Mysteries of Lightning - Secrets Revealed (Documentary) Scientists find clues to the mystery of what causes lightning - It's well-known that lightning is an electric current—a quick, powerful burst of charge that flows within a cloud or between a cloud and the ground. But surprisingly, scientists still don't fully understand how the initial spark forms that generates such powerful lightning. In a new paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from Langmuir Laboratory at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology near Socorro, New Mexico, have reported observations of a rare but extremely powerful type of lightning spark, or discharge, called narrow bipolar events. The scientists found that this powerful type of lightning is caused by a newly recognized type of discharge called fast positive breakdown, and the data suggests that this same discharge initiates most or even all of the lightning flashes typically seen in thunderstorms. These sparks travel at speeds that are fast even for lightning—around 10 to 100 million meters per second—and produce very powerful radiofrequency (RF) radiation as high as a few megawatts, making them the strongest natural sources of RF radiation on Earth.


This discovery is surprising, since previous simulations have shown that lightning breakdown appears to be negative, meaning the spark moves upward in the cloud from a negative to a positive region. In positive breakdown, the spark moves downward from a positive to a negative region.

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