Ball Lightning: Weather's Biggest Mystery | Answers With Joe

this video supported by curiosity stream imagine explaining lightning to an alien it's basically like a giant bolt of electricity that can just kind of randomly arc from a cloud to the ground at any time and it burns hotter than the surface of the Sun so if it hits you you you know explode and die and it happens like a hundred times a second somewhere on earth oh oh oh let me tell you about tornadoes can't get slanted lightnings when these things we know about from a very early age it's just a normal part of nature we get used to it we don't think about it very much unless we get up close and personal with it the thing is we're still learning things about lightning like the fact that we just recently learned that it produces gamma radiation and it actually produces ozone as well it also Believe It or Not helps to fertilize soil yeah bolt of lightning confused nitrogen molecules to oxygen creating nitrogen oxides that then sort of dissolve into the rain as nitrates that then wash into the ground and then voila potatoes and the massive energies involved create lightning phenomena that we're still trying to figure out to this day including the mysterious ball lightning longtime viewers this channel probably know that I love me some unexplained phenomena I used to have books on these topics all over my room when I was growing up and yeah I used to believe some pretty wacky stuff praise or no you can see the influences of those books and videos all over this channel including spontaneous human combustion the curse silent twins of England the Philadelphia Experiment and today we can add ball lightning to that list because ball lightning is kind of one of those mysterious phenomena that's been reported going all the way back to ancient times but it happens so rarely and it's so little studied that it's almost on par with Bigfoot and ghosts and that kind of thing now I know you're probably sitting there saying Joe this is fascinating at all and you're very handsome but what is ball lightning anyway see how let me tell you what ball lightning is and by the way thank you he didn't have to say that ball lightning is not what happens when the guy pees and an electric fence it's described as a luminous ball of light ranging in size anywhere from the size of a pea to the size of a car they occur during electrical storms have been known to come into houses through windows or even chimneys buzz around the room go up the walls and whatnot sometimes for up to a minute or so and sometimes they just kind of fizzle out sometimes they explode sometimes they leave the environment completely untouched sometimes they splinter wooden structures and start fires in weirdest of all some have been seen passing through glass as if it's not even there if thought that ball lightning might be the inspiration for spirits and fairies in some religions the Australian Aborigines just called them in moonlight and there are a lot of theories as to what exactly this might be but before we dive into that let's get familiar with good old-fashioned normal lightning see a lightning is interesting because in some ways it's super simple and in other ways it's really complicated like really when it comes down to it lightning is nothing more than this you know how when you scoot your feet around on a thick carpeted floor and get a static charge built up in you and then you shock yourself when you touch metal or some other conductive surface well that's because all of those threads in the carpet and all the tiny fibers that make up those threads when friction is applied to it that can kind of shake loose negatively charged electrons that then enter your body and you build up charge and then when your negatively charged skin gets close to a positively charged metal surface that energy will jump that gap so if you were a bacteria standing on a doorknob that spark would look like a giant lightning bolt to you so just imagine that next time you see a thunderstorm that you are standing on a giant doorknob and that cloud is a giant finger of course the clouds aren't scooting across a carpet floor to build out their charge but the same idea applies clouds are filled with microscopic water droplets and all kinds of particulate matter dust debris and whatnot and they're all swirling around each other and just like those fibers in a carpet they can build up a charge now it does get more interesting than that because higher up in the atmosphere the air gets colder and it gets less dense and those water droplets freeze into little ice particles and ice particles build up a positive charge because reasons so when you look at a cloud from the side you're basically looking at a giant battery in the sky with a positive terminal on the top and a negative terminal on the bottom and this creates all different kinds of electrical phenomena you've got negative cloud-to-ground lightning which is kind of what most people think about when they think of lightning it's that negative charge at the bottom of the cloud kind of reaching down and finding a positive spot on the ground it's that whole finger and doorknob thing the ground by the way becomes positively charged because those positive ions are attracted to the negative charge up in the air that's why if you're ever outside and your hair starts to stand up and you feel a little bit of static built up in you and there's a cloud or a thunderstorm going on you might want to get inside quickly in fact often lightning this the ground doesn't actually go all the way to the ground it actually kind of gets met halfway up there are these leaders that come out from the cloud and they connect to streamers that come up from the ground and they actually connect somewhere in the middle and that weird jagged shape that lightning takes is simply because air is not a very good conductor of electricity so it has to kind of search around and try to find for a place to discharge all that energy but it does it really fast at 270 thousand miles an hour but really most lightning is cloud-to-cloud lightning it might be the negative side of one cloud connecting to the positive side of another cloud or vice versa or it might just be the bottom of a cloud connecting to the top of a cloud just inside the middle there but the big-daddy by far the most powerful lightning strikes are positive cloud to ground lightning this is when the positive charge at the top of a cloud gets so strong that it actually reaches all the way down and connects to the ground it's almost like a battery shorting out and it releases a lot of energy positive cloud to ground strikes are far brighter far hotter and produce far louder thunder than other lightning strikes their energy tends to be a lot more focused it doesn't branch out like the negative strikes do it's all contained in one bolt you do not want to be hit by one of these or be anywhere near it another couple different types of lightning that are worth mentioning is ribbon lightning which is like horizontal streaks of lightning which is actually produced by high winds pushing the lightning along yes lightning can be pushed by wind and the other type is bead lightning which isn't really a type of lightning is more like the decay after a lightning strike kids it's when the bolt decays into dots along the path that the lightning strike took it's basically just ionized gas and plasma that's leftover from that extreme heat now there are some lesser-known atmospheric phenomena that are worth talking about and these are known as transient luminous events or TL EES for short blue Jets are bright flashes of blue light that can travel up to 40 kilometres in altitude directly on top of a cloud these are often associated with clouds producing hail along with the blue Jets you have red sprites and the word sprite actually stands for stratospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification seriously these kind of look like jellyfish and occur way higher in the atmosphere up to 90 kilometres like into the ionosphere and these are much weaker and only occur for a couple of milliseconds and they're mostly correlated with positive cloud to ground strikes and along with the sprites you sometimes get elves which stands for emissions of light and very low energy perturbations because the meteorological world can acronym like a mouse elves are giant halos surrounding the sprites up in that 90 to 100 kilometer range and they're very dim very short-lived they were only discovered in the late 90s and all these TL E's are thought to be about the collision of energy discharge with molecules in the upper atmosphere almost like a reverse aurora but they're all very mysterious and very little understood which brings us back to the most mysterious lightning phenomena ball lightning when it comes to ball lightning there's far more that we don't know than we do know it's mostly just because of the fact that it's so rare and the majority of sightings are by regular people who don't get a chance to report it ball lightnings been observed ever since ancient Greece there are stories of lighthouses being hit by them world war ii pilots which supposedly saw them massive ships have been destroyed by them sorry nicholas ii reportedly was chased through a church by one when he was a kid but yeah they occur so rarely that they're basically considered folklore yeah just to get an idea of how rare it is lightning strikes around 8 million times a day somewhere around the world that's a lot of opportunities for this phenomena to occur and it still only really get seen they've been described as purple green white or orange in color sometimes they'll separate into multiple balls and like I said before sometimes they'll explode and cause damage sometimes they just kind of fizzle out and just create a little warmth one event that occurred recently in the Czech Republic in July of 2011 apparently one of these things flew into an emergency room that said was about the size of a tennis ball and had a seven-meter tail on it reportedly it bounced from the window to the ceiling and then down to the floor and back up to the ceiling again and then rolled around on the ceiling for about 12 meters before it finally fizzled out apparently let's a burning smell in the room after it was over and many of the computers were frozen and the cables were frayed I mean that's pretty compelling stuff but again anecdotal evidence only takes you so far scientists are still debating whether or not it even exists but that hasn't stopped the wild theorizing from happening so let's get into the speculation the first theory is that ball lightning is nothing more than hallucinations brought on by exposure to extreme magnetic fields yeah and experiments researchers have been able to produce hallucinations by submitting the visual cortex to what they call transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS what kind of hallucinations does these people see balls of light flying around the room so yeah the idea is that with all the powerful forces at play in a lightning storm that it might create the kind of magnetic fields that could cause us to just hallucinate these things also ball lightning might be just a misdiagnosis an almost fire which if you don't know it st. Elmo's fire is it's not just a great brat pack movie and a stirring song it's actually an electrical phenomena where ionized air creates a glowing plasma around especially like sharp and pointy objects when the atmosphere is highly electrically charged although seeing almost fire looks more like regular arced electricity that you're used to seeing it doesn't usually show up as a sphere necessarily but it's thought that in certain conditions maybe it could now this next theory actually has some weight behind it it's the idea that it might actually be vaporized silicon from lightning bolt strikes and the reason why I say this has some weight behind it is because there's actually some solid evidence behind this well yeah in 2014 some Chinese researchers were taking spectrograph readings of a lightning storm and they actually caught on camera ball lightning and even better they were able to take a spectrograph reading of this they measured the glow of the ball lightning to be around five meters wide but the actual size of it is probably quite a bit smaller but it hovered up in the air moved sideways for about 10 meters and then up for a few meters before it finally disappeared yeah that spectrometer picked up emission lines that indicated silicon iron and calcium in other words it was kind of made up of vaporized dirt or at least this type of ball lightning was but yeah the theory is that this intense heat separates the oxygen from the silicon and creates sort of a vaporized cloud of sorts and then this cloud becomes kind of self-sustaining as more oxygen rushes in and it sort of keeps building on itself now this is probably the most compelling explanation just because we have some kind of evidence for it but this also wouldn't account for it being able to go through windows and stuff like that so maybe this is a type of ball lightning but maybe there are other types of ball lightning as well luckily there plenty more theories to go around the next one is called the electrically charged solid core model and the idea here is that there's a solid core of positive ions surrounded by sort of a thin sheet of negatively charged electrons and layered just between that sheet of electrons and the positive core is a but ton of e/m energy that's pushing out the electrons and keeping them from falling in to where they're attracted into the positive core it's almost like the way you might think of the Sun where the fusion energy of the Sun is pushing out but it's being pulled back in by gravity and this might also explain why some instances of ball lightning have occurred around earthquakes or volcanic eruptions because it builds up a piezoelectric charge that's not really associated with lightning at all so the solid charge core model is interesting but again it doesn't really account for 100% of the effects that have been described around ball lightning the microwave cavity hypothesis suggests that after a lightning strike a pocket of microwave energy gets sort of encapsulated in a nexus of electrons that can remain stable for a short period of time and it creates light through that super concentrated market wave radiation that could possibly explode or it could possibly fizzle out being that this is nothing but pure radiation this would be able to account for it being able to pass through a window say next up is the Sola Tom hypothesis remember I just said that ball lightning couldn't be saying almost fire well it might be saying almost fire in physics of silicon is a self-reinforcing wave and that term kind of gets applied to anything that's self-sustaining so the theory is it's basically a coronal discharge like saying almost fire only it gets trapped inside of a ball of ionized air and then it becomes self-sustaining so this theory is interesting because it actually argues that ball lightning is produced by thunder see how the sound wave that we experience is thunder are basically sonic booms created by the Lightning traveling faster than sound and these waves create concentric rings that travel along the ground so the ring creates a vortex of over and under pressures that eventually spreads out and then breaks apart but the idea is that that vortex could possibly trap plasma from the lightning strike and then when that ring breaks apart it creates spheres of this trap plasma hence ball lightning so the spinning plasma toroid theory was actually put forth by a company called electron power systems where they claimed to produce ball lightning in the lab and then explain what was going on so yeah this is very similar to the vortex theory that I talked about a second ago only it doesn't require the sound waves here's a quick explanation that came from the paper they published in 2002 an explanation for the plasma toroid is presented that it is a hollow toroid of electrons where all the electrons travel in parallel paths orthogonal to the toroid circumference and reside in a thin outer shell of the toroid the electron motion creates a current in the surface that in turn creates an internal magnetic field you know that old chestnut now there are others that I cut out for time that involve Rydberg matter nanoparticles and buoyant plasma and whatnot but you get the idea for something that many scientists don't think is actually real there's been a lot of theoretical work put into understanding this and there's good reason why take for example that last theory the idea that we could create a plasma that's stable without any need for an acoustic or a magnetic confinement that's pretty much the holy grail of nuclear fusion now obviously nuclear fusion requires an insane amount of heat and energy but what is lightning if not an insane amount of heat and energy so by researching lightning and the weird phenomena that it creates we could possibly be working towards some breakthroughs in energy storage and production so maybe taking mysterious phenomena seriously isn't a complete waste of time after all the moral of the story here is whether be crazy and if you have a curiosity about this kind of thing and some extra time on your hands around the house you might want to check out wild weather with Richard Hammond on curiosity stream in this series documentary filmmaker Richard Hammond travels the world to explain how rain wind and temperature combined in various ways and in various environments to produce all the weather we experience from fog and hail to tornadoes and yes lightning this is actually just one of many series out there about weather on curiosity stream focusing on hurricanes tornadoes storm chasing and just overall extreme nature events so if you dig that kind of thing this can keep you occupied for a while and of course this is just one example of the kind of content you can get on a curiosity stream everything from historical documentaries to astronomy cutting-edge medicine and theoretical physics whatever you're curious about you can stream it here see what I did there so 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 845,395

Rating: 4.8732538 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, ball lightning, lightning, weird weather, weather phenomena, electricity, mysterious phenomena, thunderstorms

Id: _gOlQCI9Tgg

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020