SCIENCE . TECHNOLOGY

Electric Skies: The Mystery of Lightning

45' (ENG, GER)

3.5 million lightning bolts strike the Earth every day.

They can reach lengths of up to 700 kilometers and temperatures of up to 35,000 degrees Celsius. We humans only see a small part of this. The International Space Station (ISS) provides spectacular images of light phenomena that sparkle in bright red or blue. American storm chasers have now succeeded for the first time in documenting these “transient luminous events,” or LTE for short, from Earth. They appear for only a fraction of a second and can shine all the way into the stratosphere. As destructive as lightning is, it can also promote life. Not only does its energy promote plant growth, lightning may even have played an important role in the origin of life itself. Fulgurites provide important clues to this. They form when lightning strikes the ground and melts matter into a bizarre structure. Lightning may even have made the formation of the planets possible in the first place.