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Scientists Discover A New Kind Of Lightning
Exoman writes "Lightning that shoots upward up to 60 miles from the clouds? A team of researchers led by Han-Tzong Su of the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, videotaped the discharges last July from an observatory on the southern tip of the island. The lightning was firing from the top of thunderclouds more than 300 miles away across the South China Sea. The researchers reported their work Thursday in the journal Nature."
There are some pictures and video available at Nature.com - http://www.nature.com/nsu/020311/020311-6.html
Most notably, 19 times from space.
Lightning Jets Blow Sky High
Found their site (please be nice) and dug around enough to find a decent image of what this kind of lightning looks like.
Check for yourself here.
I gotta say, I'd think it was the end of the world if I saw something like this on a regular basis.
The nasa page the parent points to seems to be describing red sprites, first photographic evidence in 1988/1989. This looks to be something different.
From the article:
Other types of high-altitude lightning events also have been documented in the past decade using high-flying planes and cameras carried aboard the space shuttle fleet. One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.
Red sprites, another form of high-altitude lightning, travel downward toward clouds but appear to stop short of reaching the top of thunderclouds.
Su noted that while the other types of jets seem to occur over most parts of the world, the six gigantic optical jets observed so far have all been connected to thunderstorms over the open sea.
Also, from the Wired article:
Scientists had found plenty of evidence of sprites in the 1990s, but the larger, upward streaming lightning jets had escaped detection -- possibly because they may only occur over oceans, Inan said.
I thought I'd seen this on Discovery or such a long time ago, they were called sprites when I saw them. Is this something different?
Patent it!!!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.
Here is a link to the two articles in the most recent Nature, though w/out a site license or subscription all you can see is the first paragraph of the paper by Su et al.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Naturally you reply "What kind? It's either ice cream or it isn't."
He gives you vanilla.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
NPR had a great series called "Lost and Found Sound", one episode had the sounds of the Northern Lights, and lightning. Sounds of the Northern Lights
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Yes, they are nice images, but oddly enough I found the same images in the same directory without the annoying lettering. The lettering tipped me off to the fact that the images were the front cover of an issue of Geophysical Research Letters from last year (a pdf copy can be found in the same directory). The images are of a type of sprite known as a carrot, although the top one could be columniform.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The conventional ground-to-cloud lightning bolts occur because thunderstorms build up huge surpluses of negatively charged particles near the bottom of clouds while objects on the ground collect a surge of positive charges that eventually come together in a bolt.
Erm, so are they saying that current now flows from a positively charged source to negative one?
Man, I can't keep up.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This convention was set before it was found electrons are current conductors, and they actually flow from - to + , of course.
ment to say current carriers, of course.
Working for necessity's mother.
The last time I heard about weird electical lightning formations was when they were throwing around ideas and someone had a suspiscious picture.
from space.com
While it's not likely Columbia was struck by lightning flying through clear skies some 40 miles high, it is possible that some kind of electrical event took place. At least one image is reported to exist in which it appears something like lightning is striking, or discharging from, the shuttle as it approached the California coast.
Also a little more detail in this article.
I never heard anything else so apparantly they decided that the picture was fake or irrelevant, I guess. I wasn't able to find any more current info.
I don't read Chinese, so it was difficult. Here are some colorized images superimposed on fanciful daytime scenes from this page. The original images are not in color, and they come from this mostly illegible (to me) page. Most of the other images appear to be of sprites. I'm not certain how they know the tops are red and the bottoms are blue.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I fucking hate vanilla...
And who the fuck modded the parent offtopic??? Do you not understand analogies?? It seems perfectly relevant to me...fucking slashtard mods...
or perhaps even charge carriers...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Lightning creates the ozone, right? I'm no ozonelogist to say the least, but if someone is I am sort of curious... Does this mean anything in regards to the ozone layer?
of course it does't make any sense out of context, which is the case if its parent is modded so low nobody sees it.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Gee, two different 'troll' mods, you must have enemies. Nevertheless, you are quite correct; unless God has been revising the laws of physics lately there likely aren't any new kinds of naturally ocurring lightning, but, at best, newly discovered forms that have been occuring all along and have only now been noticed.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Isn't this the lightning that we've been seeing from space for over 30 years? Come on. Figure out how to make your own lightning, then we'll fund your damn salary and expensive cameras.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
ack
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
...and I see this message attached to a 5:Informative comment. I'm supposed to mod it down as overrated on the basis of the say so of a nick that says Sir Holo who claims to be a Solid State physicist?
If the poster is full of shit, explain his errors. Becuase otherwise, I have no basis to accept your words over his.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
he'd cream his fuckin' jeans.
there was another article about a similar discovery from one of the islands of Hawaii a long time ago.
One is called burning tree and is quite unique. This is a tree like discharge appearing to hover above the ground.
http://www.astronet.ru:8100/db/x/msg/1170947
I don't think its new.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
But you can at least have a look at the pictures, even without a site license... start here and use the arrows to navigate. And here is the figures from paper #2.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
If atmospheric conditions are dependant on these 6,000 cubic kilometer lightning events, wouldn't stringing an orbital elevator cable from the surface of the earth up through the ionosphere have undesirable environmental effects? Would it even be possible to string a cable of any material from the surface through the ionosphere without having a significant ongoing effect on these types of discharges?