The Weirdest Kinds of Lightning You've Never Heard Of 

Nice compilation of Michael’s hairs over the years

Always a pleasure to see a baby Hank in SciShow!

Those of us old enough to have listened to AM radio will remember that you heard a lighting bolt on the radio as loud static if close and less loud the farther away the lighting was.

An uncle is a lifelong electrician and certified lightning protection specialist/instructor. I learned quite a bit of information from his spare educational materials back in the 1980s, and I'm certain that there's even more to be learned currently (pun intended). Something that wasn't addressed in the above video was hot bolts vs. cold bolts, as they were labeled in those old instructional materials. A cold bolt is primarily voltage equalization between charged locations with comparatively miniscule amounts of current, very much like the static discharge arc one get between one's fingertip and a grounded household item. The comparative lack of current leads to very little heating along the path of conduction. Hot bolts, on the other hand, carry gargantuan amounts of current, and are typically far more destructive to conduction path items. For instance, when a hot bolt hits a tree, the ginormous current flow superheats the moisture in the tree bark and wood, causing it to flash to steam and triggers a steam explosion. Since steam occupies 1600 times the volume that an equivalent amount of water does, it gets REAL big REAL fast. When I was in the military in Panama back in the early 1990s, I saw the result of hot bolts occasionally striking the damp concrete on the runway, causing the concrete to spall outward and leave a steaming crater behind. When that concrete explodes out, you do NOT wanna be anywhere near it.

Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening

I've always been fascinated by lightning, even more so with volcanic lightning and Sprites.

"Everything is cooler when it's made of lasers" - This is actually physically true. The coldest temperatures we can reach use a method called "laser cooling" where we use lower power lasers to trigger atoms to release higher energy photons, overall lowering the atom's energy state. Lasers. Making things colder. So cool.

I'm a physicist who studies low temperature plasma (Non-equilibrium plasmas). The part of the video where you said ball lightning can be created by lightning striking glass and ionizing the gas on the other side of the glass caught my eye. The way we make cold plasma is by having a high voltage electrode with glass on top and an air gap then a ground electrode. The electrodes create an electric field. However, the plasmas we create with this aren't characteristic of ball lightning. We typically use anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 volts. But I could definitely see a ball lightning like discharge in this set up if we used a potential of millions of volts like lightning has of instead of the tens of thousands of volts we currently use. I would like to test this and see if I can create ball lightning in my lab. I'd have to figure out how to pull megavolts out of a power supply and go over extra safery precautions, but this seems really interesting.

Why do I feel like Stefan should be wearing a smoking jacket during the "SciShow Lounge" parts?

I remember a news interview during the 80s in NC after particularly violent thunderstorms with several close call strikes and one person actually hit (the survived). A very young reporter interviewed a local man (and colorful character) who who’d been struck 3 times in his life! She asked him while he was standing on his front porch.about his encounters with lightning. The old man with a proper NC twang said, “Lectriciy don’t bother me much any more after the third time. As he was speaking he was fidgeting with a short piece of extension cord that had a plug and bare wires where it had been clipped short. After he finished speaking he turned and plugged the cord in an outlet while fondling one lead in each hand… I thought the poor girl was going to have a heart attack from her horrified expression (she undoubtedly thought this old timer was electrocuting himself on live tv). He announced, “This here 120 tingles a bit, but 240 has a bit more bite” in the most matter of fact tone!

What a coincidence. I was looking up pictures of red sprites just 20 minutes before this video got uploaded.

More of these compilation videos, please! Very useful for getting a comprehensive understanding of an topic, as no one can follow all the related videos (on any one issue) published over a period of months or even years!

here in Arizona, we get "Heat Lightning" on clear, cloudless days with no cross-winds. The extreme heat, dusty air, and low humidity causes a perfect env. for electric charges to be built. the heat causes updrafts. updrafts pick up powder-fine dust. dust in motion experiences friction. Particulate friction causes a static charge to form. there is some suggestion (as yet unproven) that the sun's rays also directly contribute to the charge as high-energy particles from the sun hit dust particles and strip them of electrons, carrying or "knocking" them off the dust higher up and depositing them on the dust lower down (or perhaps just encouraging the directional trend). this static-electric dust-cycle is somewhat delicate, and can be disrupted by strong crosswinds, so it happens most often on still days, except for the concentric updrafts' circulation, which are highly localized the electron disparity between the top and bottom of the cell (which is nearly invisible, usually just being air that's "doped" with "enough" dust, and quite turbulent) builds until the charge difference overcomes the impedance of the atmosphere (aided by the intervening particles of dust in the column, which reduces the impedance of the air just like salt etc. does in water) and then; BANG! you hear thunder on a cloudless day. they've even been linked to wildfires, though typically via process of elimination... the bolts are rather faint and hard to see in daylight, and tend to be red (due to the dust), though very powerful ones can look just as blue-white as they would in a thunderstorm. they also tend to happen in batches, with the whole charge of the whole cell discharging at once, either with a very powerful bolt, or and group of nearly-simultaneous bolts; resulting in rather impressive rolls of thunder. this process is turned up to 11 when we have a severe dust storm. the only thing more terrifying than seeing a tsunami-like wall of rock (as dust) coming at you at high speed is seeing all the flashes of lightning inside it, obscured and glowing a malevolent red... as if portals to hell were briefly opening, and coming for you...

My husband was an F18 and H60 B helicopter mechanic. When he was working on the F18 flatworm, he had a coworker in his squadron who was electrocuted when he touched an aircraft that wasn’t properly grounded. The tool they used to discharge the charge wasn’t calibrated by the person in charge of doing that. The mechanic survived. He was in shock after the strike. This is not common. My husband saw the entire thing because he was waiting for the aircraft to be cleared.

I've always loved lightning storms in the Mountains of PA but nothing could have prepared me for how beautiful the lightning was in Puerto Rico, it was so much louder and brighter than what I've seen in PA and it made me want travel the world just to see different lightning.... 🌩️😍😁 Edit: They didn't even mention that Roy Sullivans tombstone was struck multiple times by lightning after he died.... He must have Really pissed off Zeus. 😅

I actually study lightning in a research group lead by Prof David Smith at UCSC! We study terrestrial gamma ray flashes produced by lightning (that’s right, lightning can be bright/energetic enough to produce gamma radiation!) it’s such a fun field to be in :)

I’ve been struck twice and one near miss in my lifetime, shocking.

I saw a Massive Negative SuperBolt hit a Power Substation from about 10 km away. The Bolt went straight down and was amazingly thick. The Substation got Smashed. The Strike did about $4M in damage to the Substation. What a memory! :D

I want to stop here and say EXTRA good job. I occasionally pick nits with you, because science, but there are no nits to pick. All I’s dotted, all T’s crossed. Plus you’re becoming more succinct, more eloquent and you’re covering context better. Whoever is writing for you, best give them a raise, they’re a treasure. Bravo to the entire production staff, crew, and hosts.

How entertaining!! 💗 Literally zap my brain with knowledge right now!! 🌩

The first thumbnail was better than the kite...

Ah ha, ha, ha. "Baby hank." What a finale!

Why isn't this labeled as a compilation

The different variants of Michael's hair...

We haven't gotten a video with Michael in a long time so I was very excited!!!

im glad that I didn't know about ball lightning until recently because as a kid I would've been terrified of it haha

I saw a ball lightning in Escondido,CA when Mulan first came out. It was a sphere as big as the street was wide, from one light post to the other, and it was rolling down the street. It was crazy to see when I was young

My dog would have to disagree with any good news regarding her chances of being struck by lightning or eaten alive by thunder. She is 135lbs ish (being polite here), a working breed who's never worked a day in her life, who wholeheartedly believes that thunder and lightning can, in fact, bust inside through windows, exterior walls, ceilings, and doors. Her solution for safety is to attempt to fit her entire huge body (huge as in 5 ft long without the tail, more than 2 ft high and infinitely 'round') into the bathroom. A sound choice since the bathroom has no windows and is the furthest interior space from the exterior of the house. And she is very dedicated to the safety of this place. I cannot convince her that it is safer on my bed, under the blankets, with me (which is exactly where I am during any thunderstorm because I am almost as terrified as her given that my building is surrounded by very large trees, very much like the trees on my old acreage that I've seen get hit by lightning 3 times in 2 summers). It is quite impossible, though, for the both of us, her being bigger than me and unwilling to move over even a little, to fit in this very tiny bathroom together (yes, I've tried). And so during such storms, I will bring some blankets and pillows and snuggle down just outside the bathroom door, holding hands with the giant beast, until things settle down. And this is how we survive a thunderstorm together. She will refuse to abandon her place of safety until the sounds of thunder are completely gone AND she sees me looking outside through the curtains to confirm there is no longer a threat. I must do the confirmation look often more than once and then drag all my blankets and pillows back to the bedroom for the ultimate confirmation that it is safe for her to leave the bathroom. I've never seen a dog so very frightened by thunder and lightning or any sound that might resemble it, such as fireworks, or even car doors slamming a block away where she cannot see it. A lot of dogs are rightfully afraid of thunder and lightning. But to see this huge beast nearly lose her mind because she really does believe that the storm is absolutely, definitely, coming inside just to get her through any exterior barrier. If we ever were in a tornado, she'd be the first one in the bathroom and I bet she'd learn to close the bathroom door too! I find it surprising that she understands where the safest place is and does not hesitate to go there, with no shame at all, and for sure will not emerge until it really, truly, is safe. If people paid more attention to their own safety, I bet there would be fewer casualties of lightning strikes. I think that's a fair assumption.

The most exciting bolts of lightning I've seen are of the anvil crawler variety, have seen a few summer time storms that put out bolts from cloud to cloud on the bottoms ' usually a break in the rain or backside of storm ' striking at least one per second for one and a half hours at a time.

I used to work with someone who got struck twice in her life by lightning. She didn't even have a job or did anything that increased her chances, it just kinda happened. Now she's terrified of even the chance of a thunderstorm happening, but has the 'neat' lightning shaped scars to show.

Starting lighting with lasers does sound like the kind of XTREME research you'd expect 90's scientists to conduct

I love that scientists keep asking questions, and honestly says "we don't know". Also love thunder and lightening and those deep grey blue clouds. Thank you all that helped make this vid!! 😀

Kinda bummed they didn't go into St. Elmo's Fire, an interesting lightning phenomenon where lightning seems to "stick" to objects, like ship's masts or the sides of buildings. It's greenish in colour & you can hear the crackling & fizzing as the charge wears itself out over several seconds. I saw an incident of St. Elmo's Fire one time during a truly frightening rainstorm that battered my town like a hammer. I saw this greenish glow fizzing & sparking along the window frames of a building across the street from me. The frames were metal, so that might have been a factor. I could hear it zapping & fizzling through the window I was watching from. Very cool experience to see from only a few dozen feet away.

"Ash is the cause of most volcanic lightning." ^^this right here is why I always root for Team Rocket to take away his Pikachu.

"The fire of five suns" Officially the best name for lightning. Ever.

Thank y'all a bunch for sharing this with us!

This type of illuminating content sparks joy in me.

Having lived in South Florida where the storms are amazing, it is definitely something I have a lot of respect for.

Lasers to guide lightning? Increased lightning over the oceans? Sounds like we need sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!

When my mom was a kid in the early 1970’s a ball of lightning came down her chimney, ever since then she has been terrified of lightning and thunder

Man gets struck by lightning 7 times and survives, but then offs himself due to depression, potentially linked due to the lightning frying his brain. Dunno if Zeus wanted him to get the message.

I miss Michael. I imagine he's moved on to a new job somewhere else, but I wish he would come back. He's great.

“Catnip to a lighting bolt” 😂

Lightning-fast click on this notification

Wish this was labeled as a compilation in the title

I love thunder storms and the lightning ....very good video❤

Maybe the super bolts happen when you build up charge without ice, and the cloud and ground/sea just act like a normal spark gap? That would mean the voltage difference that needs to be overcome is not that needed to cross 30 or 50 meters of air in a cloud but several hundred meters to more than a kilometer, with no stepped leader needed, just a giant spark.

Heard "Michael" and thought it was going to jump into a Vsauce intro.

I have see ball lightning. 4 balls in close proximity. I was in Arizona. There was lightning, but no rain. Lightning struck a dry wash down the hill from where I was staying, and a few seconds later I was saying to myself that some grass or brush must be on fire because there were several bluish glows from around that area (think of alcohol flame color). Then I realized that it was not fire, the balls moved slowly down the wash until the first hit a tree and it disappeared in a bright white flash. The second one did the same when it hit a bush nearby the tree. The last two just petered out. But they lasted much longer than 20 seconds, more like a minute.

My father got struck by lightning while working for a road construction crew when he was a teenager. After that, he seemed to attract electrical shocks. We had an ancient canister vacuum that had once been my grandmother’s, and Mum or I could use it over and over again without ever getting even the tiniest electric tingle, but if Dad tried to use it, the resultant electric shock would throw him halfway across the room. Stuff like that happened again and again, with Dad getting shocked alarmingly frequently. It was really strange. Almost like once electricity got a taste of him, it wanted more.

I'm old enough to remember ball lightning being summarily dismissed as a hoax, so I'm greatly enjoying this episode. At 6'10" - 7'10" : If shipping were responsible for 'superbolts', where are the strikes around the Panama Canal, or in the Malaca Straits? That alone ought to be sufficient to discount pollution as a complete explanation. Are there descriptions fitting our definition of superbolts from before the industrial age? Steamships didn't ply the open oceans in any numbers before Brunel's proving work in the 1830/40s. Nor does shipping explain the distinctly noticeable cluster of recordings in the High Andes ... there aren't that many large vessels on Lake Titicaca. I wonder to what extent the physics of the planetary mantle affects what happens in the atmosphere?

I have been struck by lightning twice. Other than Lichtenberg scars on my right leg from the first time, I have had no long lasting problems from it. I can, however, definitely understand why someone may be traumatized by it. Midwestern farmer stoicism is probably why I have been able to shrug it off. Of course growing up on a farm in the midwest probably increased my chances of being struck in the first place.

So this is brilliant.

A funny reminder of how it used to be someone's job to manually vary the text sizes of all the on-screen captions. That must have taken forever. Phew!

Is it just me, or is a 1 in 3000 chance of getting struck by lightning over your lifetime not nearly rare enough? I always figured it was like 1 in a million at least. Does that mean that one in every 3000 people have been or will be struck by lightning? Or that with every 3000 strikes of lightning you witness, you get struck once?? I'm guessing it's the former and not the latter 😂

Yay Michael!

Before the infrared observatory atop the 9000-foot-plus summit of Mt. Lemmon north of Tucson, there was an Air Force installation. I had an uncle stationed there in the 60s. He described an incidence of ball lightning that entered through an open window, traveled across a room and exited via another open window.

Anybody wishing to study lightning hitting sea water ought to try the Greek Islands in summer. The storms are short and violent, featuring some of the most numerous and substantial bolts of lightning I've ever seen. In many cases the storms feature multiple strikes per minute, and the spectacle (and sound) of a bolt with the thickness of an oak tree ripping its way to connect ocean to sky (especially in the dark) defies words.

Young SciShow hosts take me back! Y'all are awesome! And don't feel bad, we all get old. Hopefully... ;)

Hank saying "You're chances of getting struck by lightning are...yeah...you're stupid" is a vibe

One of the best videos I’ve seen, makes me wonder how people survive being struck by lightning, especially more than once. And then there’s lightning in Hurricanes… my great uncle sold lightning rods long time ago and I’ve had relatives that have been struck twice and survived

Literally the highest voltage event anyone could ever come in contact with.

Volcanic lightning is cool as hell. Lightning sprites are pretty cool too

Lightning struck a power line in front of my parents' house in Tennessee years ago. The resultant surge fried all my dad's ham radio gear (despite it being grounded), peeled all the foil wallpaper off the bathroom wall, and most eerily, spat several ball lightning orbs into the kitchen from the power sockets. According to my mother, they danced around in the middle of the kitchen floor for some time before grounding themselves on the steel oven and vanishing.

I've seen the rare sprit lightening once. At the time I didn't know what I was seeing. I saw it as a child, it was red and like a jellyfish in the sky. I was only 4 so I called it sore lightening because it was red like a sore. As an adult I learned I had seen sprit lightening.

His amazing hair unnerves me.

There was that poor fire watcher/state park guy in the Guinness Book with something ridiculous like 8 lightning strikes. I saw him interviewed once, a surprisingly laid back dude. I suppose being struck by lightning puts everything into perspective. 😳

Wish you all would label compilation videos somewhere. There's really no reason not to say it's a compilation in the details at the very least

Man, that hair grew back quick😂

I remember being floored by that "lightning is five times hotter than the surface of the sun" fact when I was younger. Now that I'm older, I know it's because the surface of the sun is weirdly cool compared to its corona (and the interior, obviously).

Green lighting is awesome to see. I saw green lightning this year. It never came down to the ground, just stayed zapping around in the lower clouds. I've read that it's rare to see it, so I'm lucky I guess I get to see them sometimes.

My dad has one of those scars. It always scared me as a kid. I had like this instinctual fear of its appearance.

Pre-covid, Michael looks like punk rock, and 2024 Michael looks like death metal!

I cracked up as badly as his voice when he said gee whiz.

This video was very shocking

I just managed to capture a video of ball lightning last month, totally by accident , was the craziest thing, was moving against the wind through an oak tree across the street from me , right after a bad thunderstorm, in fact thats why I was outside filming ,trying to capture how fast the clouds were moving

Someone survived 7 lightning strikes? I like my odds.

"Hey, guys, check this ou-" **KERZAP**

I would have assumed that superbolts are the way they are precisely because lightning in those circumstances is rare. When charge builds up, it needs to eventually release. When there is a weak insulator between the two collections of charge, it breaks often and weakly. When there is a strong insulator, I would assume it breaks rarely and thus much more intensely. Basically the idea would be that it takes a lot of built up energy before it's able to establish a path for charges, but once that path is established it can release everything.

I thought this video came out months ago. I vividly remember watching this

Damn, that is a very young Hank Green.

The day my father died, I was waiting for the ambulance ouside of the house. It happened during an intense thunderstorm, and I saw a lighting strike about 5 meters away from me.

Fire.

There is an old abandoned iron mine in a mountain near me which is famous for "UFOs" but it's actually just ball lightning it's very common in the area because of the iron deposits

Why can't we use lighting to charge capacitors

Wow, lightning is so strong it pulled Michael's hair further outwards

Laser guided lightning, I would like two please.

I’ve heard of all of those ! first read about ball lightning 😮 1973’ !! On a Ashton Scholastic info sheet at school!! In nz I never personally ,saw lightening forked or cloud to ground, till only less than ten years ago! Here in NZ used to be cloud 🌧 to cloud

The lightning nut is in Catatumbo.

This is some shocking information

All humankind and all aliens couldn’t put humpty together again

Ball lighting is fun.

Oh great Lazer Lighting Gunz. Just what we did need and no one asked for. Thanks Guys.

A ball lightning strike hit a stove in Albuquerque New Mexico, and apparently it looked like a big huge ball of light that made the entire floor shake when it grounded through the stove.

I'm disappointed in the apparently short lifespan of ball lightning. That was my best explanation for a UFO sighting I had in my teens. Late on a summer's night I spotted a bright, blue-white light in the distance off to the west (towards Niagara Falls from my perspective). The light persisted, seemingly remaining unmoving in the same position, for many minutes, at least 20 to 30 minutes. It finally dropped rapidly to the right (North) nearly to the horizon and then shot off at an upwards angle at high speed in the same direction. If you have a good explanation for this, I would LOVE to hear it! By the way, I do have a witness who could testify that I was not dreaming this.

The SMOKE ⚡🌋

Imagine if super lightning leads us to understand what dark matter is. And imagine how many astrophysicists would be quietly annoyed by that.

When i was sitting in philosophy class taking an exam, I felt like I got struck by lightning. If the ocean is heating up so fast, that means all the stuff on the bottom of it is dead or dying. That seams pretty pressing, I think. What could be done about that?

You missed black lightning which is radioactive. Hello Mcfly!!

The only reason my wife let us get a dishwasher was because of your previous videos. Thank you so much I hate doing dihes😂