This stunning lightning flash happened in 2017. There was a storm, the kind that passes through the Midwest a few times a year. Nothing unusual. Maybe a few people looked up and thought, big one tonight, and went back to whatever they were doing.
But somewhere in that storm, a bolt of lightning started over eastern Texas. And then it kept going. Across Missouri. Over Kansas City. Almost to Iowa.
It was one single flash, no breaks. 515 miles.
What’s is so amazing about this event is that no one really noticed. It didn’t hit the ground or make a sound. It happened too high, too fast, and too quietly.
Years later, someone found it.
Quietly waiting to be found in the data
There are scientists who look at satellite footage of old storms. That’s their job. One of them is Michael Peterson, who works at the Georgia Institute of Technology, studying lightning.
He was going through storm records collected by satellites, the kind built by NASA and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) when something caught his eye. A lightning event that didn’t stop. Frame after frame, it just kept going.
It turned out to be the longest lightning bolt anyone’s ever recorded.
The World Meteorological Organization confirmed it. They track weather extremes around the world; it’s part of what they do under the United Nations. And now this quiet, unnoticed lightning bolt from 2017 holds the record.
An unusual kind of lightning
This wasn’t a lightning strike. This one didn’t hit a tree or set off car alarms. It was what scientists call a megaflash, which is lightning that spreads sideways, not down. And it moves through the top of huge storm clouds, way up in the sky.
It’s so high and so far, you wouldn’t know it’s there unless you had a satellite watching from space. That’s why anyone besides scientists saw it.
We didn’t even know megaflashes existed until about ten years ago. And they were there, always have been. We just didn’t have the tech to see them yet. Then suddenly, with new instruments on orbiting satellites, they started showing up.
Megaflashes and why are they so important
This bolt didn’t even make the news until now, nearly 10 years later. So why does it matter?
Well, because it reminds us how much we don’t see. How far have we come, and how much is still left to discover.
It also matters for flights; lightning like this can stretch into commercial airspace. It matters for wildfires, too, especially when a flash makes it down through dry air. And it’s connected to Stranger Things… bursts of light even higher up called TLEs (short for Transient Luminous Events). They’re still figuring those out.
The 2017 megaflash formed during a severe storm over the Great Plains, where the weather likes to go big. That clash of hot southern air and cool northern air makes for some of the most intense skies anywhere. Tornadoes, hail, and lightning that crosses entire states.
What else is up there?
The last record for the longest lightning bolt was 477 miles. This one beat it by nearly 40. There might already be longer ones recorded, just sitting in the data, waiting to be found.
Randall Cerveny, who helps keep the WMO’s archive of weather extremes, thinks we’re just getting started. “It’s an incredibly strange phenomenon,” he said. “We only discovered them 10 years ago, when we could use a particular set of technologies to detect the start and end locations of the of lightning events.”
These huge lightning bolts have been observed before in the United States, Argentina, and southern France. And according to Cerveny, they can also occur in parts of China and Australia.