curiosity #11 What happens when your 're struck by lightining?

curiousity (55)in #science • 7 years ago

I’m going to try and make it through an episode about lightning without making a single electricity pun. I know, shocking. Well, I tried.

Hey there, Odds are at some point in your life you’ve seen a thunderstorm but you’ve probably never taken part in one. The chances of being hit by lightning in the US in a given year are about 1 in a million, so unless you’re one of the few who has been singled out by Zeus, you’ll never know what it’s like to have a storm cloud personally bully you. Lucky for you, I can tell you all about it, in agonizing detail.

The conventional wisdom on lightning is it’s caused when a static charge builds up in a cloud. It’s still debated how exactly, but the simplest explanation is ice descending from the top of the cloud strips electrons from water droplets ascending from the bottom, and after a while there’s a massive negative charge at the base. The negative charge is so strong it actually repels electrons on earth, pushing them down into the ground, and the surface of the earth becomes positively charged. Like teenage lovebirds, opposites attract, and eventually the air, which serves as the stern parents in this analogy, can’t keep the charges apart. They overcome the insulation properties of the air, and a stream of electrons shoots down to the ground and sparks fly. Isn’t science romantic?

But if someone’s in the middle, they’re going to get hurt. Delivering up to a billion volts and billions of watts, a bolt of lightning can be fatal, and 10 percent of the time it is. There are a few different ways a jolt from the heavens can finish you off. A number of your bodily systems rely on an electrical rhythm, and a zap from God’s shock collar can throw those out of whack. One of the leading causes of death is cardiac arrest, though respiratory arrest and seizures aren’t uncommon either. Even if your brain doesn’t misfire, it can still be cooked by the intense heat of the bolt. If you’re not killed, that same heat will probably leave third degree burns at the points the lightning entered and exited your body. It could set your hair and clothes on fire. And any metal you’re wearing like necklaces or belt buckles will also become super heated, leaving burns. Lightning also heats the air around you, up to 20,000 degrees Celsius, or over three times hotter than the surface of the sun. That rapid heating causes the air to expand.If you’re farther away, you would hear it as a sound wave, aka a crack of thunder. But if you’re standing in the middle of it, that expansion is actually a shock wave. It can send you flying, burst your eardrums, tear your clothes to shreds, and literally knock your shoes off. Yes, apparently being struck by lightning is excruciatingly painful with a touch of slapstick comedy.

Effects of being struck by lightning can linger long after the storm has passed, and unless you’re Tony Cicoria, who got a bolt to the face and became a piano virtuoso, usually they’re not superpowers. Chronic pain, headaches, personality change, difficulty concentrating, and muscle twitches are just a few of the long term effects reported by lightning strike victims. Not to mention the physical scars, which in the case of Lichtenberg figures, actually resemble lightning itself. On the plus side, that’s about a million times more badass than getting a barbed wire tattoo.

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