A shocking record: Lightning bolt stretched 515 miles, crossed three states
An enormous, 515-mile-long flash of lightning that crossed at least three states has been named the longest in recorded history in the world.
The 2017 “megaflash” stretched from eastern Texas to near Kansas City — a distance that would take at least eight hours by car or 90 minutes by commercial plane, according to the World Meteorological Organization. In comparison, the average bolt of lightning usually measures less than 10 miles, according to the National Weather Service.
The WMO, an agency within the United Nations, announced Thursday that it certified the megaflash as the longest lightning flash on record. It struck Oct. 22, 2017, during a severe storm that hit much of the Great Plains.
A megaflash is a giant bolt of lightning that travels huge distances from its origin point, said Randall Cerveny, a professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University and a member of the WMO committee that confirmed the new record.
“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.”
