Lightning is utterly fascinating but best studied from a
distance if you know what is good for you. The strikes get more
powerful the closer you get to the Equator. None of the
continental United States is in the tropics but South Florida
comes mighty close and has the dubious distinction of getting
the worst lightning strikes in the country as far as damage and
deaths are concerned. There is a phenomenon in which lightning
strikes sandy soil such as a beach and actually leaves an
imprint of the stroke. It is called a folgerite and is nothing
more than glass, instantly created when the white-hot lightning
bolt hits the sand. The sand instantly melts and fuses in to
sculptures which some people collect as they are an interesting
item to examine. I don't know if you can touch them without
breaking them, but I would like to examine one some day. They
are probably rather fragile because the glass is most likely
full of pours and cracks from it's violent creation.
The thing about lightning is that it is so hard to
imagine the energy levels released. I'll make a stab, here.
There is a unit of electrical energy called the Joule
after someone's name and it represents one volt at one amp over
one second. The tiny bulb in a flashlight uses up a joule of
energy in maybe 2 or 3 seconds. That's one joule. It is
estimated that a good lightning strike releases
1 followed by 23 zeroes joules of energy in to your stereo,
telephone, TV set or you if it really isn't going to be your
day.
People have marveled for many years as to how, if we
could store the energy in lightning, we could run X number of
houses for so many hours on one lightning bolt. Trust me. It's
only idle speculation as we will probably never be able to
harness something as variable as lightning but it is an
interesting thought exercise. You know that little snap you hear
in Winter when you discharge static electricity from your finger
to a door knob or maybe some poor soul you just shook hands
with? Well, thunder is that same sound when the spark is ten
miles long and hot enough to melt sand in to glass.
Martin
"Melissa Wobschall" writes:
> That is really interesting. I always knew lightning was a dangerous
> thing,
> but I never knew it struck so powerfully so as to be seen and felt. I
> shouldn't be too surprised, I guess, as I know the if you go near the
> northern or southern lgits, the borialices, you can feel the electrical
> disturbanceces. The earth does a marvelous job of blocking all the
> electrical magnetic disturbances space sends us. It's all very
> interesting.
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