They're 1,000 times stronger and brighter than average lightning, and scientists have finally found a cause of these dramatic flashes of electricity.
A lightning bolt strikes the sea near Fort St Elmo during a storm in Valletta, Malta, on February 27, 2019. The highest concentration of superbolts have been observed in the Mediterranean Sea, the North Atlantic, and the Altiplano in Peru and Bolivia—regions where storms' charging zones are closer to the Earth's surface.Lightning’s rattling cracks and surges of illuminated energy have long prompted puzzling scientific queries.
This photo taken on Aug. 5, 2023, shows lightning striking over the Adriatic Sea off the shore of Makarska, Croatia. While most lightning strikes land, the majority of superbolts occur over water in areas such as the Mediterranean and North Atlantic., which showed that superbolts tend to cluster in certain parts of the world: the Mediterranean Sea, the Northeast Atlantic Ocean, and one of the tallest plateaus on Earth, the Altiplano in Bolivia and Peru.
“It’s a difficult problem to solve because these superbolts occur so infrequently, maybe a few times per year. With the oceanic storms, I could see this being a correlation issue or a causation issue,” Peterson says. “We don’t have so much of a baseline to go off of in terms of how [superbolts] arise, and hopefully this research provides a piece of that.”Efraim notes that understanding the cause of superbolts will be important to determining how they could impact society.
“It's very complicated because we cannot say for sure what would affect what yet, but it's certainly something that can be modeled,” Efraim continues. “I think that’s the impact of our research—we found a big piece to the puzzle, and this information can now be implemented and incorporated into global models.”
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