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Mysterious Jets of Upside-Down Lightning Are Real, And We Just Got Our Best Look Yet


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One of the most powerful and fascinating forces of nature is born of storms: great cracks of light that part the sky, flicking vast amounts of electricity into the surrounding atmosphere, cracking into the ground whenever it reaches it. Or that's how we typically think of lightning.

But the phenomenon has another manifestation, only relatively recently revealed: sometimes, it erupts upwards from the clouds, lashing into the stratosphere in a tremendous blue 'jet' of electricity.

Little is known about this phenomenon; it's unpredictable and occurs beyond the sight of most people, above a layer of storm clouds.

But, thanks to a citizen scientist, one such giant jet was recorded above the clouds during a storm in Oklahoma in 2018 – and, with data collected by other instruments, scientists have been able to study it in detail in three dimensions.

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-upside-down-lightning-could-be-even-weirder-than-we-thought

The research has been published in Science Advances.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8731

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