Curiosity 6 of 10
6. About 44 lightning strikes per second on the planet
NASA satellites have shown that there are, on average, about 44 lightning strikes per second on Earth, more than 1 billion per year. Most occur over the continents and near the Equator.
The place with the most lightning in the world
The numbers come from sensors on satellites that record the flashes seen from space, by day and by night. They count both lightning inside the clouds and the bolts that reach the ground, which are the minority.
Tropical regions, with plenty of heat and humidity, concentrate the storms. The record holder is Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, where storms form on many nights of the year, where mountain winds meet the warm, humid air over the lake.
A lightning bolt heats the air along its path to about 30,000 °C in a fraction of a second, hotter than the surface of the Sun. The air suddenly expands and produces the shock wave we hear as thunder.
Since light arrives almost instantly and sound travels about 340 meters per second, you can estimate the distance of a storm: every 3 seconds between the flash and the thunder equals roughly 1 kilometer.
Did you know? Brazil is among the countries with the most lightning strikes in the world, with tens of millions of discharges per year, according to the Atmospheric Electricity Group of INPE.
