The planet where it rains diamonds
BBC Earth Podcast
Jenkins Laura
4.6 • 611 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2019
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ever wondered what it would be like to fly into the heart of a storm? For the pilots of the 53d Weather Reconnaissance Squadron it’s just another day on the job monitoring and collecting data on weather systems. These ‘Hurricane Hunters’ share what it’s really like when you reach the eye of a storm. But it’s not just weather on Earth that captures our imagination; we’re travelling about 63 light years from our world to experience weather on other planets. Wind speeds of 5,400mph, dust storms and a Giant Red Spot which has raged on uninterrupted for the last 400 years. Buckle up, we’re in for a bumpy, but thrilling, ride.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from BBC Studios. |
| 0:04.0 | A commercial subsidiary of the BBC. |
| 0:10.0 | Welcome to the BBC Earth podcast. |
| 0:27.6 | The podcast that's battling down the hatches and prepping for the storm. |
| 0:36.6 | Today it's all about the weather. |
| 0:38.3 | Good weather, bad weather, weird weather. |
| 0:43.3 | And our first port of cool is the place which has more lightning storms than anywhere else on the planet. |
| 0:50.3 | It's in Venezuela, in South America, where the Catatumbo River empties into the huge expanse of Lake Maracaibo. |
| 1:01.4 | The lightning storms there can go on for up to 10 hours, with up to 280 lightning strikes per hour. |
| 1:09.3 | It's got a Guinness World record and everything. |
| 1:11.6 | The lightning rates in there can go up to completely uncomprehensible amounts. I've seen storms |
| 1:16.0 | that had five or six lightning strikes every second, which is at some point quite hard to watch |
| 1:22.5 | because your eyes don't really know how to interpret what you're seeing right now. And obviously |
| 1:26.7 | if that storm is on top of you, |
| 1:28.3 | you're going to get completely blasted by rain, |
| 1:30.3 | 200, 300 liters a square meter in two hours maybe. |
| 1:34.3 | If storms are your thing, |
| 1:36.3 | then Catatumbo is the place to be. |
| 1:39.3 | I'm a storm photographer, so this is obviously my dream place, you know. My name is Jonas Piontec. I'm a from photographer, so this is obviously my dream place, you know. |
| 1:50.0 | My name is Jonas Piontek. I'm actually a photographer and a storm chaser from Germany. |
| 1:54.0 | Somebody posted an article about it, and I saw it, and I was obviously like, oh damn, I need to go to that place that looks absolutely epic. |
| 2:03.6 | When I went there for the first time, I didn't really know what to expect. And basically I arrived there and I met that guy, his name is Alan, and he's the owner of the camp and he does the tours out there. |
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