Hello and welcome back. If you are listening, thank you for coming on this Atlas

Obscura Advent journey, this journey through space and Earth and coming up next week

animals and finally humans. It's day seven of our countdown and day two of what I am

calling Life on Earth Week.

Yesterday, we heard about all the near extinction events

that shaped our world and all of the life on it.

Today, we're going to go to a place that holds an ingredient to life itself.

Early Earth before life emerged was this pretty rough place and it really barely

had the chemical ingredients necessary to even produce life.

But one key component, Q Mary Shelley, may have been lightning.

As great lightning storms hit the mountains and the rocks,

they released phosphorus, the chemical backbone of all life.

So today, we go to a rather extreme place on earth, this small area of Venezuela where

lightning is king. Join me on a visit to the Ray-Lampago, the northwest corner of Venezuela.

It's where the Catatumbo River meets Lake Mericibo.

They are above the lake, streaks of lightning shock the sky.

From a distance, the lightning is completely Streaks of lightning shock the sky.

From a distance, the lightning is completely silent,

but out there on the lake in the thick of it.

The atmosphere rumbles and thunder crashes. And it happens like this almost every single night. This

phenomena, this storm has been happening here for as long as people can remember. I'm Doolan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today we're joined by nature guide, author, and photographer Alan Heighton to talk about the

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