According to the NOAA, lightning has been witnessed in volcanic eruptions, intense forest fires, surface nuclear detonations, snowstorms, large hurricanes, and now the American Center for Physics parking lot. Well, I didn't see it, but this tree did (or at least it would have if it had light-detecting organs). Sometime over the weekend this little guy experienced an arboreal nightmare as hundreds of millions of volts of electricity shot through his body. Lightning strikes can be as much as 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun, and in an instant, that heat turned water into steam inside him-splitting his trunk vertically through his core and sending bark flying at least 50 feet in various directions. Lightning strikes like this happen 4-million times a day on our planet, yet no one's sure what causes it (even the folks who park in this same parking lot). According to this Scientific American post by lightning expert and physicist Joseph Dwyer , no measurement made in
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