One Lightning Stroke in Ten Does This
About this video
Most lightning carries negative charge from cloud to ground. But roughly one stroke in ten carries positive charge instead, and those are far more powerful. When a big positive stroke drains a large volume of cloud very fast, the electric field above the storm changes almost instantly — leaving the thin air fifty to ninety kilometres up sitting in a field it cannot withstand. It ionises, and the discharge spreads as a mass of fine branching filaments reaching down and up from where it began. The whole event lasts a few thousandths of a second.
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