Thunderbolts and lightning (very very frightening)

The cause of lightning has been strangely elusive.

Oh, in the broadest-brush terms, we've understood it for a while.  The rapidly-rising column of air in a cumulonimbus cloud induces charge separation, resulting in an electric potential difference between the ground and the air.  At a potential of about three megavolts per meter, the dielectric strength of damp air is exceeded -- the maximum voltage it can withstand without the molecules ionizing, and becoming conductive to electrical current.  This creates a moving channel of ionized air called a stepped leader.  When the leader reaches the ground, the overall resistance between the ground and the cloud drops dramatically, and discharge occurs, called the return stroke.  This releases between two hundred megajoules and seven gigajoules of energy in a fraction of a second, heating the air column to around thirty thousand degrees Celsius -- five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

That's the origin of both the flash of light and the shock wave in the air that we hear as thunder.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Maxime Raynal from France, Port and lighthouse overnight storm with lightning in Port-la-Nouvelle, CC BY 2.0]

The problem is, there was no consensus on what exactly caused the very first step -- the charge separation in the cloud that triggers the voltage difference.  Some scientists believed that it was friction between the air and the updrafting raindrops (and hail) characteristic of a thundercloud, similar to the way you can induce a static charge on a balloon by rubbing it against your shirt.  But experiments weren't able to confirm that, and most places you look, you'll see words like "still being investigated" and "uncertain at best" and "poorly understood process."

Until now.

A team of scientists led by Victor Pasko of Pennsylvania State University have shown that the initiation of lightning is caused by a literal perfect storm of conditions.  They found that free "seed" electrons, knocked loose by cosmic rays, are accelerating into the rapidly-rising air column at "relativistic" speeds -- i.e., a significant fraction of the speed of light -- and then ram into nitrogen and oxygen atoms.  These collisions trigger a shower of additional electrons, causing an avalanche, which is then swept upward into the upper parts of the cloud.

This is what causes the charge separation, the voltage difference between top and bottom, and the eventual discharge we see as lightning.

It also produces electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays, something that had been observed but never explained.

"By simulating conditions with our model that replicated the conditions observed in the field, we offered a complete explanation for the X-rays and radio emissions that are present within thunderclouds," Pasko said.  "We demonstrated how electrons, accelerated by strong electric fields in thunderclouds, produce X-rays as they collide with air molecules like nitrogen and oxygen, and create an avalanche of electrons that produce high-energy photons that initiate lightning...  [T]he high-energy X-rays produced by relativistic electron avalanches generate new seed electrons driven by the photoelectric effect in air, rapidly amplifying these avalanches.  In addition to being produced in very compact volumes, this runaway chain reaction can occur with highly variable strength, often leading to detectable levels of X-rays, while accompanied by very weak optical and radio emissions.  This explains why these gamma-ray flashes can emerge from source regions that appear optically dim and radio silent."

There's still a lot left to explain, however.  Also this week, a paper came out of Arizona State University about the astonishing "megaflash" that occurred in October 2017, where a single lightning bolt traveled over eight hundred kilometers -- from eastern Texas all the way to Kansas City.  Even though the megaflash dropped some cloud-to-ground leaders along the way, it didn't discharge completely until the very end.  Megaflashes are rare, but what conditions could lead to a main stepped leader (and the corresponding return stroke) extending that far before grounding are unknown.

So like with all good science, the new research answers some questions and raises others.  Here in upstate New York we're in thunderstorm season, and while we don't get the crazy storms they see in the southeast and midwest, we've had some powerful ones this summer.  I've always liked a good storm, as long as the lightning stays away from my house.  A friend of ours had his house struck by lightning a few years ago and it fried his electrical system (including his computer) -- something that leads me to unplug my laptop and router as soon as I hear rumbling.

Even if the mechanisms of lightning are now less mysterious, it's still just as dangerous.  Very very frightening, as Freddie Mercury observed.

****************************************

Lightning rod

In 1904, biologist Joseph Grinnell formulated what has since become known as the Competitive Exclusion Principle: if two species overlap in their niches, the degree of overlap correlates to the degree of competition between them.  If the competition becomes too high, eventually one of them is outcompeted and dies out.

Contrary to the "Nature is red in tooth and claw" view of the natural world, however, many species solve the problem of competitive exclusion in remarkable peaceable ways.  Some partition the habitat -- for example, species of insect-eating warblers in my part of the world avoid competing for food by splitting up where they forage, with some species mostly staying in the treetops, others in the the forest midstory or undergrowth.  Elaborate cooperative strategies are also remarkably common -- witness lichens, which are a symbiotic pairing of an algae species and a fungus, where the fungus gives the algae housing, and the algae photosynthesizes and donates some of the nutrients to its host.

So despite how it's often characterized, nature doesn't always land on the violent solution.

Sometimes, though...

There's a rain forest tree found in Panama called the almendro (Dipteryx oleifera).  It's in the bean family, Fabaceae, which you can tell if you look at its pinnately-compound leaves and showy flowers:

It can get up to 55 meters tall, which is a necessity in the rain forest.  Dense patches of rain forest have such a thick covering of leaves that only two percent of the incident sunlight reaches the forest floor.  Understory plants have evolved to cope with the perpetual twilight -- this is one of the reasons why rain forest plants often have very dark green leaves.  The density of pigments allows them to trap every photon of light they manage to receive.

Trees, though, compete by elbowing each other out of the way, trying to grow as tall as possible so as to access light, and in the process, shade out the abundant competition.  But not only do rain forest trees have to worry about nearby trees, they also have to deal with lianas, vining species that twine up tree trunks and drape themselves over the canopy, hitching a ride on their taller, sturdier neighbors, and shading them out in the process.

Well, the almendro has evolved a strategy for dealing with all of that at once.

A study this week in New Phytologist looked at a peculiar pattern that ecologist Evan Gora, of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, had noticed: almendros seemed to have an unusually high likelihood of being struck by lightning, but almost never sustained any significant damage from it.  Well, after a five-year study, Gora and his collaborators found that almendros that were struck usually just lost some leaves and small branches, while other species sustained significant damage, with 64% of the struck trees dying within two years.

Not only that, but the lightning strikes completely wipe out any lianas.  Almendros that were hit by lightning not only recovered quickly, they had their tangle of vines blown to smithereens.  And neighboring trees that were jolted by the strike -- through sparks jumping from the almendro -- often died, too, freeing up more living room.

The data shows that living near an almendro raises a neighboring tree's likelihood of being killed by a lightning strike by 48%.  "Any tree that gets close," Gora said, "eventually gets electrocuted."

How the almendro has managed to evolve into a natural lightning rod is uncertain, but it has been found that the cells in its wood have wider channels for water transport, making the wood more electrically conductive.  Most of the damage to trees from lightning strikes occurs because internal resistance causes the electrical energy to dissipate as heat, making the sap boil and triggering the trunk to explode.  Lowering the electrical resistance allows the current to pass through the trunk and safely into the ground with less heating.  This means that not only does the almendro not suffer as much damage, it actually attracts lightning -- electrical discharges tend to follow the path of least resistance.

So even if sometimes the natural world does evolve nice, friendly, cooperative solutions to the problems of survival, sometimes it... doesn't.  Even the trees don't always.  Like the Ents and Huorns from Tolkien's Fangorn Forest, sometimes the trees deal with their enemies by taking matters into their own... um... branches.

Think about that next time you're going for a nice stroll in the woods.

****************************************

Frozen lightning

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will recognize the name Andrew Butters, my fellow blogger over at the wonderful Potato Chip Math.  Andrew and I are so much alike that mutual friends suspect we were twins separated at birth.  Besides both being bloggers, we are both novelists, were both physics majors (degrees we completed despite the fact that, to put it bluntly, we both kind of sucked at it), both have seriously demented senses of humor, and both love weird and arcane science stuff.

It's this last commonality that has earned Andrew mention in Skeptophilia more than once, because he frequently passes along science news articles he runs across, and a good many of these have ended up here.  And today I once again give him my tip o' the hat for sending me a link to a story from Science about some recent research on the topic of fulgurites.

What's a fulgurite, you might ask?  The -ite ending might clue you in to surmise correctly that we're talking about some sort of mineral.  Fulgurite isn't just some ordinary garden-variety rock, though.  Fulgurites are formed when lightning strikes the ground, discharging into soil that has a high mineral (and low organic matter) content.  When this occurs, an electrical potential difference of as much as a hundred million volts is bridged.

This is what physicists call "a hell of a big short circuit."  Lightning releases all the energy stored in that potential in a fraction of a second.  The column of air through which the current passes superheats, generating the light flash and booming shock wave we associate with a nearby strike.

But it doesn't expend all its stored energy on its passage through the air.  As the current dissipates in the ground, it generates so much heat that it melts the minerals in the soil, when then fuse together into a twisted tube of glass that charts the pattern the lightning bolt took once it struck.

Fulgurites [Image licensed under the Creative Commons John Alan Elson, Fulgsdcrb, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The topic comes up because the article Andrew sent me a couple of days ago is about a geologist, Jonathan Castro, at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, who came up with the novel idea of using fulgurites to chart ancient climate trends.  Fulgurites are often found near mountaintops -- the peak of Mount Shasta, for example, is pitted with them, the rock blackened and scarred from the hundreds of hits the mountain has taken.  Castro found that when a fulgurite forms, it evaporates all the water in the glass chunk formed; the fulgurite then begins to take up water again at a slow and steady rate, so the water content in the pores of the glass can give you a good idea of when it formed.

Not only does this serve to date lightning strike frequency -- and thus give data about the paleoclimate -- it also can be used to time the advance and retreat of glaciers.  A strike onto a thick layer of ice would cause shock cracks and melting, but in short order there'd be no trace left of it.  Once the glacier retreats and exposes bare rock surfaces, though, any strikes would cause the formation of long-lasting fulgurites.

So, fossilized frozen lightning.

Reading about this sort of thing always makes me realize something I never thought about during the years of my abortive attempt to launch a career in scientific research.  Research depends not only on technical know-how and a solid background in your subject, it depends hugely on creativity -- the capacity for coming up with a way of tackling the question at hand in a novel way.  When I read about Castro's use of fulgurites to date the movement of glaciers, my first thought was, "I never would have thought of doing that."  It's not just that I'm not a geologist -- and actually, because of growing up around my rockhound dad, I knew about fulgurites before reading the article -- I just can't imagine being scientifically creative enough to put fulgurites together with glaciers together with water uptake rates by glass and come up with a new lens on the climate ten-thousand-odd years ago.

But I have the utmost respect for anyone whose brain does work that way.  When Andrew sent me the link, my response was, "Okay, that is just cool."  And it once more points at something I've said many times before; if you're interested in science -- even if you were kind of a washout as a physics student -- you'll never, ever be bored.

*********************************************

If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Apocalypse whenever

I have an update for those of you who are worried about when the world is going to end, or civilization is going to fall, which honestly would happen anyhow if the world ended.

This update comes from sources that conveniently ignore the fact that previous predictions of the world's end have had a 100% failure rate.  Every time we're told that an asteroid is going to end it all, or the Rapture is going to happen, or the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons are going to run roughshod over the populace, what happens is...

... nothing.  Civilization, or what passes for it these days, just keeps bumbling along as usual.  There are no death comets, no killer plagues, no Second Comings of Deities.  All of which I find reassuring but at the same time vaguely disappointing, because I live in the middle of rural upstate New York and we could really use some excitement around here most days.

Of course, a batting average of zero isn't enough to discourage these folks.  This time it's gonna happen, cross our hearts and hope to die in horrible agony when the Earth explodes.

First, we have the Nibiru cadre, who have been predicting the arrival of Nibiru for decades, kind of like what happened in Waiting for Guffman but not nearly as funny.  This time, though, we can say for sure that Nibiru is approaching because there's going to be a "Blood Moon" (better known to those of us who aren't insane as a lunar eclipse).  Yes, I know that lunar eclipses happen every year, but this one is different.  Don't ask me how.

According to an article in Express, the fabled tenth planet is due to arrive any time now, and has been captured in a video.  Not a NASA video, mind you.  A video taken by an anonymous YouTube subscriber, which as we all know is a highly reliable source of scientific research.

"And now," writes the author of the article, Jon Austin, "conspiracy theorists have somehow tied it in with the infamous blood moon events of a year ago that appears [sic] to be happening again."

What?  Those events of last year wherein nothing happened?  Ah, yes, I remember thinking at the time, "Heaven help us all if this happens again!  Scariest non-events I've ever seen!"

According to this bizarre view of how the world in general, and astronomy in particular, works, the "blood moons" aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.  Nope.  The Nibiroonies have "now tried to tie together the two myths and even claim it is the shadow of Nibiru causing the blood moons."

Because it's not like if there was a planet near enough, and big enough, to cast a giant shadow over the moon, NASA would notice it, or anything.

Then we have the revelation that Obama and his evil henchmen are planning a scheme to destroy America and take down other major world governments along with it.  According to the site What Does It Mean?, the president and his collaborators have a Cunning Plan to unleash upon us, despite the fact that the guy only has five months left in office, so if he really has been intending to destroy the United States, he's gotten off to an awfully slow start.

But no, the article says, he's palling up with Hillary Clinton, who apparently rivals Obama himself for being the embodiment of pure evil.  And they've teamed up with the people who run Google for a conspiracy trifecta to accomplish the following:

1.) [D]isabling of advertisements on all websites critical of the Obama-Clinton regime, including the globally popular Antiwar.com, in order to destroy them.

2.) Deleting Donald Trump from the search list of candidates running for the US presidency. 

3.) Developing and employing a filter so that the name Donald Trump won’t even show up on anyone’s computer device or smart phone.

4.) Hiding in their search results information relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and the massive numbers of suspicions deaths associated with her.

5.) Being supported in their hiding Hillary Clinton health information by the New York Times, with one of their insiders admitting what they’re doing.

Myself, I would be thrilled if something would prevent my ever having to look at a photograph of Donald Trump again.  If that's what the conspiracy's about, I'm all for it.

And as evidence for all of this, they cite...

... InfoWars.  Yes, Alex Jones, who despite having a screw loose is still considered by some to have inside information about the plots that are running rampant in our government, but which never seem to accomplish a damn thing.

It's sort of like the "Obama's coming for your guns" thing you hear all the time from the far-right.  I mean, dude had eight years to take all our guns, and as a nation we're still as heavily armed as ever.  And the contentions that Obama's a radical Muslim.  Really?  He drinks beer, eats bacon, doesn't fast during Ramadan, and supports LGBT rights.  If the guy is a Muslim, he's the worst Muslim ever.

Last, we've got the weird coincidence of three separate lightning strikes that killed hundreds of reindeer (in Norway) and cattle (in the US), and which is said to be HAARP gearing up for a major strike on the populated places of the earth.  Add this to the fact that there's a hurricane in Florida as we speak, because that's not common or anything.  HAARP has done all this as a sort of test run, and next thing we know, there'll be earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and the works, and civilization will have no other choice besides giving up and collapsing.

What's funniest about all of this is that just last week, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, which now owns HAARP, had an open house last week wherein they invited anyone with questions or suspicions to stop by for a tour of the place so they can see what it actually does, which is to study high-altitude atmospheric phenomena.  I coulda told them this strategy wouldn't work; if you demonstrate conclusively to the conspiracy theorists that HAARP was a harmless scientific study facility, they will either (1) tell you that the real HAARP had been moved elsewhere, or (2) that you are only saying this because you are under the influence of a mind-control beam, which is one of the things HAARP is supposedly able to do.  So you can't win.  These are people who think a lack of evidence is evidence.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Three ways in which we will almost certainly not be meeting the fall of civilization as we know it.  It's kind of anticlimactic, really.  We're moving into autumn, here in the northeast.  School's starting, the days are getting shorter, and we soon will be battening down the hatches for cold weather.  Myself, I think an apocalypse would be a nice change of pace.  I'm not in favor of wholesale destruction, mind you, but a minor catastrophe or two would go a long way toward alleviating the monotony.

A linguistic analysis of the Antichrist

Despite the fact that I scour the internet daily for weird news, sometimes I miss good ones.   I try not to fret about these oversights, however -- because one characteristic of woo-woos is that they never, ever let a claim die.  So if I miss a crazy, outlandish story, no worries; it'll be back.

Again and again and again.

One such bizarre claim, that I missed on its first go-round but which is recently repeating its circuit of ultra-religious right wingers (I've seen it posted on Facebook twice in the last week), is a story that contends that Jesus actually revealed the name of the Antichrist in the bible.  Never mind that wackos who are way too fond of the Book of Revelation have tried before to pin that title on various world leaders; Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, the Emperor Nero, and Ronald Reagan, for example, all had their supporters as being Satan's Right-hand Man.  (As for Reagan, his candidacy came about when someone noticed that his first, middle, and last names all had six letters -- 666, get it?  But my vote goes for Pope Benedict, who looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.  I mean, can't you just picture him throwing lightning from his fingertips, and vaporizing protesters who support marriage equality, all the while cackling maniacally?)

But they're not the ones that the End Times crowd are after these days.  The whole thing apparently started with a 2009 YouTube video that claimed that the biblical passage "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from the heavens" (Luke 10:18) was actually encoding the real name of the Antichrist.  Here's the excerpt that's been making the rounds recently:

When I started doing a little research, I found the Greek word for 'lightning' is 'astrape,' and the Hebrew equivalent is 'baraq.'  I thought that was fascinating...  And I wondered what the word 'heights’ is, and I looked it up in the dictionary, and it’s 'bamah...'  If spoken by a Jewish rabbi today, influenced by the poetry of Isaiah, he would say these words in Hebrew … 'I saw Satan as Baraq Ubamah.'

 Righty-o.  Obama is the Antichrist.  Not that we have any kind of political agenda here, of course.

The only problem is, don't use a linguistic argument when there are lots of linguists around who are smarter than you are.  An expert in Hebrew and Aramaic, Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, weighed in on the contention in an article in Salon, and he said that there are several problems with it.  First, Ehrenkrantz says, the Hebrew root "bamah" doesn't mean "heights" as in "heavens," it means "heights" as in "hills."  Sticking a "u-" prefix on the word is consistent with Hebrew morphology, but doing that alters stops to continuants -- in this case, changing the /b/ to a /v/.  So, it would be "uvamah," not "ubamah."  And even so, the "u-" doesn't mean "from," it means "and."  So "baraq uvamah" means "lightning and hills."

The actual phrase "from the heavens," Ehrenkrantz says, should be "min ha-shamayim."  So the passage "lightning from the heavens" would be "baraq min ha-shamayim."  Which doesn't sound like much of anything except Hebrew.

Couple that with the fact that Obama's first name, Barack, does come from an Aramaic root, but it isn't "baraq," it's "barak," which means "blessing."  It's a cognate to the more common name Baruch.  So, if you're really trying to pull some apocalyptic linguistic analysis on the president's name, you would probably be more justified in concluding that Obama was sent to Earth by god as a blessing, and is undoubtedly going to kick some satanic ass while he's here.

Because the problem with twiddling around with language is that two can always play that game.  Linguistic coincidences and peculiarities in word root structure abound.  So let's have some fun, okay?  Let's start with the Hebrew word "rosh," which means "head, chief, or leader."  ("Rosh Hashanah" means "head of the year.")  And we all know the Latin word "limbo," the ablative form of "limbus," meaning "the edge, or outer circle, of hell."  So:  "the chieftain of the outer reaches of hell" would be "Rosh Limbo."

Hey, maybe this stuff works, after all.