94 Fun Facts About Lightning

Roughly how hot does the air around a lightning flash get?

About 30,000 C: roughly five times hotter than the Sun's surface, hot enough to flash a tree's sap into steam that can blast off its bark.

What causes thunder?

Air heated so fast it explodes outward: thunder rolls on because sound from different parts of the long lightning channel reaches you at slightly different times.

In Greek myth, who gave Zeus his thunder and lightning after he freed them from imprisonment?

The Cyclopes: armed with the thunder and lightning they gave him, Zeus overpowered the Titans and went on to reign in heaven.

Which kind of lightning is the most common, far outnumbering the familiar cloud-to-ground bolt?

Intra-cloud: even the bolts that do reach the ground start with a breakdown between charged regions inside the cloud.

Cloud-to-ground lightning is started by what moving down from the cloud?

A stepped leader: it zigzags downward in short, jerky steps and splits into branches as it goes, which is why a lightning bolt looks forked.

What is the most luminous part of a lightning discharge called?

The return stroke: the bright flash you see actually races up from the ground to the cloud, even though the bolt seems to strike downward.

Rare but powerful positive lightning is largely blamed for triggering which flashes high above storms?

Sprites: aircraft pilots reported glimpsing flashes above storms for years before researchers finally documented sprites with sensitive video cameras.

Lightning that exits the side of a storm and strikes miles away is known as what?

Bolts from the blue: they can strike ground under a blue sky, so hearing any thunder at all means you are within striking distance.

Roy Sullivan, recognised by Guinness as struck by lightning seven times, worked as what?

A park ranger: Sullivan worked in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, and one of the strikes, in 1972, set his hair on fire.

In a thunderstorm, collisions between ice crystals and which soft hail particles separate charge?

Graupel: in lab tests, whether it ends up positively or negatively charged after these collisions depends partly on the temperature of the cloud.

Which region of a thunderstorm cloud holds its main positive charge?

The top: winds high up spread that positive charge out sideways into the storm's anvil.

Metallica's album Ride the Lightning took its title from a line in which author's novel?

Stephen King: Kirk Hammett was reading The Stand, where a death-row prisoner talks of waiting to 'ride the lightning', slang for the electric chair.

Where on Earth does most of the planet's lightning strike?

Tropical land: sunshine heats land faster than the sea, and that warmed air rises into the thunderstorms that make lightning.

Over which lake does the Catatumbo lightning occur, which Guinness World Records named the world's most concentrated?

Maracaibo: displays there can last nine hours at a stretch, yet in early 2010 the lightning stopped for months.

The village of Kifuka, one of the most lightning-struck places on Earth, is in which country?

DR Congo: humid Atlantic air sweeps across the vast Congo rainforest and meets the first mountains there, setting off violent thunderstorms all year.

What is a 'megaflash'?

An exceptionally long horizontal flash: by 2022 megaflashes had been recorded only over North and South America, partly because few other regions were watched by the right satellites.

On which planet did Voyager 1 discover lightning, at first dubbed an 'electrostatic discharge'?

Saturn: the radio bursts were first blamed on its B ring, and were only later linked to lightning in giant storms.

Which rover's microphone recorded a putative detection of lightning on Mars, reported in 2025?

Perseverance: electrical activity on Mars had long been suspected but never shown, until its microphone caught crackles from dust devils and dust storms.

What are the glassy tubes called that form when lightning melts sandy soil?

Fulgurites: scientists study old ones as clues to how often lightning struck in the past and to what ancient environments were like.

Why is a lightning strike generally not dangerous to an aircraft?

The metal fuselage acts as a Faraday cage: yet investigators blamed the 1963 crash of Pan Am Flight 214 on lightning igniting fuel vapour in a wing tank.

Why is touching a lightning victim safe?

Bodies store no electricity: victims carry no leftover charge, so bystanders should start CPR at once if the heart has stopped.

What harms more people in groups than a direct lightning hit does?

Current spreading through the ground: it can surge in through one leg and out the other, which is why it so often kills large farm animals.

A three-second delay between lightning and thunder means the strike was how far away?

About 1 km: the flash reaches you almost instantly but sound covers only about a kilometre every three seconds, so counting the gap gauges the distance.

What is lightning called when it is too far away for its thunder to be heard?

Heat lightning: despite the name, heat doesn't cause it; it is ordinary lightning from a storm so distant that its thunder fades before reaching you.

What smell may accompany a very close lightning strike?

Ozone: its name comes from the Greek ozein, 'to smell', given for the sharp odour its discoverer recognised as the smell that follows lightning.

Lightning plays a role in the nitrogen cycle by turning atmospheric nitrogen into what?

Nitrates that rain deposits as fertiliser: the flash's heat splits nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air, and the compounds they form wash down into the soil.

The branching, fern-like red marks that can appear on the skin of lightning victims are called what?

Lichtenberg figures: they are so distinctive that forensic pathologists use them to help confirm a death by lightning when nobody saw it happen.

In the 2000s, gamma-ray flashes from thunderstorms revealed that lightning can produce what?

Antimatter: NASA's Fermi telescope caught thunderstorms hurling beams of positrons, the antimatter counterparts of electrons, out into space.

Which rocks, known since ancient times, are theorised to have gained their magnetism from lightning?

Lodestones: a piece hung on a string swings into line with Earth's magnetic field, so lodestones became the first magnetic compasses.

What did Benjamin Franklin tie to the string in his famous kite experiment?

A house key: contrary to legend, lightning never struck the kite; it gathered charge from the storm, and the key sparked when he reached toward it.

Scientists trigger lightning on demand at Camp Blanding, Florida, by launching what into storms?

Rockets trailing spools of wire: the unwinding wire gives the storm a ready path to ground, so researchers can make lightning strike right where their instruments wait.

Which spacecraft was famously struck by lightning shortly after lift-off?

Apollo 12: on a quick-thinking flight controller's advice, Alan Bean flipped a single switch, and the mission carried on to the Moon.

Wildfires like Australia's in 2019-20 can create which cloud type that makes its own lightning?

Pyrocumulonimbus: a fire's heat drives smoke so high that it condenses into a storm cloud, and its winds and lightning can spread the fire further.

Lightning hits which New York skyscraper about 23 times a year, busting the 'never strikes twice' myth?

The Empire State Building: tall, pointed, isolated objects get struck again and again, and whether they contain metal makes no difference.

In French and Italian, the expression for love at first sight literally means what?

A bolt of lightning: one 2017 study, though, found that 'love at first sight' is really a strong initial attraction rather than a distinct kind of love.

Which weekday honours the Norse god of thunder and lightning?

Thursday: Old English named it 'Thor's day' as a loan-translation of the Latin 'day of Jupiter', which also gave French its jeudi.

Which ancient people wrote whole guides to reading the future in thunder and lightning?

The Etruscans: Rome kept their soothsaying arts alive, and the soothsayer Spurinna warned Julius Caesar that danger would come by the Ides of March.

Which former NHL star founded the Tampa Bay Lightning franchise?

Phil Esposito: his group named the team the Lightning after Tampa Bay's reputation as North America's lightning capital.

The German word Blitzkrieg means what?

Lightning war: Germany massed tanks and aircraft to smash through a narrow front and race behind enemy lines before defenders could close the gap.

Innsbruck researchers calculated a severe storm's magnetic fields within 200 metres could cause what in bystanders?

Hallucinations: the pulses might make people see glowing shapes, perhaps explaining some ball-lightning reports, though a later correction shrank the estimate.

Which Aztec god is associated with lightning?

Tlaloc: Aztecs killed by lightning were buried instead of cremated, because they were believed to go to his green paradise, Tlalocan.

Radio pulses recorded by which ESA orbiter, which reached Venus in April 2006, hint at lightning there?

Venus Express: it caught whistler-like radio bursts that lightning should make, yet other searches found nothing, so lightning on Venus is still debated.

NOAA's Geostationary Lightning Mapper spots lightning from orbit by detecting what?

Flashes of near-infrared light: sudden rises in the lightning it counts help forecasters spot storms that are turning severe.

Which of Singapore's political parties uses a lightning flash as its symbol?

The British Union of Fascists in the 1930s also used a lightning-flash emblem.

Which statue had a finger on its right hand dislodged by a lightning strike in January 2014?

Christ the Redeemer is fitted with lightning rods, yet a 2008 thunderstorm had already damaged its fingers, head and eyebrows.

A single lightning storm on Norway's Hardangervidda plateau killed 323 of which animals in August 2016?

Reindeer migrate across the plateau in some of the world's largest wild herds, and Norway's environment agency debated whether to leave so many carcasses in the open.

In which film does a lightning strike on a town courthouse supply the 1.21 gigawatts for time travel?

Back to the Future's effects team billed the strike as the largest bolt of lightning in cinematic history.

By his own account, which church reformer vowed to become a monk after lightning struck near him in 1505?

Martin Luther cried out to Saint Anna in terror during the storm, and came to see that plea as a vow he could never break.

Which yellow Pokémon has a tail shaped like a lightning bolt and stores electricity in red cheek sacs?

Pikachu got its cheek sacs because designer Atsuko Nishida was obsessed with squirrels, which store food in their cheeks.

Which blue glow on ship masts during thunderstorms did Magellan's crews welcome as a favourable omen?

St. Elmo's fire is named after Erasmus of Formia, the patron saint of sailors, and it can warn that a lightning strike is imminent.

Which Star Wars villain attacks Luke Skywalker with Force lightning, only to be hurled down a chasm by Darth Vader?

Palpatine owes his grey, wizened face to the same power, which Mace Windu deflected back at him during a duel.

A lightning bolt is an example of which state of matter, also found glowing inside neon signs?

Plasma forms when a gas is ionized, and the change into it is far less clear-cut than melting or boiling.

Whose rebounding killing curse left Harry Potter with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead?

Lord Voldemort was apparently destroyed when the curse bounced back, and the baby's survival made him famous among wizards.

Which beetles are commonly nicknamed lightning bugs?

Fireflies of different species have their own courtship flash patterns, which flying males emit as they search for females.

Which rare phenomenon, reported for centuries as drifting glowing orbs, still has no agreed scientific explanation?

Ball lightning ranges from pea-sized to several metres across, and a chronicler described a fiery globe falling near London as early as 1195.

The lightning displays nicknamed 'dirty thunderstorms' crackle inside the plumes thrown up by which events?

Volcanic eruptions build up static electricity as particles of ash collide and break apart inside the plume.

Which treatable phobia, seen in animals as well as humans, is the fear of thunder and lightning?

Astraphobia only counts as a true phobia in a child if the fear lasts more than six months, because many children simply grow out of it.

In Norse mythology, what is the name of the hammer wielded by Thor, the god of thunder?

Mjölnir may itself mean 'lightning-maker': one proposed origin links the name to Slavic words for lightning.

Which creature of Greek myth, born from Medusa's blood, was said to carry Zeus's thunderbolts?

Pegasus, the winged horse, was brought to Olympus in some tales to fetch lightning and thunder for the ruler of the gods.

Which legendary creature of Native American tradition is said to make lightning by flashing its eyes?

The Thunderbird also lends its name to the US Air Force's air demonstration team.

Which 1931 Universal horror film has a scientist raise a stitched-together body into a lightning storm to give it life?

Frankenstein's creation scene used electrical effects so striking that they became a fixture of Universal's later films about the monster.

Which actor voices Lightning McQueen, the cocky rookie race car in Pixar's Cars films?

Owen Wilson was coached by a director who had taken lessons at a racing school to prepare for the film.

Which DC Comics forensic chemist gains super-speed when lightning shatters a case of chemicals over him?

Barry Allen, the second hero to be called the Flash, starts out with a reputation for being very slow and frequently late.

Which Australian rock band's logo, designed by Gerard Huerta in 1977, puts a lightning bolt in the middle of its name?

AC/DC have used the bolt on every studio album except the international version of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

Benjamin Franklin turned to a kite because which city had no spire tall enough for his lightning rod experiment?

Philadelphia's low skyline led him to raise his conductor on a kite instead, reportedly with the help of his son William.

In which country was physicist Georg Richmann killed in 1753 while repeating a famous lightning rod experiment?

Russia lost the Saint Petersburg professor in August 1753, the year after the experiment was first carried out in northern France.

Which inventor built a Colorado Springs laboratory in 1899 and made artificial lightning there up to 135 feet long?

Nikola Tesla's discharges of millions of volts made sparks jump between the ground and the feet of people walking along the street.

The Miller–Urey experiment produced which molecules by firing sparks, simulating lightning, through methane and ammonia?

Amino acids turned up in even greater variety than first reported when sealed vials from the experiment were re-examined after Stanley Miller's death in 2007.

A lightning strike in 1769 devastated the Italian city of Brescia by igniting a bastion packed with what?

Gunpowder stored there by the Republic of Venice, about 90,000 kg of it, exploded, and Britain passed new laws on storing explosives in response.

Which Shakespeare tragedy opens with three witches planning their next meeting amid thunder and lightning?

Macbeth has the witches agree to meet again with the Thane of Glamis, the encounter that sets his rise and fall in motion.

Which singer wears a red-and-blue lightning flash across his face on the cover of the 1973 album Aladdin Sane?

David Bowie's make-up artist is said to have copied the design from a National Panasonic rice cooker in the photographer's studio.

Apple's Lightning connector, introduced with the iPhone 5, was replaced by which port on the iPhone 15?

USB-C reached the iPhone after the European Union passed legislation in 2022 to standardize charging ports.

Lightning Ridge, an Australian town reputedly named after a deadly storm strike, is a centre for mining which gemstones?

Black opals made the town's name as a mining field, and that name is said to recall a farmer, his dog and his flock of sheep found killed by lightning in the 1870s.

Raiden, a thunder god in a conical hat who commands lightning, debuted in 1992 in which fighting game series?

Mortal Kombat's designer drew on a warrior called Lightning from the film Big Trouble in Little China.

Which actor insisted on singing Greased Lightnin' in the 1978 film Grease, although the number belongs to Kenickie?

John Travolta used his influence to claim the song from Jeff Conaway, who had played Danny Zuko himself on Broadway.

The Lightning Network, launched in 2018 to make payments faster and cheaper, is built on which cryptocurrency?

Bitcoin's own blockchain can only process around 7 transactions per second, the bottleneck the network was built to ease.

Which American stealth fighter was named Lightning II in 2006 after Lockheed's P-38 of World War II?

The F-35 has also picked up the nicknames Panther, Fat Amy and Battle Penguin.

Which six-time major champion golfer was struck by lightning at the 1975 Western Open near Chicago?

Lee Trevino needed surgery to remove a damaged spinal disc, and back problems went on hampering his play.

Juliane Koepcke fell 3 km strapped to her seat after lightning hit her plane in 1971, landing in which rainforest?

The Amazon held the 17-year-old for 11 days as she hiked out to safety, the only survivor of the 92 people on board.

Which ruler of the gods in Hindu tradition wields a thunderbolt called the vajra and rides the elephant Airavata?

Indra is the most frequently mentioned deity in the Rigveda, and is linked with the sky, storms and rain.

Which American author wrote The Lightning Thief, in which Percy Jackson must recover a weapon stolen from Zeus?

Rick Riordan made it his first children's novel, and it opened the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series.

Which NFL team has worn an arc-shaped lightning bolt as its logo since its debut season in 1960?

The Chargers also used a shield logo featuring a horse's head during their years in the AFL.

Which carmaker gave the name Lightning to the battery-electric version of its full-size pickup truck in 2021?

Ford unveiled the F-150 Lightning as part of its fourteenth-generation F-Series, then announced in 2025 that it would stop making it.

Lightning, a heroine who sets out to save her sister Serah, is the main protagonist of which 2009 role-playing game?

Final Fantasy XIII casts her as a resident of the artificial world of Cocoon who is chosen by divine powers to destroy it.

Which magic word does orphan Billy Batson speak to be struck by lightning and transformed into an adult superhero?

Shazam is also the name of the ancient wizard who grants the powers, an acronym drawn from six immortal elders.

The Japanese thunder god Raijin is typically shown with a fierce face, beating which instruments?

Drums surround Raijin in Japanese art, and he holds large hammers to play them and make the sound of thunder.

In which baseball film does Roy Hobbs make his bat Wonderboy from a tree struck by lightning?

The Natural has Wonderboy split late in the story, so Roy steps up with a bat the batboy made under his guidance.

On which CNBC show does Jim Cramer give instant verdicts on callers' stocks in a segment named the Lightning Round?

Mad Money's host opened the segment in the show's first two years by hurling an office chair against the studio wall.

Benjamin Franklin hoped his rods would draw lightning into which early capacitor, named after a Dutch city?

The Leyden jar was discovered independently in 1745 by a German cleric and by a Dutch scientist, Pieter van Musschenbroek.

Which tarot card, which follows The Devil in the deck, shows lightning striking as two figures fall headlong?

The Tower is called The Lightning in some old Belgian decks, which show a tree being struck instead.

Which saint, whose legend has her father struck dead by lightning, became the patron of artillerymen and miners?

Saint Barbara is invoked against lightning and fire because, in her legend, the strike killed the father who had just beheaded her.

Which supreme god of Slavic mythology, linked with oak trees and the axe, ruled thunder and lightning?

Perun survives in everyday speech: in a number of Slavic languages the word still means thunder or a lightning bolt.

Which Yoruba orisha of thunder and lightning, once a ruler of Oyo, carries a double-headed axe?

Shango's own reign is said to have ended when lightning accidentally destroyed his palace.

What name is given to the scientific study of lightning, which the WMO lists as an Essential Climate Variable?

Fulminology draws on radio as well as sight, since the pulses from a strike can be located up to 10,000 km from their origin.