'One Mississippi...' How Lightning Shapes The Climate

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

When lightning strikes a giant tree in the tropical rainforest, there's usually no fire, no blackened crater — you might not even notice any damage. But come back months later, as Evan Gora does, and you may find that tree and dozens around it dead. Gora, a forest ecologist who studies lightning in tropical forests, says we are just beginning to understand how lightning actually behaves in these forests, and what its implications are for climate change. On today's episode, Evan Gora tells Aaron Scott about shocking discoveries in lightning research, and why Evan has developed a healthy respect for the hazards it poses – both to individual researchers and to the forests that life on Earth depends on.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:05.6	Hey there, short waivers, Erin Scott here and today we're going to start off with a quick lightning round.
0:12.0	Literally, we're going to talk about lightning.
0:16.0	Yeah, so lightning is just a big static shock.
0:19.0	So it's essentially the same process that happens when you reach out to touch a doorknob.
0:24.0	But instead of that little bolt traveling a couple millimeters, it travels kilometers.
0:29.0	Evan Gore is a forest ecologist who studies lightning.
0:32.0	And with the additional distance comes a much greater amount of power.
0:36.0	So a lightning strike is just this static shock surface and it carries tens of thousands of bolts and tens of thousands of amps in a channel that's about the size of your finger.
0:44.0	And that whole idea that you can figure out how far away lightning is by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder clap.
0:52.0	Yeah, that's all true.
0:54.0	You just got to make sure that you're up on the speed of sound.
0:57.0	When a lightning strike happens, about five seconds to a mile.
1:00.0	So you see the flash start counting when the boom gets to you.
1:03.0	You know how close it was.
1:05.0	Stop. I got to stop you right there because I was raised that it's one second per mile.
1:10.0	So I've basically been way overestimating how far away lightning is.
1:14.0	So I've been in much greater risk than for sure.
1:17.0	We're sure.
1:18.0	We're sure.
1:19.0	If it's under a second, you are very close.
1:23.0	So yeah, it's a funny.
	...

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