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Lightning is a natural phenomenon

Lightning is a natural phenomenon that is dramatic, often beautiful, and yet deadly and dangerous at the same time. A bolt of lightning involves the rapid discharge of a massive amount of electrical energy producing both the bright flash of light and the sound of thunder. There are a number of different kinds of lightning produced by different conditions, and new information on lightning is discovered all the time. By its nature, lightning is an ephemeral phenomenon, making it difficult to study under all conditions and explaining why new types of lightning have been found as man makes his way higher and more often into different regions of the upper atmosphere. Lightning is an extremely common natural phenomenon. Since Benjamin Franklin demonstrated the electrical nature of the lightning bolt, lightning has been subjected to many scientific studies. Although Franklin?s experimental success demonstrated that rain clouds are electrified and that lightning is a gigantic electrical discharge, lightning?s exact origins and the mechanism by which rain clouds are electrified have never been completely elucidated.

Although lightning has also been observed to occur during earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, nuclear test explosions, and out of a clear sky, the most usual manifestation of lightning is during a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms form in atmosphere that contains cold dense air at higher altitudes and warm, moist air at lower levels. The typical thunderstorm is between 8 and 12 kilometers in height. From the chaos of wind, water and ice in the presence of a gravitational field and a temperature gradient emerge the charged regions of the thundercloud (Uman 2). Although this was long thought to be a dipole, usually with a positive charge above and a negative charge below, the current thinking suggests that the thundercloud often has a triple structure in which a main negatively charged region is sandwiched between two positively...

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Lightning is a natural phenomenon. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 14:04, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707547.html