Lightning Is A Mystery Element

Do you recall being told that lightening does not strike the same place twice? The myth is inaccurate. Lightening is not a brain. It does not have a memory. At 50,000 feet, there is no way to tell if lightning will strike a satellite dish or a tree. Lightning doesn’t know what it’s going to contact until the last 50 to 100 feet from the ground. An object can be struck more than once. The shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida has been hit by lightning more than once in the same day during storms. The Empire State Building in New York has seen its share of lightning strikes as well. It has been said to have been struck by lightning at least 25 times a year (WeatherImagery,

They are known as convective storms. Cell thunderstorms form in regions where limited vertical wind shear is present. The winds direction or speeds do not abruptly change rapidly. Ordinary storms develop and mature through a cycle, as cell thunderstorms don’t have this development. Different conditions vary from warm air rising, random turbulent eddies and terrain. These are a few that can be a trigger to these more impactful storms.

An electric current exists when there is a net flow of charge through a given area. Electrons flow from the negatively charged region to the positively charged region. This is usually accomplished by using an electrical conductor which allows the electrons to pass freely through the material (Serway, et al. 709). This flow of electrons can generate heat when collisions between the molecules and electrons occur. These collisions then cause the molecules to break apart thus releasing heat. Some common examples of electrical energy are lightning, static electricity, and wiring outlets (Coleman, et al. 82). For the wildland firefighter, lightning is probably the

Charges that build up as static electricity on an object do not stay there forever. Electrons like to move, returning to the object to its neutral state. When a negatively charged object and a positively charged object come together, electrons transfer until both objects have an equal charge. The loss of static electricity as electric charges transfer is called static discharge. Normally, a static discharge creates a spark. When electrons transfer between objects they heat the air around the path until it glows, which is the spark we see.

Benjamin Franklin was a great inventor, scientist, and political leader. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1709 as the fifteenth child in his family out of the vast number of seventeen! As he grew older, he started working in his family's business, which was a soap and candle making shop. Ben hated the work. He hated the awful smell of the melting wax, and he thought dipping candles was the most boring thing to do in the world. After his brother blew up at him for sending stories under a false name to his newspaper, Ben ran away from home. The year was 1723 when Ben reached Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He stayed there for the rest of his life. In 1730, he married his true love, Debora, then started

The kite experiment influenced by the works of other great scientists such as Isaac Newton and Joseph Addison, Franklin wrote his most important scientific work: Experiments and Observations on Electricity. The kite experiment of Benjamin Franklin was to tie a kite with a metal skeleton thread, with its lower end attached to a key. Taking advantage of a thunderstorm, he noted that, trace the comet, electricity is led from the kite to the key, charging outlet. From this, Franklin showed that the clouds were electrically charged and lightning we see are these electrical discharges. Among the inventions of Benjamin Franklin is the lightning conductor, produced from the just mentioned discovery. The lightning rod installed quickly across the country and was a commercial success

“ ‘I’m supposed to go to the Underworld and confront the Lord of the Dead.’...’Find the most powerful weapon in the universe.’...’And get it back to Olympus before the summer solstice in ten days.’ “ The Lightning Thief is a book in which Percy Jackson, the hero, and his friends Annabeth and Grover, must undertake a quest to reclaim Zeus’s master bolt from Hades. “The Hero’s Journey” is a pattern of stages that many heroes experience. Throughout Percy’s quest, the archetype of “The Hero’s Journey” is followed. A few stages of “The Hero’s Journey” that Percy undergoes are The Ordinary World, The Supreme Ordeal, and Confronting the Father.

Benjamin’s experiment with his kite and key helped him to understand lightning. “Mid-eighteenth century scientists and inventors considered electricity to be Franklin’s most remarkable area of investigation and discovery” (Mary Bellis). Franklin’s experiments helped him to create the lightning rod. The lightning rod was a rod that was attached to the highest point of a house or building. The rod would have a wire attached to it that would run all the way to the ground. Lightning would strike the rod and travel along the wire into the ground. The wire connected to the ground absorbed the lightning, preventing the lightning from hitting the house or building. The lightning rod would prevent fires and electrocution. One of Benjamin Franklin’s less known

So the warm moist air creates clouds of rain and thunderstorm. Adding to that winds with different speed going in different directions assisting in expanding these great clouds of rain and thunderstorm. With

He began his work on what was thought of as the electrical phenomenon in 1746, and insisted that electricity was no different to "vitreous" electricity. Franklin was the first to label them as positive and negative, as well as discovering the principal of conservation of charge. Franklin published a proposal for an experiment in 1750, where he intended to prove that lightning was electricity by flying a kite in a storm. Many scientists tested this, some electrocuted in the process, and confirmed Franklin's

Lightning is basically a large amount of static electricity. An individual can create a small amount of “lightning” by rubbing a balloon with carpet which produces a relatively small amount of static electricity. Lightning is formed when charged particles in a cloud become polarized and separate significantly with positive charges moving up and negative charges moving

A tornado is a very complex and complicated type of outdoor vacuum. The various types of tornadoes are caused when a great size of particles become part of cloud and start releasing heat rapidly which makes it rise and create a vacuum underneath it. The air that quickly goes into the vacuum creates the center of the tornado or the tornadoes vortex. Then when the air temperature changes it causes a sudden drop in the air pressure. When the heat is being released in the vacuum it causes precipitation. The rain released is equal to the amount of heat absorbed.

There is one instance that lightning strikes ceased to occur from January to March 2010 that temporarily raised fears of the phenomenon being extinguished permanently but was later found out that it was drought that caused it. Humidity in a sense may have played a vital role in the occurrence but scientists lately say that maybe it’s the region’s wind patterns and unique topography that contribute to the special phenomenon. They say that when warm winds, trapped by the surrounding mountains in Lake Maracaibo, collides with cool air coming down from the Andes mountains, they are forced to condense, thus creating thunderclouds.

In 1752 Franklin devised another experiment to test if lighting has an electrical charge. He flied a kite carrying a pointed wire in a thunderstorm and attempted to test his theory that atmospheric lightning is an electrical phenomenon similar to the spark produced by an electrical frictional machine (Bruno 406). To

     Have you ever heard of a solar flare? A solar flare exists after a sunspot has existed for a long time and the magnetic lines of force usually become jumbled. As a result of this jumbling, magnetic energy is stored in the Corona (region of atmosphere above the chromosphere). The energy may be released in a spectacular discharge, which is a solar flare. A solar flare can be as wide as 367,000 miles and as high 500,000 miles out into space. A solar flare is nothing more than helium erupting from the sun like a volcano.