6. The Shock Factor

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I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

There are words, Hannah, in science that sometimes mean something wonderful, sometimes mean something terrible.

And there are shows I'd like to do about those words sometimes, but not about the other meaning of the words.

What's the word today?

Discharge.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think this is the only context in which a conversation about discharge that lasts for half an hour will be enjoyable for everybody.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I can think of a load of really that are both inappropriate or unpleasant or just, you know, repugnant.

Certainly unexpected on a Saturday morning on radio four.

Not the time to listen to conversations about discharge.

But this one.

Wow, this is a really good one.

This type of discharge.

See, this is the rogue we're pulling under people here because you're going, really, really?

Discharge?

We do a whole thing about this?

Like, yeah.

Shall I read you out the question that got sent to curious cases at BBC.co.com?

A few of them on the same topic.

Zoe from Toronto asked, How does lightning work and are there different types?

Lightning, see?

Hey.

Oh, that's the kind of that's that's that's kind of That's the only type of discharge I'm going to talk about.

It's always better when someone explains it, isn't it?

Yeah.

We also had a question from Simon Thompson and Amil Sharon.

Why does lightning change direction?

Another one, what is the probability of being hit by lightning?

And one that I particularly like.

Can you capture the energy from lightning strikes and use it to meet the world's energy needs?

That's from David Wood and Noah Willis and his friend Joe.

All of which sounds a fantastic thing.

I will just say as a proviso that if any part of your body at the moment is in any way discoloured or misshapen or is discharging lightning

that's bad

we have been joined the studio by two people who i think it's fair to say love lightning then again who does not professor karen applin studies space weather at the university of bristol and dr daniel mitchard is a particle physicist from cardiff university's lightning lab dan sounds like my kind of lab what exactly do you do there apart from make lightning well we do a lot of uh investigations into how lightning interacts and different types of lightning phenomena.

A lot of our work has been on making sure aircraft are safe and we're kind of moving into looking at how lightning interacts with the environment and things like climate change and things like that.

But mostly zapping stuff?

Mostly blowing things up.

Amazing.

Amazing.

All right, let's get some basics in first then.

So if we start with the type of lightning that you can see out of a window, sort of the lower cloud, what is it and why does it happen?

So the lightning that you see out and about when you're looking at thunderstorms and things like that is buildup of charge, usually up in the clouds or in storm cells.

And all that's happening is that that charge is just trying to ground itself.

And so the charge will become bigger and bigger and bigger, and it will just overcome the insulation of the air and it will just connect to ground and try and equalize that charge out.

So in terms of what you're actually seeing then, is it like a...

a rush of electrons?

Yeah, it's a rush of electrons and charged particles and they're going so there's so so much energy there that they're kind of exploding the air and you see all that light and you hear that explosion as thunder.

And that exploding the air, the light that you're actually seeing is what the gas being ionised?

Yeah, it's nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and the air just being kind of torn apart and all that light is...

being thrown out and then it all kind of recombines again after.

It's torn into a plasma.

It is torn into a plasma, yes.

It's a very hot plasma.

Wait, how hot?

It's about 30,000 degrees Celsius, about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

Whoa.

Okay, there's potentially a lot of energy there to harness.

There is a lot of energy, but it's over a very short space of time.

So a lightning arc is about 100 microseconds.

So it's very, very short.

And it is in gigawatts, so it is a lot of energy for a single lightning arc, but compared to the amount of energy we use every day, it's not that much, really.

Thus far, what I'm hearing is that Back to the Future was based on science fact.

Yeah, it was entirely based on science fact.

I don't think anyone's quite replicated yet time travel, but you know, we can do that in the lab if you want to have a go.

Look, you said the word gigawatt, and I was all on board.

Okay, which direction is the lightning going?

You kind of imagine that the lightning is coming down from the sky and striking something, but it actually connects maybe about 100 meters or so above the ground level, and you can actually get positive and negative lightning, which is different flows of charge in different directions.

The image I have in my head is when you rub something with it, like you rub the plastic rod with the sheet and you and you charge statically.

A balloon is a perfect example.

So is a cloud essentially going through that kind of interaction that you're building up?

Yeah so it's in the cloud you need to have a mixture of different types of water.

So you have ice and water and a kind of special soft hail that's called graupel

and then because the cloud is turbulent all the materials are mixing and wafting upwards then they collide and you get transfer of charge from I think it's ice to graupel or graupel to ice and basically because because the Graupo is kind of hail, it sort of falls down, and the ice is lighter, so it wafts up.

So, you get a separation, and that's what builds up the charge.

There is another theory that it's cosmic rays, which is kind of a minor theory

as to how cosmic radiation, when you get cosmic ray showers.

So, as various radiation is passing through the earth, and it will break down into lots of different particles as it passes through the atmosphere.

And I suppose you could call it a minor theory, or maybe an additional mechanism might be that these particles, as they're passing through clouds, are charging clouds or creating pockets of charge, and that will initiate the lightning.

So, there's different theories, like certainly, the cloud charge theory is the prominent one, but there may be other mechanisms involved, and there may be other things going on.

I think they work together.

So, like, the cosmic, you have to have your pre-charge thundercloud.

The cosmic ray on its own can't make a thundercloud.

No, no, no.

But you have your thundercloud all like ready to go, and then your cosmic ray can come in and might trigger it.

I don't know about you, but next time I'm visiting, I'm going to say, oh, cosmic rays are discharging again.

That'll be space again.

Why do you end up getting the different shapes then?

So yeah, really, below cloud,

you either get cloud to ground, which is that typical lightning strike you see that forks out and it...

Yeah,

that's that shape of different.

Yeah, and it will connect and you kind of see that flicker and that kind of image in your eye of the typical fork structure.

But you can also get cloud-to-cloud lightning, which is where the lightning is just, rather than going to ground, it's trying to equalize itself with another pocket of charge in the cloud that might be closer.

So the lightning is travelling sideways in a way.

So that kind of also forks, but you might not see it because it's in the cloud.

So you can get sheet lightning where you just get these flashes that you don't really resolve very well.

It can also go in different directions.

Okay, the fork, why does it fork?

It's just trying to find a connection to ground.

And so clouds, they're several kilometers up in the sky.

And if you're that far away from something that you want to connect with, it's going to spread itself out.

Why doesn't it just just go straight down?

Well, it's traveling through different pockets of air, so some air might be more or less conductive, and you'll get this process called step leaders, where it will kind of accelerate through one pocket of air, and then it kind of meets a bit of resistance, and then it'll accelerate again in a different direction.

How much lightning is there, though?

I mean, if you watched us from space, would there always be lightning going on somewhere?

Yeah, there pretty much is always lightning going on somewhere in the world.

I think there's around three million strikes a day on Earth, so it is a lot.

And there are live lightning monitors which you can watch.

Lightning Watch.

Yes, a bit like Spring Watch, but maybe a bit more exciting.

It's not called Lightning Watch.

What is it actually called?

There's a couple of websites.

One is lightningmaps.org.

I'm going on it.

And the other one is Blitzawtongue.

Real-time Lightning Maps.

It makes noises actually.

Hello.

It makes a noise.

And it's on and it goes to...

We're not going to absolutely.

It'll also show you the spread of thunder.

So you can kind of figure out if you watch it, you can see how the thunder spreads out.

There's so many more than I thought.

Look, look how many there are.

There's barely a moment when there isn't some sort of circle on this map.

It's extraordinary.

Are there some places that are more prone to lightning than others?

The closer you are to the equator, the more lightning you get.

And that's really due to the type of weather systems they have that can create storms.

Does that mean that you know there are people living in Norway, northern Norway who've never seen lightning in their lives?

Yeah the further north you go the the less lightning there is.

They've got the northern lightning

lane.

Give it and take it away you know

you get one show in the sky or another but not both.

No and and at the poles it's it's almost unknown.

Imagine if you were from northern Norway and came down, travelled down and saw lightning for the first time, you would be convinced that it was the gods having Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the fact they literally have a god of lightning and who's quite famous.

There's been a few films recently, and yet they have never...

I'm just thinking of if penguins and polar bears ever met, it's probably the one thing they could chat about back then.

They've never seen lightning.

It's the one thing they would have

an equatorial cruise going, well, I'm really come here because I want to see the lightning because I've never seen that at home.

They're quite sweet.

Okay, looking at that map though, there is much more lightning than I expected.

Does that mean maybe there's a higher chance of being hit by it than perhaps we realise?

Somewhere around 24,000 people a year get killed by lightning, but in the UK your chance of being struck is very low.

That is more than I thought.

But one of our listeners, Zoe in Toronto, she wanted to know what actually happens when you get struck by lightning.

So have a listen to this.

This particular trip was going to be three days on a reservoir in Vermont and we were heading across the lake to a remote campsite that you couldn't access anyway other than by boat.

And we knew that there was going to be bad weather.

The storm came in really really fast so it was pouring rain and it's so loud you can feel it you know

so my husband said you know maybe you should check on our son zach so I walked right over to his hammock and I bent down under the rain fly and and so I touched him on the shoulder with my left hand and I said you know Zach we're going to be okay like we're under the tree cover we're not out on the open water we're not near anything really tall we're not near anything metal we're going to be okay and as soon as I said that that's when the lightning struck somewhere I mean I think think it must have been a ground strike.

I did not get hit directly or I would not be here telling you this story.

What I remember mostly is just explosive pain in my right arm.

It was like darts were trying unsuccessfully to shoot out of my skin is the only way that I can think of to describe it.

I mean, my son said he did hear me scream, and I remember hearing myself scream, but it was like this out-of-body experience.

And when it was over, I realized that I was probably five or six feet at least from where I had been.

Driving home, I I think, was when really it hit all of us like, wow, I can't believe we're all still here.

So that was Lightning Survivor, Kerry Evans, there.

And actually, everybody was completely fine.

They all survived it.

But I thought it was interesting in that how they were talking about being in hammocks and sort of staying off the ground.

Does that help to protect you?

Not really, because if it's made it all the way from the cloud to the hammock, it's going to kind of continue on through.

So if you're a metre or so above the ground, I mean, it's already travelled several kilometers.

I think it's also a common misconception about people who think that if they wear wellies, that might help, but it doesn't really, because lightning that powerful and that energetic can move and jump around and it can skip those gaps to connect.

It's probably better to be in what they call a Faraday cage, which is to be surrounded by something conductive that would work.

Like in a car.

Yeah, like in a car or

some types of buildings and things.

Whereas if you're just putting on some kind of rubber-soled shoe, that's not really enough because the lightning could theoretically just kind of strike your head and then jump out of your hip to ground, skipping the shoe entirely.

So it doesn't really...

Okay, so so far we've got get in a car to say stay.

Is there any other tips he can give us?

Because you're not inspiring me with hope right now.

I think the best thing to do is just

stay indoors or stay in a car or just be in shelter somewhere.

If you can't find shelter, you should just really be as low as you can and you shouldn't be standing up.

You should be...

Taking selfies.

Not taking selfies or not holding anything like a phone.

As high as possible, a good angle.

Yeah.

We've been talking mainly about the kind of lightning we see below cloud, but you mentioned there are other types of lightning above the clouds and they are much more varied, much more interesting in some ways.

Yeah, there's a whole family of very interestingly named phenomena that are generally too quick for the human eye to see and they reach up to the edge of space and you can look these up online because some of them are quite fantastical and like nothing you've ever seen before so from the clouds app you get things called jets and they are kind of like lightning they're a bit more linear they can reach up anything from 10 kilometers up to 90 kilometers so right up to the edge of space and there's three classes of those there's blue starters which are the small ones blue jets, which are kind of the common ones, and then you get gigantic jets, which reach all the way up to the edge of space.

What is that the official name?

They are the official names.

Oh, you wait.

You wait till

there's a point in this where it happens in particle physics where scientists run out of names for things, so they kind of start thinking of other names.

If you go above 50-kilometre altitudes, you will see these big, giant red structures called sprites, and they are often described as jellyfish like or carrot like

and they are huge.

They can be about 40 kilometers across and they can be about 40 kilometers, 50 kilometers tall.

Sprites will have these tendrils that hang down and some of those tendrils are called trolls.

Probably one of the most recently discovered things that kind of sit on top of sprites are ghosts, which are green in colour, but they're incredibly hard to see, a bit like their, well, it wouldn't be their real life counterpart, would it?

And then you get elves and elves are giant halos that kind of sit up to about 100 kilometers and they can spread out to about 400 kilometers they're like giant discs there's a whole range of other things there's pixies there are pixies and there are gnomes gnomes yes

you went heavy on the whimsy in this one you know we've drifted away from the sights quite sharply

Dan, you brought something that will create lightning right in the studio for us.

Yes.

So we've brought a Tesla coil here in the studio and it's not lightning as such, but it's a very good way of visualizing how a lightning arc behaves.

It's particularly good to demonstrate how lightning doesn't need to connect to ground.

And here in the studio, there isn't anything to ground itself, so it will just dissipate into the air and not connect to anything.

But we're all here.

You can try and ground it yourself by standing next to it.

What does this range of influence, this particular machine?

The arcing will probably reach out to about 20 to 30 centimetres, and we've got a two-metre cordon around it.

Tesla coils are high-frequency, high-voltage.

They're a little bit different to lightning which is high current, high voltage.

If you use the waterfall analogy voltage is the height of the waterfall

and the current is the amount of water coming over it because you can imagine that a waterfall that just has little drips coming off it if you're standing at the bottom that's not going to feel like much.

You've got a really high waterfall with hardly any water going over it.

Not that big of a deal.

But you go to the Niagara, high waterfall, absolute shed load of water going over the edge of it.

Extraordinarily full of energy.

Like loads and loads of energy going over.

Lightning is both high voltage and high currents.

The voltage is the thing that basically insists that it happens.

In lightning terms, it allows it to travel.

You need a very high voltage to travel a longer distance.

So in lightning, you need to have it be in the gigavolts to kind of create that channel across kilometers of air.

That voltage occurs because of the difference in charge between the clouds and the ground.

Yeah, and it's built up through these processes.

So it sort of is a waterfall then, because of electrons.

Yeah, so the Tesla coil is very small current, but minimal.

Sweeney, skinny waterfall.

Microamps, but it's very high voltage.

So you still create these arcs that are reaching out, but there's very little energy behind them, as it were.

We've dimmed the lighting in the studio, making it a much more kind of sedation, kind of moody affair.

And we should see an arc of lightning.

You'll see a nice blue arc kind of spreading, forking out into the air.

So I guess we should describe what Tessochoils look like.

Yeah.

You've got a lot of copper wound around a central cylinder

and then a sort of doughnut sitting on top.

What's the purpose of the doughnut?

So lightning likes to come out of pointy things.

So the doughnut is really there just to make sure that we can direct the lightning only to the needle that we have on top of it rather than it going out in all directions.

So when you charge it up, it's the end of the needle we should be looking out for.

Yeah, can I ever go press the button?

Can I press the button?

Obviously.

Yeah.

Right.

Fix mode.

And is that the one that brings the frequency?

I'm cranking up the amplitude.

Then I press the button middle.

middle, frequency one hertz.

I'm making that happen.

Real sense of elemental power there.

Real sense of I am master of the universe in that moment.

I mean, you sort of are in a way, because you're taking something that exists on a global scale and you're just creating it in a small studio in the BBC.

Karen, is it only us?

Or do other planets have lightning as well?

Yeah, so there is lightning on other planets.

Mars, lightning is basically thought to be there, but no one's ever seen it.

And that's because Mars is very dusty and the dust blows around and kind of rubs together.

And

there are dust devils on Mars.

And we know that dust devils on Earth get electrically charged, they have voltage in them.

So if you were to transport that dust devil to Mars and sit it there, it might well have lightning in it because it's actually easier to make lightning in the Mars atmosphere because it's thinner.

So we do expect lightning to be there, but yes, it's never been detected.

So where have we detected it?

Have we detected on Venus?

Venus is a bit controversial.

Some people think they have detected it.

Other people haven't detected it when they think they should have done.

Where we have seen it and nobody argues is Jupiter.

Loads of lightning on Jupiter.

Pretty much all the spacecraft that have been to Jupiter have seen lightning there.

Okay, if we are at the point where we're considering exploring other planets, is this something that we have to be a bit concerned about, about lightning strikes on other planets?

Yes, it is.

Yes.

So there's very much, we're going to be sending people to Mars in the next, I don't know, very optimistically, maybe 20 years, more realistically, 50 to 100 years.

And it's a hazard, just as it's a hazard on Earth.

So obviously, if you have astronauts and they're walking around, there's a risk to them if there's a lightning storm.

Probably you would just make sure they didn't go out of the spacecraft at the time there was a dust storm or something if they were on Mars.

I think probably more like realistic hazards are things like disturbances to electrical systems because lightning generates a lot of noise as we've heard and electrical noise and that could, you know, sparks and things aren't good for electronics generally, so you might have problems with your your spacecraft systems and you don't have to have lightning for there to be a problem because if it's like lots of charged dust blowing around then it can stick to solar panels and that causes a problem for your power generation so it is definitely something people need to be aware of particularly as Mars is the place we're going to go and there is electricity in the Martian atmosphere.

I'm just thinking back to how you were describing that lightning occurs, which is the movement of different types of water within these clouds.

On other planets, is it the same mechanisms that's causing the lightning?

Because water on other planets is kind of a key question, isn't it?

Yes, it is a big question.

It's a mixture of ways that lightning is generated on other planets.

On Jupiter and Saturn, where the lightning's been seen, we believe that it is mainly from water clouds, and that is because it's quite deep in the atmosphere, and we can sort of work out what height roughly those flashes come from.

And then that corresponds to sort of a temperature at which you have water and ice.

So that suggests the same mechanism as we have on Earth.

But on Mars, it's actually the same mechanism as volcanic lightning, and that is due to dust and ash being spewed out of the volcano and rubbing.

I mean, in the good old days, when the Earth was mainly volcanoes,

there was a lot of lightning, wasn't there?

In the early days of Earth's formation.

I don't know if we know that there was more or less.

We do know it's been there the whole time Earth's been around, and that's because you can find fossilised lightning strikes called fulgurites in rocks.

So I don't know if there is more or less, and everything's changed as well.

The atmosphere is different then, but there certainly has been lightning the whole time.

Was it important for life, possibly?

Potentially.

There's a very famous experiment from the 1950s where scientists Miller and Urey got a kind of tank and they put some chemicals in it that they believe to be representative of pre-life Earth.

And then they said...

It's a sort of swamp that existed.

Exactly, a primeval swamp or something.

And then they zapped it.

with a spark to represent lightning and I think after quite a long time, after about a year, they found that there were some amino acids that been formed inside.

It caused life.

Well, amino acids short life.

I mean, they're getting that.

they're getting that they're closer they're closer

is that a theory that actually life started because of a lightning strike oh it's one theory i love it it's crazy isn't it yeah i mean it's also much more fun than the geothermal vaults you know down the road and the

okay fine that's all they're doing whatever yeah but like

yeah it's fantastic it is i really like that yeah this sounds like we're straying very far into science fiction here but but is this a legitimate theory that people have it is a legitimate theory and I think for Earth very much.

I think on other planets probably not the same because you don't have the same mix of stuff that you had on Earth.

But certainly lightning has things it does for chemistry.

It's a big burst of energy that you're putting into a gas, the atmosphere, that you wouldn't otherwise get.

We have established there are lots of different types of lightning and the lightning on other planets could be the key to discovering whether they'd be habitable or not or whether life has existed there maybe.

But let's get back to Earth because one of the questions wanted to know about whether we can use it.

Dan, can we capture lightning?

How much power is there?

We would measure this in current.

So if you think that your domestic supply is three to five amps, say, an average lightning strike is about 30,000 amps.

So that's a lot of power for a brief period of time.

It's about 100 microseconds.

So yeah, it's a fraction of a second.

But there's something there that we could grab?

I think it's always been a dream of a lot of people to try and capture, to bottle lightning.

People have tried, and it's kind of in there in the imagination of human society to do this, but there are big issues.

And I think the two main issues are one, lightning is inherently random, so it's really hard to predict where it will strike.

And then the second one is that this energy is delivered so quickly that there's no technology really that can store it that quickly.

It will just blow things apart.

And I guess the other point of that is that for our needs as humans, even though it is very energetic for that brief amount of time, one single strike is not going to give you sufficient energy for what we use it for.

You'd have to capture a huge amount of lightning strikes to kind of make it meaningful.

270 years ago, Benjamin Franklin went out with a key and a kite.

This is something we've been trying to do for a while now.

We move very slowly as lightning scientists.

I mean, it should be pointed out that Franklin didn't go out and get hit by lightning, although he could have been, but he did just dangle

into a onto a ring, like a dangle kite into the water.

He flew a kite in a thunderstorm to try and attract lightning to a wire with a key on it that was hanging on it, and in kind of in an attempt to capture and study lightning.

The kite was on an insulated bit of string, so he was quite far from the strike.

And was he wearing wellies?

Well, I wasn't there at the time, but maybe.

But that you couldn't just do like a slightly better wire than Franklin had 270 years ago.

You could do essentially the same same technology.

You couldn't f lift a drone up there or something and essentially drain the cloud of charge is what I'm asking.

Why can't we do that?

It's a very difficult thing to do and maybe we don't fully understand the processes and how these things are created, but it is a long way up and there's a lot of myths about lightning as well.

It won't necessarily go for the highest point and it won't necessarily go for the conductive thing.

It kind of just will do what you don't think it should do and kind of is still very unpredictable.

So, maybe we can't capture it, but we can certainly learn, and that's what you're doing, about its effects on the atmosphere because it creates greenhouse gases, doesn't it?

Lightning produces nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone.

We know that nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, or NOx, as it's quite commonly known, is a greenhouse gas, and through some other chemical processes, can contribute towards global warming.

And there are estimates for every degree of global warming, lightning on Earth will increase by about between 12 and 35 percent.

It depends where you are, and it depends where in the world it is, and quite how this will be, you know, how this is impacted, and how the energy of lightning might change.

But really, for every degree of global warming, you're getting more lightning.

More lightning is putting more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

And I think the current estimates are that lightning contributes something like 15% of all of the world's NOx emissions.

it can kind of create a bit of a runaway effect.

So, as the world warms up, the predictions are that we will see more lightning, and it might be more energetic, and it might be more frequent, and it might occur in places that it hasn't occurred in before.

There's some studies a while ago that say that people are starting to see it in the poles now when it wasn't there before, for example.

These polar bears

finally get to see it.

I mean, that's a bittersweet kind of finale to that, like whatever.

It's not a great sign that it's there, but at least the polar bears

in their last action get to see the lightning right while sitting on a slowly decreasing ice yeah block okay well on that um probably quite depressing note

uh i think it's uh time for us to thank both of our guests dan mitchard and karen aprin thank you

here's what i'm hearing He did say that no one has managed to capture lightning yet, but he didn't say it's impossible.

Did he?

He did not.

It sounded like a big fat not yet to me.

Yeah, it did, absolutely.

And, like, I mean, it made me go back to first principles of going out in a rainstorm with a key on a kite.

Hey, what a way to go!

Yeah, I mean, it really would be.

I mean, it would be a yeah, yeah, that, yeah.

Look, how did how did it happen?

Look,

look, lightning giveth life and it taketh life away.

Yeah, yes.

But anyway, look, there we go.

Discharges.

Discharges are fun.

You enjoyed that, didn't you?

I did.

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And it takes just minutes to transfer your cash to any of Wealthfront's expert built investing accounts when you're ready.

Wealthfront, money works better here.

Go to wealthfront.com to start saving and investing today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024.

Go to wealthfront.com to start today.