Published August 11, 1999
Thunder is the sound made by unfriendly clouds clashing together at a loud all-night-party; thus the term, thunder-bumpers. No? Would you believe lightning is the rage of the gods or Thor pounding upon his heavenly anvil?
Myth is much more believably fun than some stuffy scientific explanation that is understood principally by the scientists who agree to disagree. Ben Franklin himself was fortunate to survive his 1752 lightning is electricity experiment, and wisely never repeated it.
Lightning kills only about a hundred people a year although approximately ten million atmospheric discharges occur every day around the globe. More common are survivors who suffer severe injuries like paralysis, burns, amnesia and lingering neurological disorders.
Although air is an excellent insulator, ten million volts electrical potential at that instant is sufficient to jump the distance within and between clouds and ground. A gap of up to six miles is ionized during the bi-directional zap.
Under fair weather, the Earth perpetually conducts a small, sustained current at a constant 200,000 volts between the ionosphere and ground. It’s called the Global Electric Circuit.
During the 1969 launch of the Apollo 12 mission, lightning neutralized vital spacecraft electronics. Astronauts regained control. Also, an unmanned Atlas Centaur 67, caring a Naval communication satellite, was stuck at launch on March 26, 1987. The damaged flight control computer sent a hard-over yaw command, caused excessive dynamic loads and ultimately the vehicle’s destruction.
Lightning forecasting is the job of the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) in Tucson, Arizona. One hundred thirty magnetic direction finders collect real-time data that is displayed on a large lightning map for the United States. The Atmospheric Research Systems, Inc. (ARSI) extends lightning detection hundreds of miles into both oceans and beyond. Other networks monitor portions of Europe, Asia, Australia, China, and Canada.
But the more unusual lightning types, such as these, fascinate a fortunate few to have seen them and perplex the scientists: ball, heat, bead, sheet, silent, black, ribbon, colored, tubular, cloud-to-air, red sprites, blue jets, and elves.
For instance, high altitude aircraft, space shuttle flights and NASA’s DC-8 Airborne Laboratory have been used to study sprites. These newly discovered spikes of light, above intense thunderstorms, generate strong electric pulses several miles wide and 60 miles into the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere. On April 28, 1990, space shuttle mission STS-32 recorded one from their payload bay television camera.
Another most unusual occurrence has been witnessed and consistently described by observers, from all professions, since the time of the ancient Greeks. About 5% of the population from every country have seen them.
It’s called ball lightning, an uncommon but well-documented phenomenon. It may not be lightning at all; but the scientists can only hypothesize. It visits the farmer and avoids the scientist!
Ball lightning usually appears during thunderstorms as a luminous sphere drifting through the air parallel to the earth. Sometimes it descends from the clouds or may suddenly materialize outdoors or indoors. It tends to enter a room through a keyhole, or crack under the door subsequently reassuming its ball shape. Passing through a closed window results in small uniform holes in the glass.
The globes’ top speed is about three meters per second and float about one meter above the ground, changing direction erratically contrary to wind currents. They have no observable buoyancy. To date, no ball lightning event has been photographed or video taped.
The energy of this small, persistent ball is very low, about the intensity of a 20-watt incandescent lamp. There is no discernible heat production. Their size is typically that of a basketball, but also have appeared as small as a pea and as large as a bus.
Its duration, typically about 25 seconds, has been reported to last up to several minutes. The distinctly orange and blue balls seem to last the longest. Interestingly, ball lighting life tends to increase with size and decrease with brightness.
Open-air ball lightning may be noiseless or crackle like the sound of frying steak or static from a transistor radio. Some will extinguish noiselessly or may vanish with a particularly strange bang. The explosion may displace conducting objects, such as household electrical connection boxes and hurl them into an alley or nearby street. Several people have reported the smell of ozone and nitrogen oxides in a close encounter with ball lightning.
Ball lightning never occurs on sharp mountain peaks, high-rise buildings or near any scientific laboratory. But it has appeared inside airplanes, submarines, homes and offices. Ball lighting does exhibit an attraction to animate objects (people and animals).
In January 1984, ball lightning entered a Russian passenger aircraft, and flew above the heads of the stunned passengers. It subsequently exiting through the tail section. Mechanics later discovered two holes in the plane, fore and aft.
From the news release: “Suddenly a fireball, about four inches in diameter, appeared on the fuselage in front of the crew’s cockpit. It disappeared with a deafening noise, but re-emerged several seconds later in the passengers’ lounge after piercing, in an uncanny way, through the air-tight metal wall. The fireball slowly flew above the heads of the stunned passengers. In the tail section of the airliner, it divided into two glowing crescents which then joined together again and left the plane almost noiselessly.”
At Rochester, New York a commercial airline pilot encountered ball lightning while in descent to the airport through a thunderstorm. His passengers experienced a “ball of sparks enter the aircraft, apparently through an engine intake, move into the fuselage and chased a flight attendant up and down the aisle. She was screaming as she tried to outrun the ball lightning. The globe dissipated silently without harming anyone.”
Presently, no scientific theory satisfactorily explains ball lightning, also known as St. Elmo’s Fire. Physicists tend to disbelieve because of contradiction to the contemporary laws of their science. It does not necessarily consist of plasma or resemble the properties of a maser.
John Lowke, a plasma physicist at the Institute of Industrial Technologies, CSIRO, in Australia says, “I feel that there is no question that ball lightning exists. The reports are all remarkably similar and have common features with the hundreds of observations.”
“Round about every science floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations which are more easily ignored than attended. When science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.” —William James