Nature & Environment

Catatumbo Lightning enters the record books

By T.K. Randall
November 11, 2014 ·  5 comments

The lightning appears most nights of the year. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Thechemicalengineer The timing and exact location of a lightning strike tends to be inherently unpredictable, yet at the mouth of the Catatumbo River where the water empties in to Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo there are so many lightning strikes that they can be reliably observed almost every night of the year.

So frequent is the phenomenon in fact that it is not uncommon to see storms lasting ten hours with as many as 280 strikes per hour.Historical records dating back over 400 years indicate that this has been going on for centuries.

Now thanks to the tireless efforts of local campaigners the Catatumbo Lightning has been officially recognized by the Guiness Book of Records 2015 as the place with the largest number of annual lighting strikes per kilometer, a title which used to belong to the Congolese town of Kifuka.

"We're working on trying to get the world to know more about Venezuela," said entomologist Alan Highton who first visited Lake Maracaibo in 1995. "There's still much to do."

Source: Reuters | Comments (5)

Tags: Venezuela, Catatumbo, Lightning