Wow, a folgerite. I'll have to keep that in mind. If people collect them to examine them, I wonder how they can pick them up without breaking them. I imagine that, if you are gentle enough, you could touch one, but I wonder how sharp the edges are.
Mel -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Martin G. McCormick Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 10:51 AM To: Just Chat; Where Anything Goes ... Almost! Subject: Re: Sprights and other electrical disturbances 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 ======================================== The Just-chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/just-chat> You can find an archive of all messages posted to the just-chat group at either of the following: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/just-chat/index.html> or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> You may subscribe with your RSS reader at the following URL: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
