© MICHAEL PETERSON, LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
A thunderstorm looms over southern Brazil and Uruguay in this computer-rendered view. The lightning in this image is around 160 miles long, roughly a third the size of the newly reported record-breaking flash.
The spidery streak is just one of many new lightning discoveries found in often overlooked satellite data
ONE EVENING WHILE working, Michael Peterson found himself staring at an enormous spider. But Peterson, a remote sensing scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wasn't looking at a critter of the eight-legged variety. Instead the form crawling across his screen was a monstrous flash of so-called spider lightning — a twisting network of light stretching hundreds of miles across stormy skies.
"I was just blown away," he says.
His analysis revealed two record-breaking lightning flashes, the longest by length and by duration. One stretched over Brazil some 418 miles from tip to tail — slightly longer than Kansas is across. The second lit up skies for 13.5 seconds over the central United States. A third lightning flash over the southern United States sprawled some 44,400 square miles — nearly the area of Ohio. (Official data aren't kept for the flash with the largest area, so it's not possible to determine if it set a record.)
The
previous record-holding flashes "called into question our typical view of lightning," Peterson says.
But these latest mega-flashes "are now essentially pushing the boundary further for what lightning can be."
Comment: Details of some of the attacks reported from the country over the past 4 years: