We’ve seen lots of rain lately, mostly on the return trip, but some since we’ve been home, too. That got me to thinking about lightning, so I went surfing for some tidbits:
- Most lightning strikes occur either at the beginning or end of a storm
- The average lightning strike is 6 miles long
- Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, four times as hot as the sun’s surface
- A cloud-to-ground lightning channel can be 2 to 10 miles long
- Voltage in a cloud-to-ground strike is 100 million to 1 billion volts
- Around the earth there are 100 lightning strikes per second, or 8,640,000 times a day.
- 20% of all lightning victims die from the strike
- 70% of survivors will suffer serious long-term effects
- Americans are twice as likely to die from lightning as they are from a hurricane, tornado, or a flood
I don’t know about y’all dear readers, but this is a little creepy. Anyway, I found this information here.
July 20, 2006 at 2:25 pm
I smile everytime I read your posts – I have a lot of catch up reading to do but I just read two or three and I am literally sitting here laughing out loud – thanks goodness the dogs are not passing judgment!
Peace