Name: What if all the lightning on Earth struck the same place at once?
Uploaded: 2025-06-12T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This question comes from Trevor, who asks,

"If all the lightning that occurs worldwide on any given day all struck in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?"

They say lightning never strikes in the same place twice.

And it's a little surprising that the saying has survived.

You'd think people who believed it would have been gradually filtered out.

People often wonder whether we could harvest electrical power from lightning.

After all, lightning is electricity, and lightning strikes seem pretty powerful.

The problem is, a lightning strike is over so fast that the total amount of energy delivered isn't that extreme,

and in any case, it's very hard to get lightning to strike where you want it.

A typical lightning strike delivers enough energy to power a residential house for about two days.

That means that even the Empire State Building, which is struck by lightning about 100 times a year,

wouldn't be able to keep a house running on lightning power alone.

Even in regions of the world with a lot of lightning, such as Florida and the Eastern Congo rainforest,

the power delivered to the ground by sunlight outweighs the power delivered by lightning by a factor of a million.

This makes sense because ultimately lightning is powered by sunlight.

Generating power from lightning is kind of like building a wind turbine powered by tornadoes.

In Trevor's scenario, all the lightning hits the world in one place, that would make power generation a lot more attractive.

By happen in the same place, let's assume that the lightning bolts all come down in parallel right up against each other.

The main channel of a lightning bolt, the part that's actually carrying current, is about a centimeter or two in diameter.

Our bundle contains about a million separate bolts, which means it'll be about 6 meters in diameter.

Hitting a region of the ground the size of the center circle of a basketball court.

Every science writer always compares everything to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, so we may as well get that out of the way.

The lightning bolt would deliver about two atomic bombs worth of energy to the air and ground.

From a more practical standpoint, this is enough energy to power a game console and TV for several million years.

Or to put it another way, it could support the US's electricity consumption for 5 minutes.

The bolt itself would only be as narrow as the center circle of a basketball court, but it would leave a crater the size of the entire court.

Inside the channel, the air would turn to high energy plasma.

The light and heat from the bolt would spontaneously ignite surfaces for miles around, the shock wave would flatten trees and demolish buildings.

All in all, the Hiroshima comparison isn't far off.

You might hope you could collect the energy of the bolt using a lightning rod.

The mechanism by which lightning rods work is actually disputed.

The traditional idea is that they provide a channel to divert current directly to the ground.

While some people claim that they actually ward off lightning strikes by steadily transferring charge from the ground to the air,

lowering the cloud-to-ground voltage difference and reducing the probability of a strike.

Either way, a lightning rod wouldn't keep you safe from Trevor's lightning.

A copper cable a meter in diameter could, in theory, conduct the brief surge of current from the bolt without melting,

but unfortunately, whatever is at the other end of this cable probably wouldn't conduct electricity nearly as well,

and an explosion would disintegrate everything nearby all the same.

Collecting all the world's lightning into one place is obviously impractical, what about gathering all the lightning from just one area?

No place on earth has constant lightning.

But there is an area in Venezuela which comes close near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo.

There are two spots. One over the lake and one over the land to the west, where thunderstorms form almost every night.

These storms can generate a flash of lightning every two seconds, making Lake Maracaibo the lightning capital of the world.

If you somehow managed to channel all the bolts from a single night of Catatumbo thunderstorms down through a single lightning rod,

and used it to charge a massive capacitor,

it would store up enough power to run a game console and TV for roughly a century.

If this happened, we'd probably need to revise the old saying to something like, "Lightning always strikes in the same place; that place is in Venezuela. You shouldn't stand there."

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What if all the lightning on Earth struck the same place at once?

ultimately

assume

phenomenon

constant