Longest lightning bolt record broken by 768km continuous flash over three US states
A bolt of lightning that stretched for more than 750 kilometres — across three American states — holds the new world record for longest flash.
Key points:
- The lightning struck from one cloud to another, not endangering anyone
- Ordinarily, lightning stretches to a maximum of about 16km
- The record for lightning duration was also recently broken by a flash lasting almost 20 seconds
The single flash extended 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in April 2020, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
That beat the previous record, set in 2018 in Brazil, of 709 km.
Also, in 2020, a single lightning flash over Uruguay and northern Argentina lasted for 17.1 seconds, nipping the record of 16.7 seconds.
Normally lightning doesn’t stretch farther than 10 miles (16km) and lasts less than a second, said Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, who is the chief of records confirmation for the meteorological group.
“These two lightning flash records are absolutely extraordinary,” Dr Cerveny said.
Both were cloud-to-cloud and several thousand feet above the ground, so no-one was in danger, he said.
These records, which are not linked to climate change, were spotted and confirmed thanks to new satellite tracking technology.
Certain regions of the world are prone to the type of intense storms that can produce what are called “megaflashes”, Dr Cerveny said.
