The 5 weirdest things lightning can do
- Ric Kearbey
- 20 hours ago
- 5 min read
Lightning is already one of the strangest things nature does.
But the bolt you see streak across the sky is only the beginning.
Under the right conditions, lightning and the electrical machinery inside thunderstorms can do things that sound more like science fiction than weather. Some happen underground. Others happen dozens of miles above the clouds. And one involves something you’d probably expect to hear about in a particle physics lab, not a thunderstorm.
So yes, the ordinary bolt that makes you jump three feet off the couch is apparently lightning behaving itself.
Here are five of the weirdest things lightning can do.
1. Can lightning really create glass?
Yes. Strike the right patch of sand or soil and lightning can leave behind a bizarre underground sculpture called a fulgurite.
A lightning channel can heat the material it passes through extraordinarily quickly. If the ground contains enough silica, that intense heat can melt and fuse grains together. When everything cools, what’s left can be a hollow, branching tube of natural glass.
Think of it as lightning signing its name underground. Unlike the flash itself, which disappears almost instantly, the signature can remain buried long afterward.
But lightning doesn’t always travel toward the ground. Sometimes the weird stuff happens in the opposite direction.
2. Can lightning happen above a thunderstorm?
Absolutely, and this is where thunderstorms start looking like science fiction.
High above some powerful storms, enormous red flashes called sprites can appear. They can resemble glowing jellyfish, carrots or giant red tendrils hanging in the upper atmosphere.
They happen far above ordinary thunderstorms and last only milliseconds, which helps explain why they remained mysterious for so long. Pilots reported strange flashes above storms for decades, but scientists didn’t capture the first credible camera evidence until 1989.
Today we know sprites are part of an entire family of upper-atmospheric electrical phenomena with names that sound suspiciously like somebody let a kindergarten class name them: ELVES, blue jets, gigantic jets, halos, pixies and more.
But lightning doesn’t have to go upward to get ridiculous. Sometimes it goes sideways.
3. How far can one lightning flash travel?
Farther than you probably think possible.
The World Meteorological Organization recognizes a lightning megaflash that stretched an astonishing 515 miles, or 829 kilometers, across the United States.
One flash. Five hundred fifteen miles.
That’s roughly the distance you’d expect to spend eight or nine hours driving, not something you’d expect one electrical discharge inside a storm system to cover.
And somehow, 515-mile lightning isn’t even the strangest thing on this list.
4. Can lightning turn a thunderstorm into a gamma-ray machine?
Yep. Scientists have discovered that thunderstorms can produce incredibly brief bursts of gamma rays, the same high-energy form of light we normally associate with some of the most extreme objects in the universe.
They’re called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs, and they can last less than one-thousandth of a second. NASA estimates thunderstorms may produce roughly 1,000 of them around the world every day.
Inside the enormous electric fields of thunderstorms, electrons can accelerate to nearly the speed of light. Those high-energy electrons can interact with air molecules and produce gamma rays.
In other words, a thunderstorm can temporarily behave like a natural particle accelerator.
Which leads directly to the sentence I never expected to write in a weather story.
5. Can thunderstorms really make antimatter?
They can.
And if you have absolutely no idea what antimatter is, give me about 30 seconds. I promise this is easier to understand than it sounds.
And now we’ve officially left “weird weather fact” territory and wandered into “Are you freaking kidding me?” territory.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected evidence of antimatter produced above thunderstorms. Under the right conditions, the incredible electrical energy inside storms can set off a chain of events that creates tiny particles of antimatter.
So what exactly is antimatter?
Start with you.
You, your phone, your coffee cup, the chair you’re sitting in and practically everything you can touch is made of matter. Zoom in ridiculously far and that matter is made of tiny particles.
Here’s where it gets weird.
Some of those particles have an opposite version. That opposite version is antimatter.
Think of it like nature making a particle and then making its opposite twin. An electron, one of the particles found in ordinary matter, has a negative electrical charge. Its antimatter twin is called a positron, and it has a positive charge.
And here’s the really strange part. If a particle meets its antimatter twin, the two can disappear and their mass is converted into energy.
That’s antimatter. It’s not mysterious goo or some exotic substance floating around in space. It’s made of real particles that are essentially opposite partners of particles found in ordinary matter.
And thunderstorms can actually produce some of those antimatter particles.
We’re talking about incredibly tiny amounts, not a glowing ball of antimatter hiding inside the thunderstorm. But during some of the most energetic processes inside storms, nature can create positrons, the antimatter twins of electrons.
Think about how ridiculous that is.
Your coffee cup: matter.
You: matter.
The antimatter twin of one of the particles making up ordinary matter: thunderstorms can make that.
The same atmosphere that gives you an ordinary summer thunderstorm capable of knocking out the neighborhood Wi-Fi can briefly become a natural particle-physics laboratory.
Antimatter. From thunderstorms. On Earth.
That’s one heck of a range.
Why are these the weirdest things lightning can do?
Because lightning isn’t really a single “thing.” The weirdest things lightning can do happen because it’s the visible result of an enormous electrical system trying to equalize differences in charge, and what happens depends on where that electrical energy travels and what it encounters along the way.
Send it through sand and you can make glass. Let a flash spread through a gigantic storm complex and it can travel hundreds of miles. Electrical activity above a thunderstorm can help trigger enormous red sprites high in the atmosphere. And under some of the most extreme electrical conditions inside storms, things get stranger still, with gamma rays and even antimatter entering the picture.
That’s what makes lightning so much more interesting than the white zigzag we all drew with a crayon as kids. What we see from the ground is only one visible piece of a much larger electrical machine operating around us.
The next time lightning flickers outside your window, you may see a brilliant flash followed a few seconds later by thunder. But elsewhere in that storm, or even high above it, the atmosphere could be doing something far stranger than you can see.
It might be making glass beneath the ground, lighting a giant red jellyfish above the clouds or briefly turning a thunderstorm into one of Earth’s most powerful natural particle accelerators.
Apparently, lightning never got the memo that weather was supposed to stay down here.
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