right satellites.

On which planet did Voyager 1 discover lightning, at first dubbed an 'electrostatic discharge'?

Saturn: the radio bursts were first blamed on its B ring, and were only later linked to lightning in giant storms.

Which rover's microphone recorded a putative detection of lightning on Mars, reported in 2025?

Perseverance: electrical activity on Mars had long been suspected but never shown, until its microphone caught crackles from dust devils and dust storms.

What are the glassy tubes called that form when lightning melts sandy soil?

Fulgurites: scientists study old ones as clues to how often lightning struck in the past and to what ancient environments were like.

Why is a lightning strike generally not dangerous to an aircraft?

The metal fuselage acts as a Faraday cage: yet investigators blamed the 1963 crash of Pan Am Flight 214 on lightning igniting fuel vapour in a wing tank.

Why is touching a lightning victim safe?

Bodies store no electricity: victims carry no leftover charge, so bystanders should start CPR at once if the heart has stopped.

What harms more people in groups than a direct lightning hit does?

Current spreading through the ground: it can surge in through one leg and out the other, which is why it so often kills large farm animals.

A three-second delay between lightning and thunder means the strike was how far away?

About 1 km: the flash reaches you almost instantly but sound covers only about a kilometre every three seconds, so counting the gap gauges the distance.

What is lightning called when it is too far away for its thunder to be heard?

Heat lightning: despite the name, heat doesn't cause it; it is ordinary lightning from a storm so distant that its thunder fades before reaching you.

What smell may accompany a very close lightning strike?

Ozone: its name comes from the Greek ozein, 'to smell', given for the sharp odour its discoverer recognised as the smell that follows lightning.

Lightning plays a role in the nitrogen cycle by turning atmospheric nitrogen into what?

Nitrates that rain deposits as fertiliser: the flash's heat splits nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air, and the compounds they form wash down into the soil.

The branching, fern-like red marks that can appear on the skin of lightning victims are called what?

Lichtenberg figures: they are so distinctive that forensic pathologists use them to help confirm a death by lightning when nobody saw it happen.

In the 2000s, gamma-ray flashes from thunderstorms revealed that lightning can produce what?

Antimatter: NASA's Fermi telescope caught thunderstorms hurling beams of positrons, the antimatter counterparts of electrons, out into space.

Which rocks, known since ancient times, are theorised to have gained their magnetism from lightning?

Lodestones: a piece hung on a string swings into line with Earth's magnetic field, so lodestones became the first magnetic compasses.

What did Benjamin Franklin tie to the string in his famous kite experiment?

A house key: contrary to legend, lightning never struck the kite; it gathered charge from the storm, and the key sparked when he reached toward it.

Scientists trigger lightning on demand at Camp Blanding, Florida, by launching what into storms?

Rockets trailing spools of wire: the unwinding wire gives the storm a ready path to ground, so researchers can make lightning strike right where their instruments wait.

Which spacecraft was famously struck by lightning shortly after lift-off?

Apollo 12: on a quick-thinking flight controller's advice, Alan Bean flipped a single switch, and the mission carried on to the Moon.

Wildfires like Australia's in 2019-20 can create which cloud type that makes its own lightning?

Pyrocumulonimbus: a fire's heat drives smoke so high that it condenses into a storm cloud, and its winds and lightning can spread the fire further.

Lightning hits which New York skyscraper about 23 times a year, busting the 'never strikes twice' myth?

The Empire State Building: tall, pointed, isolated objects get struck again and again, and whether they contain metal makes no difference.

In French and Italian, the expression for love at first sight literally means what?

A bolt of lightning: one 2017 study, though, found that 'love at first sight' is really a strong initial attraction rather than a distinct kind of love.

Which weekday honours the Norse god of thunder and lightning?

Thursday: Old English named it 'Thor's day' as a loan-translation of the Latin 'day of Jupiter', which also gave French its jeudi.

Which ancient people wrote whole guides to reading the future in thunder and lightning?

The Etruscans: Rome kept their soothsaying arts alive, and the soothsayer Spurinna warned Julius Caesar that danger would come by the Ides of March.

Which former NHL star founded the Tampa Bay Lightning franchise?

Phil Esposito: his group named the team the Lightning after Tampa Bay's reputation as North America's lightning capital.

The German word Blitzkrieg means what?

Lightning war: Germany massed tanks and aircraft to smash through a narrow front and race behind enemy lines before defenders could close the gap.

Innsbruck researchers calculated a severe storm's magnetic fields within 200 metres could cause what in bystanders?

Hallucinations: the pulses might make people see glowing shapes, perhaps explaining some ball-lightning reports, though a later correction shrank the estimate.

Which Aztec god is associated with lightning?

Tlaloc: Aztecs killed by lightning were buried instead of cremated, because they were believed to go to his green paradise, Tlalocan.

Radio pulses recorded by which ESA orbiter, which reached Venus in April 2006, hint at lightning there?

Venus Express: it caught whistler-like radio bursts that lightning should make, yet other searches found nothing, so lightning on Venus is still debated.

NOAA's Geostationary Lightning Mapper spots lightning from orbit by detecting what?

Flashes of near-infrared light: sudden rises in the lightning it counts help forecasters spot storms that are turning severe.

Which of Singapore's political parties uses a lightning flash as its symbol?

The British Union of Fascists in the 1930s also used a lightning-flash emblem.