Guess How Far a Record-Setting Lightning Bolt Traveled

Yes, the World Meteorological Organization has certified a new world record for a single flash of lightning. Eight years ago, the intrepid bolt set out from somewhere in Eastern Texas and stretched 515 miles, half way across Missouri to a spot near Kansas City. It beat the previous record, for a bolt in 2020, by almost 50 miles.

Researchers used space-based observations of the 2017 storm along with improved analysis techniques to re-examine the lightning’s extent. The bolt was more technically known as a “megaflash,” which extend through clouds over long distances and offer up dozens or hundreds of cloud-to-ground strikes along the way. They can, in fact, be pretty dangerous — in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the researchers noted sometimes they only occur up to half an hour after the last thunder in a localized storm is heard. That means people might not be ready for it, “represent[ing] a poorly understood safety hazard.”

Still — 500-mile-long lightning bolts are extremely cool. If it had decided to travel vertically, and various laws of nature and physics and so on didn’t exist, it would have ended up twice as high above the planet as the International Space Station.

According to the WMO’s Randall Cerveny, this record won’t last as measurement techniques improve: “It is likely that even greater extremes still exist.”