A bolt of lightning that stretched nearly 500 miles across three U.S. states has set a world record for longest flash.
A thunderstorm complex was found to contain the longest single flash that covered a horizontal distance on record, at around 768 kilometers across parts of the southern United States on April 29, 2020.World Meteorological OrganizationAlso in 2020, a single lightning flash over Uruguay and northern Argentina lasted 17.1 seconds, nipping the old time record of 16.7 seconds.
Normally lightning doesn’t stretch farther than 10 miles and lasts less than a second, said Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, who is the chief of records confirmation for the meteorological organization.Both were cloud-to-cloud, several thousand feet above the ground, so no one was in danger, he said.
These records, which are not linked to climate change, were spotted and confirmed thanks to new satellite tracking technology. Both regions are two of the few places in the world prone to the type of intense storms that can produce what are called