Extraordinary ‘megaflash’ lightning strikes cover several hundred kilometres

Lightning seems particularly tough on high frequency signal processing hardware. A lightning strike on an invisible dog fence the previous owners had left in place around our house fried, along with a couple of ethernet ports, every HDMI connector that was plugged in in one particular room at the time. Rest of the devices continued to function perfectly, but those HDMI input/outputs were cooked. Similar HDMI devices in another room were totally unaffected. My working theory is that the devices in the affected room were plugged in to multiple power sockets, giving a longer antenna loop through the sensitive components, while in the unaffected room all the devices were running off the same power strip. Would explain why ethernet - connecting devices in different rooms - also seems vulnerable.

Not much more evidence to go on, so it's largely superstition, but as a result I do generally try to keep my whole AV setup - game console, TV, AV receiver, etc. - plugged into a single power strip now.

I also now have a cat who is exceptionally nervous whenever he hears thunder. My wife and son were home at the time and... yes, the sound of a lightning strike at point blank is not just loud, it's.. like a crack in the world.

I was once walking along a soccer field in Costa Rica during the daily afternoon shower in the rainy season. Suddenly the entire sky beyond the treeline turned completely white. It was like I was looking at a black and white silhouette of the treeline. At the same moment I heard the loudest sound I've ever heard. It was like an explosion; I could feel the ground tremble. I have no idea how close the strike was, only that the sound and lightning were simultaneous from my perspective. It honestly could have been just on the other side of the trees across the field, or maybe half a kilometer away, I couldn't tell you. All I can say for sure is I ran like hell to the nearest house.

I'm not regularly around explosions and such so I've never experienced anything like that before or since.

> "Pardon sir, we are not programmed for this event! Please advise!"

do you have a blog somewhere, or more writing somewhere?

Cat-5 can definitely do it if you're unlucky about cable orientation and length. Years ago I worked in an office one story underground and the whole thing had a cable run along a single wall with drops. One day we got a nearby strike and every single ethernet card fried, but the rest of our hardware was fine.

Long ago I was inside of a church when its steeple got struck by lightning. We could hear the static building up in the sound system before the strike occurred. People said arcs shot from all of the power sockets. There were burn marks on every corner of every wall where it seemed the current couldn't make the sharp bend and jumped out of the metal within the walls. I just remember it being loud.

Years ago I was near a tree that was struck, but did not strike me.

It was like sensory overload, I remember hearing something, but not aware what and I found myself sort of crouched on the ground covered in tinyn (harmless) cuts and the tree bark that hit me.

I remember being aware of noise, but not a specific noise other than a sort of echo of it....and just knowing that a very loud noise had occurred.

> It is ... way beyond.. loud.

Um, I don't know how often this happens but any chance of that damaging your hearing? Because I wouldn't know of any sound I'd even describe like that.

The part about it frying motherboards in your house makes me wonder how the cell tower copes with it. I assume it has a lightning rod but so close to that rod as the tower's equipment is, compared to how close your house is, it must fry everything on the tower? Do they come and replace all electronics on it every time?

Once I was on a plane that got hit by lightning, and the sound was quite frightening - an extremely loud, but short, bang. There were a few screams and many very worried glances around until the captain casually told everyone what had happened, and that everything was fine.

If you get a solid strike, I would agree that almost all bets are off. At least unless you put some real money into it, but nothing that usually makes sense unless you are protecting really expensive equipment.

A friend of mine had a strike land somewhere snaking its way into his mains feed. I believe the feed was ~60 amp rated. Anyway. At least 10 meters of the feed was simply gone. Except for some soot there weren't any more signs of either the junction box, or the electricity meter. It was as if they had never existed at all! Just gone.

Does a lightning rod high up and nearby work?

Someone local to me was struck by lightning recently, whilst they were filming the storm on their phone from their porch. The phone screen is split, their arm hurts etc, but the film was recoverable. The lightning was just discernible as just a slight lightening on one frame, apparently. And a simultaneous clap. They were fine, and apparently it was the second time they were struck, although the first time was decades ago when they were caught out cycling.

Good question! I'm not entirely sure, but if we consider that: 1) Air is a decent insulator compared to earth 2) Most thunderstorms are quite close to the ground 3) The electric potential is caused by colliding masses of air.

I would have to assume a large volume of air gets a bulk charge that is large in a specific direction but not large enough for a strike to the ground. Then you get a breakdown somewhere that connects a lower potential are to a higher potential area, and because there is a bulk charge, the breakdown simply continues after this initial connection.

After that, I don't really get how it can continue for 16 seconds, other than massive amounts of charged in the atmosphere, and partially ionized leftover air from the initial blast being conductive enough to trigger more insulation breakdowns.

You can use electron beams to charge acrylic which you then trigger to discharge by various means, and it seems to behave in a similar way but on a much smaller scale. Iirc the small lightning bolts inside the acrylic sometimes continue for a surprising amount of time, even though it's tiny, and the flash also (generally) occur entirely within the insulator even it it's quite long and thin.

Maybe when there's a potential difference over a large area, getting regulated at once. In the picture it's more extending over an area than a length.

Just a guess, but normally lightning is caused by potential difference between the air and ground, so you roughly speaking have two potential surfaces/regions. For this to happen laterally, perhaps it would be enough to have three masses of air separated by two pressure fronts, with the interactions at the air masses' boundaries acting something like charge buildup across parallel plate capacitors. And then, dielectric breakdown happens.

I think the majority of lightning is cloud to cloud.

The big events I've seen/felt were at Cape Canaveral (happens every year), but I also saw the Dec. 2019 storm in Jakarta, which was accompanied by tornados - this one was so intense that adults were scared for their lives, a real fireworks display.

Both areas have tropical-level energy.

I guess the difference is whether you're staying inside a hut or a modern building with a grounding system

Well, proponents of the electric universe theory have an interesting explanation. First of all: lighting is not caused by clouds rubbing together. It is a result of the protective capacitance layer in the upper atmosphere leaking. Sprites are discharges from surrounding space across the ionosphere which trickles further down CAUSING thunderstorms and electric discharge to ground, or lightening.

Fixed now. Thanks!