Lightning

Historic planetary instability and catastrophe. Evidence for electrical scarring on planets and moons. Electrical events in today's solar system. Electric Earth.

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meemoe_uk
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Re: sulfur

Unread post by meemoe_uk » Tue Jan 29, 2013 11:28 pm

Well I've been catching up of the recent work of Eric Learner. He's produced fusion reactions from electric arcs using voltages of about 30kV. Lightning strikes have voltages around 10MV to 10GV. This is about 300 to 300000 times as much voltage as has been evidenced to be the minimum necessary for nuclear fusion. Therefore this make me more confident that lightning is a significant producer of sulfur and possibly many elements in nature.

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reka
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Limestone and Lightning

Unread post by reka » Tue Feb 05, 2013 8:40 am

Sorry that I am such a leyman on this issue but I need to ask a question.


I've been reading about lightning strikes through out the world and have noticed that the most strikes occur in the Republic of the Congo in Africa. I also know that in Florida the Orlando Tampa corridor receives huges amounts of lightning strikes yearly.

What is really interesting is that these 2 areas are also limestone rich, as the state of Florida sits on top of a limestone base.

Does anyone have a theory as to why lightning might be attracted to limestone?
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the ELEMENTS shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up
...But Dmitri Mendeleev didn't establish the periodic table till 1869

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webolife
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Re: Lightning

Unread post by webolife » Thu Feb 07, 2013 4:44 pm

Reka

Regading your signature quote:
The word "elements" can also be taken to mean "foundations" as in earth's crust.
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

kiwi
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Re: Limestone and Lightning

Unread post by kiwi » Thu Feb 07, 2013 5:16 pm

reka wrote:
I've been reading about lightning strikes through out the world and have noticed that the most strikes occur in the Republic of the Congo in Africa. I also know that in Florida the Orlando Tampa corridor receives huges amounts of lightning strikes yearly.

What is really interesting is that these 2 areas are also limestone rich, as the state of Florida sits on top of a limestone base.

Does anyone have a theory as to why lightning might be attracted to limestone?
I watched that a few nights back on a BBC production hosted by David Attenborough called AFRICA (part 2) ... he states each year "up to" 100 Million lightning bolts strike the Forests. There is some great footage of time-lapse Storms discharging, also time-lapsed is some nice footage of the water vapour "twisting" vortex-like from the Jungle canopy upward to a very low 8/8 (total coverage) cloud-base , dozens of them twisting up like mini Water-Spouts ,... incidentally, just prior to that section was an interesting look at a type of Fungi that has an enzyme which allows it too "glow" with its own light, the locals called it "Chimpanzee Fire" ... that also was timelapsed

And of interest also?
The satellite image above shows veils of fine dust lifting off the sands of the Sahara. It is a regular phenomenon that occurs around noon each day. Countless particles of desiccated plankton dust fill the air, forming a giant dust storm many kilometres wide. More than half of this is believed to be from the Bodélé depression, an ancient lakebed in the Sahara. This huge cloud is blown across Africa and after crossing the west coast the dust is drawn upwards high into the sky. It then begins an epic journey across the Atlantic propelled by the prevailing wind. It is estimated 54,000 tons of desert dust flow from Africa to South America every day.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/10 ... ainforest/


http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/ ... eather.htm


Cheers :D

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Re: sulfur

Unread post by allynh » Mon Feb 11, 2013 10:21 am

Check out the discussion in the thread:

Re: Mummified Dinosaurs / electric fossilization...?
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... =90#p20103

The thread talks about all kinds of transmutation events.

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GaryN
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Re: Lightning

Unread post by GaryN » Thu Feb 28, 2013 8:13 pm

Hows about some "Dark Lightning"?

ScienceCasts: Dark Lightning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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GaryN
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Re: Lightning

Unread post by GaryN » Fri Mar 01, 2013 1:16 pm

TERA-Thunderstorm Energetic Radiation Array
•Runaway Breakdown
The runaway breakdown of air occurs when the rate of energy gain experienced by an electron in an electric field exceeds the rate of energy loss through collisions with air molecules. The numerous collisions result in an effective drag force on the electron, which works to slow it down. For subatomic particles like electrons this drag force does not behaves according to our ordinary experience. When you stick your hand outside your car window while driving down the road, you feel a drag force due to the motion of your hand through the air. As you go faster, the drag force increases, and as you slow down the drag force decreases. Electrons, on the other hand, behave differently: when electrons are moving sufficiently fast, the drag force actually decreases the faster the electron goes. As a result, if an electron is moving very fast its drag force can become smaller then the force from the electric field and the electron will run away, continuously gaining energy until it is moving very close to the speed of light. The electric field necessary for runaway breakdown to occur is about 300,000 V/m at sea level and lower at thunderstorm altitudes, a factor of ten lower than the field needed for a conventional breakdown.
The Mysteries of Lightning-by Dr. Joseph Dwyer
http://my.fit.edu/~jdwyer/research.htm
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

Goldminer
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Re: Lightning

Unread post by Goldminer » Sat Mar 02, 2013 9:14 am

GaryN wrote:TERA-Thunderstorm Energetic Radiation Array
•Runaway Breakdown
The runaway breakdown of air occurs when the rate of energy gain experienced by an electron in an electric field exceeds the rate of energy loss through collisions with air molecules. The numerous collisions result in an effective drag force on the electron, which works to slow it down. For subatomic particles like electrons this drag force does not behaves according to our ordinary experience. When you stick your hand outside your car window while driving down the road, you feel a drag force due to the motion of your hand through the air. As you go faster, the drag force increases, and as you slow down the drag force decreases. Electrons, on the other hand, behave differently: when electrons are moving sufficiently fast, the drag force actually decreases the faster the electron goes. As a result, if an electron is moving very fast its drag force can become smaller then the force from the electric field and the electron will run away, continuously gaining energy until it is moving very close to the speed of light. The electric field necessary for runaway breakdown to occur is about 300,000 V/m at sea level and lower at thunderstorm altitudes, a factor of ten lower than the field needed for a conventional breakdown.
The Mysteries of Lightning-by Dr. Joseph Dwyer
http://my.fit.edu/~jdwyer/research.htm
Excellent link, Gary! I didn't see any reference in the article about plasma, but that is what he writes about. The avalanche of relativistic electrons must play a part in the change of plasma glow mode to arc mode, I would guess.
I sense a disturbance in the farce.

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Re: Lightning

Unread post by justcurious » Sun Mar 03, 2013 6:21 pm

Might be worth mentioning another angle on lightning.
Tesla was observing lightning when in Colorado Springs.
His observations, if I remember correctly, contributed to his theory of very low frequency standing waves (Schuman resonance etc) for the wireless transmission of power. If I remember correctly, he had observed or concluded that lightning would appear in waves over very large distances. So maybe these waves might play a role with regards to the level of charge and electric potential found in the clouds and sky.

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GaryN
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Re: Lightning

Unread post by GaryN » Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:54 pm

So if pair production to electron/positron levels is occurring in Earths atmosphere, then is it not likely that in the Suns atmosphere there are much stronger electric fields and sufficient energy levels for proton/antiproton production? Fermi has seen energies up to 4 GeV in flares, but could the energies required for proton production be occurring constantly in smaller but very numerous mini lightnings that are perhaps below the limits of detection of Fermi?
The law of conservation of energy sets a minimum photon energy required for creation of a pair of fermions: this threshold energy must be greater than the total rest energy of the fermions created. To create an electron-positron pair the total energy of the photons must be at least 2mec2 = 2 × 0.511 MeV = 1.022 MeV (me is the mass of one electron and c is the speed of light in vacuum), an energy value that corresponds to soft gamma ray photons. The creation of a much more massive pair, like a proton and antiproton, requires photons with energy of more than 1.88 GeV (hard gamma ray photons).
Then, might helium be a result of a process involving protons and lithium and even more powerful electric fields and acceleration? Getting out of my depth here, time to do some more reading... :D
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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Re: Lightning

Unread post by CuriousCat » Wed Apr 17, 2013 10:04 am

I've been skimming through this thread, although I haven't invested the time to read it properly yet. I do want to add my observations. I live in Colorado and have seen my share of lightning here. I've also been through some impressive storms in Northeast Oklahoma and central Texas. The lightning seemed to be different from place to place. It seemed more frequent in Colorado, but more violent in Oklahoma and Texas. It seems to me, that perhaps the difference in altitude and humidity may have played a role. Does that make sense? Or were the differences just my perception? Central Texas is the only place I recall ever seeing "sheet lightning. That was scary, but impressive.

Cat
Disciple of Bast. Child of Loki.

Morphix
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An "Unearthly answer to lightning" comes closer to the truth

Unread post by Morphix » Fri Oct 04, 2013 11:45 am

This is an article from New Scientist, August 13, 2013. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... k8K_Gt5mSN It is useful for stating that lightning is still an enigma for conventional "rubbing molecules" theories, and on the way to seeing that outer space is the source:

An unearthly answer to the lightning enigma
Lightning is a natural electrical discharge – but scientists are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what triggers it. Renowned Russian physicist Alexandr Gurevich tells Katia Moskvitch about his theory, which really is out of this world

What don't we know about lightning?
The main problem is that we don't know how a thundercloud gets the spark needed to initiate a lightning bolt. The biggest mystery is that the electric field in thunderclouds is not very large. Years of experimental measurements from aeroplanes and air balloons have shown that the field is about 10 times smaller than what is needed to initiate lightning. It is not clear how a lightning bolt is born, but the idea is that something has to "seed" it first.

What do we know about how lightning works?
In 1749 Benjamin Franklin discovered that lightning was an electrical discharge between a thundercloud and Earth. We know that thunderstorms can generate over 100 million volts of electricity, but we also know that this gets applied across a really large space – hundreds of metres. So the resulting electric field, or concentration of electric force, is not actually very big.

It is estimated that Earth gets struck by more than a hundred lightning bolts every second. How is that electric current released?
For lightning to propagate from its point of origin to other locations – the ground, for example – the air, which is normally an insulator, must somehow permit electrical charge to move freely.

The lower part of a thundercloud is negatively charged, and as a storm moves, it causes positively charged particles to gather at ground level. So, as the lightning is triggered, the lower part of the cloud generates a channel of ionised air – or lightning "leader" – that allows electric current to flow freely and transports the negative charge towards positively charged objects, such as trees or buildings. That is when a lightning strike happens. And these currents are huge: they heat the air to about 27,700 °C, roughly four times hotter than the surface of the sun.

What are the main theories about what initiates this process?
A hypothesis explored by many scientists is that lightning is initiated when collisions between ice particles in thunderclouds ionise the air. The ice particles can separate enough electric charge to cause a large electric field and trigger a lightning strike.

Another possibility, which I am working on, is what is known as "electron runaway breakdown". The idea is that there could be another type of electric discharge, a completely new physical phenomenon.

Your theory is that this other type of electric discharge is caused by cosmic rays. How?
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles, mostly protons, born in and accelerated by energetic astrophysical processes, such as supernovae and star collisions. These rays travel across space and strike the upper atmosphere of Earth, producing highly energetic showers of ionised particles, accelerated nearly to the speed of light. We can measure these ionised particles with cosmic ray detectors.

Because cosmic rays produce highly energetic showers, for them to trigger lightning in a storm cloud, the cloud's initial electric field does not have to be very big.

So what do you think happens when cosmic rays encounter a thunderstorm?
Our theory is that when these high-energy particles happen to go through a thundercloud, they ionise the air inside it and create a region with a lot of free electrons, which collide with atoms in the air and produce even more electrons: that is a runaway breakdown.

In this case, the initial distribution of electricity in the storm cloud can be across a vast amount of space – several hundred metres or even kilometres. That is because once runaway breakdown is triggered, the cascade of high-energy particles quickly covers large distances. The result is the creation of this very large amount of negatively charged particles, exactly what is supposed to trigger the spark that initiates a lightning bolt. In principle, this is what is happening in thunderclouds, but nobody has yet proved it directly in experiments.

You first introduced this idea two decades ago. What new evidence do you have now?
The results of numerical calculations have demonstrated that this runaway electron breakdown exists. But the theory is always related to some idealised model. In a real thunderstorm, conditions such as wind and electric field vary in space and time; it is incredibly difficult to prove the hypothesis experimentally. So we decided to take a look at radio pulses that are produced at the inception of a lightning strike. These have been noticed before, coinciding with cosmic rays but never explained. We wanted to prove that it is the showers of ionised particles caused by cosmic rays penetrating thunderclouds that produce the radio pulses.

How could you demonstrate this?
We used a device that measures radio waves and shows which direction they come from, to record data from 3800 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in Russia and Kazakhstan. When we analysed this data we found that, although their pattern matched that predicted by the models of runaway breakdown, the pulses were too big to be produced by regular cosmic rays.

So might there be something amplifying the impact of the cosmic rays?
We suggested an explanation: we know that every storm cloud has tiny charged ice particles called hydrometeors, and we think they might be amplifying the pulses. Our calculations confirm it: when a large amount of free electrons – created in a runaway breakdown process initiated by cosmic rays – collect near these hydrometeors, they boost the current and observed radio pulse signal.

What other experiments are you conducting to prove the runaway breakdown theory?
We are also trying to find a correlation between gamma rays, cosmic rays and radio pulses, because we believe the gamma ray bursts we see above storm clouds are caused by the runaway breakdown process.

Gamma rays are essentially an extremely energetic form of electromagnetic radiation. They are usually invisible, but highly energetic explosions of gamma rays, known as gamma ray bursts, are visible and incredibly bright. These bursts usually occur in deep space, but they are also observed in Earth's atmosphere as very bright flashes lasting a fraction of a second above powerful thunderclouds.

How do you observe these bright flashes?
To see gamma radiation you need to be very high up, and our lab at the Tien Shan High-Altitude Scientific Station in Kazakhstan is at almost 4 kilometres above sea level. We have sensors there that measure gamma radiation; it is very clear that when there are no thunderstorms, there are no gamma ray bursts. But, in keeping with our theory, as soon as a thunderstorm starts, these bright flashes appear inside the storm clouds – and they correlate with the radio pulses that we register as well.

Will understanding what triggers lightning help us to unlock anything new about Earth and the cosmos?
In my opinion, runaway breakdown could happen in gas, it could happen in space, and that's what we're searching for. Analogous processes could take place on the surface of Jupiter, for example. So understanding runaway breakdown here on Earth can help us understand what happens elsewhere in the universe.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The lightning enigma"

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Alexandr Gurevich is a physicist at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is working on the lightning theory with Anatoly Karashtin

Sparky
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Re: An "Unearthly answer to lightning" comes closer to the t

Unread post by Sparky » Sat Oct 05, 2013 7:16 am

Run away breakdown sounds good. I wonder if lightning can generate ionization as it progresses from cloud to cloud, to leader, then to ground. :?
"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong."
"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

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dahlenaz
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Re: An "Unearthly answer to lightning" comes closer to the t

Unread post by dahlenaz » Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:35 am

Sparky wrote:Run away breakdown sounds good. I wonder if lightning can generate ionization
as it progresses from cloud to cloud, to leader, then to ground. :?
Your question may be answered by how much the aroma of an air ionizer and
the smell of the air after an intense thunderstorm are so much alike.
It is just an unmistakable aroma once you get tuned in to it. d...z

...

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Bomb20
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Re: An "Unearthly answer to lightning" comes closer to the t

Unread post by Bomb20 » Tue Oct 08, 2013 2:11 pm

An older article by Gurevich & Co. for information:
http://nlpc.stanford.edu/nleht/Science/ ... stoday.pdf

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