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Asked by beth5000 to Rob, Sam, Matt on 21 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by beniboy1102.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 21 Jun 2013:
There are actually three types of lightning. You can get lightning within a cloud, lightning between clouds and lightning between clouds and the ground. Cloud to ground lightning is the least common but the most studied because it’s easy for us to see it.
When the ice in clouds hits other bits of ice, it creates an electrical charge. Due to the stuff clouds are made off, this charge is conducted through the cloud. The positive charge ends up at the top and the negative charge ends up at the bottom.
When either the positive or negative charge gets big enough, it breaks free of the cloud and shoots down to the ground. What happens when they shoot to the ground is reasonably well studied but how a lightning bolt ends up taking a particular path to the ground is still very much a mystery.
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 25 Jun 2013:
It’s do to with charged particles in the air, and how they are arranged. If lots of negatively charge particles are all together, it’s a build up of energy – which goes zap! to sort itself out. One way of getting information about how lightning works is to watch what happens in volcanic plumes – here heaps of charged particles are thrown into the air…. and watch what happens….!
cool huh!
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