A massive bolt of lightning lit up the sky from Dallas, Texas, to Kansas City, Mo., in October 2017. It’s now officially the longest single flash ever recorded.
Satellite data collected during that storm revealed that this megaflash spanned 829 kilometers (515 miles). It lasted 7.39 seconds, notes Michael Peterson. An applied physicist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, he’s the lead author of a study describing the event. It appeared online July 31 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Megaflashes are relatively rare. They happen in only about 1 in every 1,000 thunderstorms across the Americas. But any given one can pack a punch, Peterson says.
They don’t just shunt energy from cloud to cloud, but from clouds to the ground, too. Typical lightning strikes the ground for mere microseconds. In contrast, these massive bolts can discharge electricity for spans lasting up to 100 milliseconds. They might infuse their energy into a tree or other target. That might even become the powerful trigger for a wildfire.
The 2017 cloud-to-cloud record-breaker emerged from a massive thunderstorm system that swept across the U.S. Midwest. It sparked at least 116 cloud-to-ground spikes along its path.
Megaflash hot spots include the U.S. Midwest and southeastern South America. The previous record-holder occurred in 2020. That bolt stretched 768 kilometers (477 miles) across parts of the southern United States and the Gulf of Mexico.
Researchers hope that satellites “staring” continuously at such hot spots will help uncover why megaflashes periodically occur. (Some satellites sit above a single place on Earth. They travel in what’s known as a geostationary orbit.)
Megaflashes “have the same ingredients as ordinary lightning,” notes Peterson — “but with a twist.” The heart of thunderstorms can contain many rain and ice particles. These rise to different heights due to updrafts. Each particle can carry an electric charge.
When particles collide, their charges can transfer, forming lightning.
There’s a limit to how high these cloud particles can rise. Thunderstorm cells don’t tend to kick them up higher than 11 kilometers (about 7 miles). This is the upper boundary of Earth’s troposphere, or lowest atmospheric layer.
“When they can’t go up anymore, they go out,” Peterson says. And this creates the potential for an epic flash. “There are these massive, horizontally large, charged layers.” And they can be “vertically as thin as a sheet of paper, he says. “These layers are key ingredients for megaflashes.”
Understanding how giant bolts of lightning form has become an active area of research, he adds.
“A single strike can potentially impact a lot of people. It’s the most impactful kind of lightning we have on Earth,” he says. “It’s the kind of lightning we want to get a good handle on to keep people safe.”
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