If lightning strikes a point 1 mile away, you will see the strike approximately .00000536 seconds after the strike while you will hear it approximately 4.72 seconds after the actual strike. Despite there being roughly 40 to 50 lightning strikes per second on Earth, meteorologists don’t have enough data yet to truly understand these iridescent phenomena. The path of the longest ever lightning bolt. Ohm-mazing. It was so big, in fact, that it's prompted calls for a rewrite of the official definition of a lightning strike - seeing as before this, it was assumed that lightning could travel no more than around 32 km (20 miles) from a storm. Made using data from the research. The average duration is just 0.2 seconds. Sadly, though, there's no imagery of video of either. Striking over southern France in 2012, a lightning bolt managed to sustain its connection between the … © ScienceAlert Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. The team was able to determine records after years of ground-based lightning detection networks, which measure the strength and duration of lightning strikes. At the same time, they also confirmed another record. It’s all a matter of whether or not they’ve been caught on camera. A place in Venezuela that gets 40,000 lightning strikes ... at a time for thousands of years. This website uses cookies to improve user experience. "The committee has unanimously recommended amendment of the AMS Glossary of Meteorology definition of lightning discharge as a 'series of electrical processes taking place within 1 second'," the team writes, "by removing the phrase 'within 1second' and replacing with 'continuously'.". Thanks to better lightning monitoring via satellites, scientists have also officially updated the 'lightning capital of the world' to Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, which sees 233 lightning flashes per square kilometre each year. The French lightning bolt also stretched an impressive (and definition-defying) 200 km (125 miles) in distance. Because of the possibility for more extreme events out there, the researchers are calling for the American Meteorological Society to update their definition of lightning. These severe injuries are not usually caused by thermal burns since the current is too brief to greatly heat up tissues; instead, nerves and muscles may be directly damaged by the high voltage producing holes in their cell membranes, a process called electroporation. It streaked across the skies above Oklahoma back in 2007, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has just officially recognized it as the longest single flash of lightning ever recorded. Scientists have detected a record-breaking lightning bolt that was 321.1 kilometers (199.5 miles) in length, roughly the distance between New York City and Washington D.C. The Oklahoma bolt itself was no shrinking violet, having lasted for an impressive 5.7 seconds. Tom Rourke/IFLScience. In a more extreme example of how dangerous the weather event can be, 300 reindeer in Norway were killed by a single lightning strike last month. Originally, it was described as a “series of electrical processes taking place within one second,” but the last three words have now been replaced by “continuously”. Another bolt lit up over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019, for a whopping 16.73 seconds, setting a record for the longest recorded duration of a lightning strike. Both record-breaking flashes may have taken place in Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs). John Jensenius from the National Weather Service told Angela Fritz from The Washington Post that the new record "demonstrates the far-reaching effects of lightning, and just how far around a thunderstorm the atmosphere can be electrified". In any case, both lightning bolts were so prolonged that the WMO have changed their definition of what a lightning strike is. "People need to be aware that any time a thunderstorm is in the area, there is a threat of a potentially deadly lightning strike," he added. But while the US set the record for the longest distance, France experienced the longest-lasting lightning strike ever, according to the WMO, with a flash over the Cote d'Azur region in 2012 lighting up the sky for an incredible 7.74 seconds - prior to the event, lightning was thought to max out at 1 second. The National Weather Service advises that, to be safe, people stay indoors for at least 30 minutes following the last thunder rumble to avoid lightning strikes - which still kills up to thousands of people each year, particularly in developing countries. Lightning strikes can produce severe injuries , and have a mortality rate of between 10% and 30%, with up to 80% of survivors sustaining long-term injuries. To be fair, it’s shocking (sorry) how much science still doesn’t know about what causes lightning in the first place. Striking over southern France in 2012, a lightning bolt managed to sustain its connection between the ground and the heavens for a whopping 7.74 seconds. These are a complex of nested thunderstorms that amplify each other on a scale larger than individual thunderstorms, but not quite as much as seen within extratropical cyclones, hurricane-like swirls that take place outside the tropics. Hopefully, as we continue to catch lightning in the act more and more often - and in increasingly better detail - we'll learn more about this beautiful phenomenon, and how to enjoy it safely. “It is possible, indeed likely, that greater extremes can and have occurred,” the new report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society points out. 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