Lightning Trivia
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44 free Lightning trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This lightning trivia quiz covers the most dramatic thing the sky does. The easy questions handle the basics: what lightning is, how hot it gets, what causes thunder, the counting trick for judging distance, and whether it really never strikes the same place twice. The harder end goes into the physics and the records: how graupel and ice crystals separate charge in a storm, stepped leaders and return strokes, why positive strikes are more dangerous, how many times a second the planet is hit, the 829-kilometre megaflash over Texas and Kansas, the Catatumbo storms over Lake Maracaibo, fulgurites, X-rays and antimatter from thunderclouds, lightning on Jupiter and Saturn, and the gods from Zeus to Raijin who were once blamed for it. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our weather, natural disasters and hurricanes quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 44 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly how hot does the air around a lightning flash get?
About 30,000 C
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.
Q 02What causes thunder?
Air heated so fast it explodes outward
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.
Q 03In Greek myth, who gave Zeus his thunder and lightning after he freed them from imprisonment?
The Cyclopes
The Cyclopes: armed with the thunder and lightning they gave him, Zeus overpowered the Titans and went on to reign in heaven.
Q 04Which kind of lightning is the most common, far outnumbering the familiar cloud-to-ground bolt?
Intra-cloud
Intra-cloud: even the bolts that do reach the ground start with a breakdown between charged regions inside the cloud.
Q 05Cloud-to-ground lightning is started by what moving down from the cloud?
A stepped leader
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.
Q 06What is the most luminous part of a lightning discharge called?
The return stroke
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.
Q 07Rare but powerful positive lightning is largely blamed for triggering which flashes high above storms?
Sprites
Sprites: aircraft pilots reported glimpsing flashes above storms for years before researchers finally documented sprites with sensitive video cameras.
Q 08Lightning that exits the side of a storm and strikes miles away is known as what?
Bolts from the blue
Bolts from the blue: they can strike ground under a blue sky, so hearing any thunder at all means you are within striking distance.
Q 09Roy Sullivan, recognised by Guinness as struck by lightning seven times, worked as what?
A park ranger
A park ranger: Sullivan worked in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, and one of the strikes, in 1972, set his hair on fire.
Q 10In a thunderstorm, collisions between ice crystals and which soft hail particles separate charge?
Graupel
Graupel: in lab tests, whether it ends up positively or negatively charged after these collisions depends partly on the temperature of the cloud.
Q 11Which region of a thunderstorm cloud holds its main positive charge?
The top
The top: winds high up spread that positive charge out sideways into the storm's anvil.
Q 12Metallica's album Ride the Lightning took its title from a line in which author's novel?
Stephen King
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.
Q 13Where on Earth does most of the planet's lightning strike?
Tropical land
Tropical land: sunshine heats land faster than the sea, and that warmed air rises into the thunderstorms that make lightning.
Q 21Why is touching a lightning victim safe?
Bodies store no electricity
Bodies store no electricity: victims carry no leftover charge, so bystanders should start CPR at once if the heart has stopped.
Q 22What harms more people in groups than a direct lightning hit does?
Current spreading through the ground
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.
Q 23A three-second delay between lightning and thunder means the strike was how far away?
About 1 km
Q 14Over which lake does the Catatumbo lightning occur, which Guinness World Records named the world's most concentrated?
Maracaibo
Maracaibo: displays there can last nine hours at a stretch, yet in early 2010 the lightning stopped for months.
Q 15The village of Kifuka, one of the most lightning-struck places on Earth, is in which country?
DR Congo
DR Congo: humid Atlantic air sweeps across the vast Congo rainforest and meets the first mountains there, setting off violent thunderstorms all year.
Q 16What is a 'megaflash'?
An exceptionally long horizontal flash
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.
Q 17On which planet did Voyager 1 discover lightning, at first dubbed an 'electrostatic discharge'?
Saturn
Saturn: the radio bursts were first blamed on its B ring, and were only later linked to lightning in giant storms.
Q 18Which rover's microphone recorded a putative detection of lightning on Mars, reported in 2025?
Perseverance
Perseverance: electrical activity on Mars had long been suspected but never shown, until its microphone caught crackles from dust devils and dust storms.
Q 19What are the glassy tubes called that form when lightning melts sandy soil?
Fulgurites
Fulgurites: scientists study old ones as clues to how often lightning struck in the past and to what ancient environments were like.
Q 20Why is a lightning strike generally not dangerous to an aircraft?
The metal fuselage acts as a Faraday cage
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.
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.
Q 24What is lightning called when it is too far away for its thunder to be heard?
Heat lightning
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.
Q 25What smell may accompany a very close lightning strike?
Ozone
Ozone: its name comes from the Greek ozein, 'to smell', given for the sharp odour its discoverer recognised as the smell that follows lightning.
Q 26Lightning plays a role in the nitrogen cycle by turning atmospheric nitrogen into what?
Nitrates that rain deposits as fertiliser
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.
Q 27The branching, fern-like red marks that can appear on the skin of lightning victims are called what?
Lichtenberg figures
Lichtenberg figures: they are so distinctive that forensic pathologists use them to help confirm a death by lightning when nobody saw it happen.
Q 28In the 2000s, gamma-ray flashes from thunderstorms revealed that lightning can produce what?
Antimatter
Antimatter: NASA's Fermi telescope caught thunderstorms hurling beams of positrons, the antimatter counterparts of electrons, out into space.
Q 29Which rocks, known since ancient times, are theorised to have gained their magnetism from lightning?
Lodestones
Lodestones: a piece hung on a string swings into line with Earth's magnetic field, so lodestones became the first magnetic compasses.
Q 30What did Benjamin Franklin tie to the string in his famous kite experiment?
A house key
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.