Faster than a speeding bullet.
Six times hotter than the surface of the sun.
It seems to defy the laws of gravity.
And can strike you - dead.
Lightning.
Now, we reveal dramatic new discoveries
shocking experiments
that prove lightning is one of the weirdest, most destructive,
and important phenomena on earth
Lightning strikes.
Giant sparks of static electricity
tear through the atmosphere at 60 million miles an hour.
Up to a billion volts rip the air apart
in that instant, the current creates light waves.
We see a brilliant bolt of light race across the sky.
Air inside is heats up to more than 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
It expands so rapidly it explodes
we hear a deafening clap of thunder.
It all happens in less than the blink of an eye
up to eight million times every day
This is one nature's most frequent, best observed phenomena.
But it's also one of the least understood.
We probably know more about how a star explodes half-way across the galaxy,
than how lightning works just a few miles above our heads.
Scientists are using every technological tool in the box
to see lightning as it's never been seen before.
And they're discovering that it's more powerful
You're talking about something that's up to a billion volts,
it's two hundred thousand amps,
it's a small nuclear power plant, it's huge.
And more important than ever imagined.
It's probably one of those fundamental parts of the equation
that really contribute to life on earth.
To unlock its secrets
we follow a lightning bolt on its journey from creation,
to destruction - and beyond.
Few people have experienced lightning's awesome power
more closely than former stockbroker Michael Utley
May 2000:
Utley is playing golf at his local course in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Over head a storm gathers.
Thirty thousand amps of electricity burns its way through the atmosphere
at 60 million miles an hour
and heads straight towards Utley.
The warning siren sounds.
It's the last thing he remembers.
The first thing that I remember
after the strike was 38 days after it happened.
In less than half a second - his life changed forever.
I opened my eyes and I realised I was in an ambulance.
And I had a trach, so I couldn't speak,
so it was kinda like the Godfather, and I was like, where am I.
And he looked at me and he said: you're on your way to Rehab.
You were struck by lightning a month ago
Utley never saw the bolt that hit him;
he has no memory of that terrible day
We reconstruct those missing moments,
and step into Utley's shoes
to follow a lightning bolt as it rips through the body
and examine its devastating effects in forensic detail.
We begin with the moment of impact
Lightning strikes.
Electricity tears through your body
and stops your heart¡­dead.
The lightning goes through the body and it stops the heart,
so you're 100% dependent on someone around you to do CPR at that point
So you're just laying there, you're not breathing,
your heart's stopped and, and that's it
Resuscitation brings you back to life,
but your heart rate is still erratic.
The race is on to reach the ER.
The Emergency Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Get struck by lightning in the windy city
and this could be the first place you'll come.
And the first person you'll see will probably be Dr Mary Ann Cooper
Emergency MD and head of the Lightning Injury Research Programme
The number one cause of death from lightning
is cardiac arrest at the time of the injury.
The current hitches a lift on the body's own electrical highway.
Route one:
the autonomic nervous system.
It runs down your spine and controls involuntary functions:
breathing, digestion, heart beat.
Routes two and three: blood and muscle
Full of electrolytes - acids, salts and other chemicals.
Essential for life - and electrically conductive
Together they offer the current a route through the body
straight to your heart.
The heart's internal pacemaker,
generates electrical currents that control its rhythm.
Hit this with a high voltage current
and the rhythm is disrupted - or worse
But even if you survive the shock,
a series of bizarre and traumatic injuries could still assault your body.
A strike can cause blood vessels to spasm
and leave you temporarily paralysed.
When you look at the extremities they're cold, mottled, blue,
look for all the world like they're dead
I was pretty much paralysed,
and erm, I couldn't swallow, I couldn't talk.
My body was completely fried.
For Utley, nerve and muscle damage means years of grueling rehab.
But some injuries last a lifetime.
A strike near the head sends current into the eyes
and can detach the retina.
The shockwave can rupture the eardrums
and can sometimes fractures the skull
Lightning flowers known as Lichtenberg marks.
The current ruptures tiny capillaries
to create a fossilised record of its journey across the skin.
The same process can sometimes be seen on a golf course.
But not all the effects of lightning are as easy to see.
I am definitely not the same person that my wife married prior to the incident,
I've changed.
Before the strike,
Utley was a ski instructor, an extreme sports enthusiast.
I used to have an edge, I used to be very very good.
Now, I'm still pretty good if I find all the notes, I kind of can't
It's frustrating. Without doubt you live life on a much different level.
Lightning's deadly trail of destruction ¡­from the nerves to the heart
...nothing is safe
But despite all this 90% of strike victims survive.
Survivor Michael Utley wants to know why.
To find out Utley will witness a dramatic demonstration
at Lightning Technologies in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
What were doing here is trying to see
how the lightning might flash across the surface of a human being.
Chief Engineer Andy Plumer is in charge of testing and devising lightning protection systems
His plan: to hit this mannequin with one megavolt of electricity
and recreate the split seconds that changed Michael's life forever.
I would imagine that it wouldn't take much of the current to stop the heart.
I think it doesn't take very much at all
Even if 90% of it goes outside,
the little bit that goes through does enough.
They recreate conditions on the golf course.
Utley was holding a putter
metal conducts electricity.
It was a hot day, he was sweating
this too is conductive.
Could these two factors explain his survival?
Human sweat has a little bit of conductivity
So, Bob here is putting just some salt solution
just to simulate the conductivity that existed on you
the day you were struck by lightning
Excellent.
OK Bob start charging.
Five¡­four¡­.three¡­two¡­one
The strike is so fast
that we need to freeze the moment of impact
Sweat conducts the huge bolt of electricity down the body's right side
The metal putter provides a path to the ground.
The lethal current is diverted away from the major organs.
The experiment suggests that for most strike survivors
there are other factors at play,
such as the putter or the sweat
diverting the deadly current,
and explaining their survival.
It seems Utley may owe his life to these two simple things
It's a life he's still battling to rebuild
Today he enjoys a regular game of golf
and uses the very same putter that saved his life.
But he takes no chances.
If there's one thing I'd tell people about lightning
it would be when thunder roars go indoors,
there's no place safe outside in a thunderstorm.
We've seen lightning's deadly force
Now we need to know what it is
what creates this awesome power
That quest takes us to one of the world's stormiest places
and some of the most spectacular lightning on earth.
We are following a lightning bolt on its journey through the atmosphere
We've seen what happens when a storm unleashes its awesome power
Now, let's rewind to the moments before lightning strikes,
to investigate what triggers this mysterious phenomenon.
Our journey takes us to a city that's home
to some of the world's most violent lightning storms.
Darwin, northern Australia.
In just a few hours it can take as many as 1600 strikes
Darwin is the perfect place to investigate one of nature's biggest mysteries
what sparks a lightning bolt?
An international team of scientists are here to find out.
They use radar and a fleet of aircraft
to look for the answer
deep inside Darwin's monster storm clouds
A potent cocktail of heat and moist tropical air
means these are no ordinary clouds
Called cumulonimbus,
they can rise up to 40,000 feet at speeds of 60 miles an hour.
13 miles up, twice as high a passenger jet.
Above the storm,
a modified former Russian spy plane collects data about the cloud below.
Somewhere inside this cloud lightning is preparing to strike
Understanding how has puzzled scientists for centuries
But they think the cloud acts as a giant electrical generator
Inside the cloud tiny water droplets rise upward.
They freeze, and fall back down as ice
They rub against each other.
Electrically charged particles transfer from one to the other.
The water and ice particles that were previously neutral
are now either positively or negatively charged
The negative particles sink to the bottom of the cloud,
the positive rise to the top.
Separating the positive and negative charges.
When they reunite, lightning will strike.
That's the theory.
But the reality is even stranger
Air is not a good conductor;
electricity can't pass through it easily
To let the current through,
the air's atomic structure must literally break apart,
to do that takes millions even billions of volts.
Scientists search the skies for this huge electrical charge.
But even in Darwin's massive storm clouds
it's never been found.
In the story of lighting, there's a piece missing.
It's a puzzle that fascinates physicist Joe Dwyer
from Florida Institute of Technology
With lightning it's almost embarrassing
We've been studying lightning since the time of Franklin,
and in over two hundred years we still haven't answered the big questions:
how does lightning work?
How does it get started up in the thunderstorms?
How does it propagate for miles through the air
from way up there where it's initiated down to our feet?
One thing we can be sure of:
lightning is static electricity
and you can make it at home.
Let me take my shoes off
and when I do I'm gonna rub my feet on the carpet.
As I rub my feet friction is going to separate electrical charge,
positive charge is going to go one way, negative charge the other
Now when charges separate they want to get back together
a large electric field can build up
and when this happens you can get a spark.
We think something like that is going on inside a thunder cloud
when it makes lightning.
To send a current across this tiny distance takes up to 25,000 volts.
But lightning bolts can be up to 120 miles long.
Sending a current through this much air takes millions of volts
a massive electrical charge that so far
scientists have failed to find.
You have to ask, well where is the finger that's concentrating the charge
making the big fields to produce the spark,
and we're having a really hard time figuring out what that finger is.
Thunderstorms are violent.
Lightning is unpredictable.
Getting close enough to make measurements is virtually impossible
Scientists can't get to the lightning,
so at the University of Florida's International Center for Lightning Research
they bring the lighting to the scientists.
What we did is that we used rocket triggered lightning
You can tell lightning where and when to strike.
Dwyer and the team fire a rocket into a charged storm cloud.
Ready to fire. Arming rocket.
Five, four, three, two, one.
It trails a copper wire
that acts like a lightning conductor
Millions of volts of electricity race from the cloud to the ground.
Dwyer uses data from this
to investigate how lightning can pass through miles of air.
And he looks for the answer in outer space.
In a galaxy far away, a star explodes.
Millions of microscopic, electrically charged particles
are forced out into space.
These are cosmic rays.
Travelling at nearly the speed of light
they race across millions of miles,
millions of light years to reach earth.
Dwyer wonders:
could cosmic rays explain how electricity travels through miles of air?
Billions of these rays bombard our planet every second.
They're invisible and inaudible.
But when a cosmic ray travels through the atmosphere,
it momentarily rips apart the air's molecular structure;
this produces x-rays,
electromagnetic waves of radiation
which can be measured.
Could cosmic rays be the missing link in the story of a lightning bolt?
It sounds like science fiction.
Even the optimistic Dwyer thinks it's a long shot.
When we got our first triggered lightning and made our first x-ray measurements
I didn't even get around to looking at the data for a couple of weeks,
'cause I really wasn't expecting to see anything.
When I sat down finally, there on the screen
was an x-ray pulse right when the lightning occurred.
And I thought, well what's the chance of that happening,
I mean right there at the same time.
So we looked at the next stroke
and there was another pulse, even bigger.
We looked at the next stroke, another pulse,
another pulse with the next stroke.
Every time we looked we saw a big burst of x-rays,
hitting our instrument the exact time that lightning struck.
To Dwyer it's a clue:
something has changed the air's atomic structure
and he thinks that something could be cosmic rays.
For centuries we've been laboring under the assumption
that lightning's just a normal kind of discharge,
like the finger touching the doorknob
We suddenly see now that this was wrong
If Dwyer's right,
when a cosmic ray hits a cloud
it causes a huge, momentary surge in electricity,
enough to create a spark,
but too brief to be measured.
The ray hurtles on towards the ground
The super fast moving particles collide with air molecules, and rip them apart
For a fraction of a second the air becomes electrically conductive
and provides a path down which the current can run.
Now lightning can strike.
A channel of negative electrical charge shoots from the bottom of a cloud.
It heads towards the ground in rapid steps
each takes just 50 millionths of a second
As it gets closer,
it has a strange effect on the ground below
Positive particles in the ground or in objects on it
are drawn up towards their negative counterparts.
A storm cloud can creates dozen of these negative and positive channels
Most don't connect.
But when they do,
millions of volts of electricity race between the cloud and the ground.
Lightning travels up - as well as down.
The air lights up,
we see lightning strike, hear the air explode.
In the following thousandths of a second
any remaining charge in the cloud surges up and down the channel.
The bolt may appear to flicker.
Lightning really does strike more than once.
And all this happens up to eight million times every day,
one hundred times a second.
Lighting is one of nature's most common phenomena.
And, if Joe Dwyer's theories are right
it's also one of the most incredible
If these ideas are correct,
then there may be a connection between the lightning that we see
and a star exploding half-way across the galaxy in a million years ago.
In less than half a second
we've travelled from strike to spark, impact to creation
as we follow a lightning bolt.
Now, in the moments after impact,
we enter a bizarre world of fire balls
UFOs and ghostly apparitions.
We are following a lightning bolt on its journey through the atmosphere.
We've traced it's origins,
investigated the terrible moment of impact
Now, our quest takes us to the moments after lightning strikes
to a twilight world
that seems to come straight from the pages of a science fiction comic
March 19, 1963.
Eastern Airlines Flight EA 539 from New York to Washington.
Five minutes past midnight.
The plane encounters a storm.
There's a loud bang and bright flash
Seconds later a glowing ball emerges from the pilot's cabin.
The blue white ball hovers above the aisle
and floats slowly towards the rear of the plane.
It reaches the back of the plane and vanishes.
Remarkably, the plane continues unharmed.
But this wasn't fantasy, this was fact
and it wasn't the first account of its kind.
In World War II pilots reported strange balls of light
that seemed to follow their planes
US pilots named them Foo Fighters
For thousands of years people have claimed to encounter fiery spheres
as ghosts, messages from the gods or UFOs.
But there was something different about the eastern airlines account
The eye-witness wasn't an adrenalin-fuelled fighter-pilot
or a medieval mystic,
he was a scientist, a professor at a prestigious British university
Suddenly scientists sat up and took notice.
One scientist who's been inspired by his own close encounter
is nuclear physicist Dr Graham Hubler
I have seen ball lightning myself so I know that it exists.
A teenage Hubler is on a date in a park in Upstate New York.
A storm breaks out.
The couple take shelter in a bandstand
And suddenly off to our left,
we're sitting there with open sides on the left and the front,
off to the left we saw this ball approaching, ball of light.
And of course we were terrified,
what the heck was this, we didn't know what it was.
Slowly, the ball approaches.
It was about 30 yards away and coming slowly at us,
just kind of drifting along, ambling along, drifting along.
And we're looking at this thing and
and just, we were both just paralysed actually.
To their horror it enters the bandstand,
and rolls across the floor past the couple's feet with a strange sound
The sound it was making was like a freshly struck match.
At the other side of the bandstand
the ball leaps back up
and travels out of the open side.
It jumped right back up to about six feet off the ground,
went out twenty, thirty feet, out into the night,
and then very quickly dropped to the ground and extinguished without a noise
The experience leaves Hubler with a life long fascination with ball lightning
He collects thousands of eye-witness accounts.
There's multiple ball lightning.
Balls that fell from the sky
That exploded hissed, spun, hovered, jumped.
It's even been seen to pass through solid objects
without leaving a trace.
There is no good theory that exists
that explains the features of ball lightning.
Different theories can explain one or two of the features of ball lightning
but none, none really do a very good job of explaining it all.
One man, who's examined all the evidence
investigated all the theories,
is physicist Mark Stenhoff.
There are probably as many theories of ball lightning
as there have been scientists investigating it.
But there is one thing almost everyone agrees on.
Ball lightning is probably plasma.
Plasma is the commonest form of matter in the universe.
The sun,
fire,
lightning,
and the space between the stars
are all plasma.
It's not hard to make plasma
run a current through a gas and it will spontaneously emit light.
But it's explaining how a fiery ball can materialise out of thin air
has confounded scientists for centuries
I think as soon as we see something we can't explain,
particularly something as bizarre as that,
we have a tendency to move outside our normal frames of reference
and explain things using
if you like rather supernatural explanations.
One of the more sensible theories
is that ball lightning is produced by a rare phenomenon
known as bead lightning.
This footage shows a lightning bolt that appears to break into small beads
Some scientists argue that ball lightning is a plasma bead
that's become separated from the bolt
But there's one big problem.
Eye-witnesses talk of balls lasting minutes;
these beads vanish in less than half a second.
We don't know of a way in which we could create a plasma in the atmosphere
that's self contained that would survive for many seconds,
a plasma would provide plenty of energy
but it wouldn't be able to survive for that period of time.
So if ball lightning isn't part of a lightning bolt,
could it be the product of one?
This strange looking stone
is the fossilised remnant of a lightning strike.
Lightning strikes sandy soil.
Heat and current spread through the ground.
Everything in its path fuses into a solid tube.
This is nature's own glass.
It's called a fulgerite
and can stretch to depths of 15 feet
When the tube is formed,
dust is pushed up into the atmosphere
this detonation replicates the effect
Could something as simple as dust hold the key to this centuries old mystery?
Laboratory experiments prove
a tiny dust ball holds its shape and ignites in an area of electrical charge
It could explain Hubler's account,
but not the Eastern Airlines one
Its extremely difficult to imagine how any chemical process could actually,
if you like, invade the space inside the aircraft
For now ball lightning remains a mystery
But if science can unlock its secrets,
ball lightning could turn out to be more than just a curiosity;
it's even possible
it could hold the key to a completely new source of energy.
Evidently it contains energy,
just the sheer process of glowing is sufficient to require some energy
And if we could harness that energy
who knows what the future might hold
Ball lightning surely exists,
so it's either known physics that we have to put together in ways we,
we haven't thought of before.
Or, it's a totally new physical phenomena which is very exciting,
that will lead us into some new technology or new physics.
The mystery of ball lightning is yet to be solved.
And it's not the only strange phenomenon
to occur in the moments after lightning strikes.
Look above the clouds and the story gets even stranger.
Look, what was that?
Oh yeah! D'you see it.
Yes!
On our journey following a lightning bolt
we've ventured beyond the frontiers of science.
But this is just the beginning.
Seconds after lightning strikes,
high above a thundercloud,
a strange new phenomenon appears
6 July 1989.
Physicists from the University of Minnesota test out a new low light camera
They plan to use it for a high altitude rocket experiment.
They point the camera east - a random choice
at some stars and what looks like a distant thunderstorm.
They play the tape back.
Something catches their attention:
Two funnel shaped flashes of light.
They last for just a few thousandths of a second.
The team estimates that the flashes are 20 miles above the clouds
and an astonishing 12 miles tall.
By pure chance they've captured something new to science.
From his research lab at Duke University, North Carolina,
Professor Steve Cummer searches for these strange spectres.
It's exciting to be part of something fundamentally new
that no-one else has seen before
and it's kind of a big surprise
that these things have been there the whole time and nobody knew about it
The twin pillars of lights flicker above a thunderstorm in the distance
So what are they?
Around the world lightning scientists are on the hunt to find out
They don't have to look far.
Scientists review hundreds of hours of video taken from the Space Shuttle
To their amazement, there are dozens of these strange apparitions
just waiting to be identified.
Low light cameras are trained on the skies
High altitude aircraft fly above storms
Soon there are thousands of recorded sightings.
Everybody was surprised by how common they in fact were,
it's just one of those cases, once you know what you're looking for
all of a sudden you see a lot of them
Scientists call them sprites
because of their elusive, ghostly appearance
They seem to dance above the thunder clouds in the night sky
In groups of two or three,
they last less than ten thousandths of a second
Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks
calculate they occur in the middle atmosphere
25 to 60 miles above the earth,
and can extend up to 30 miles across
Observations suggest sprites are related to lightning.
But how?
In a field in North Carolina
antenna pick up the radio signals produced by lightning.
Steve Cummer uses this to listen to the radio noise
made by individual lightning bolts
The equipment is so sensitive
he can detect lightning as it happens anywhere on earth
Every one of these individual pulses
is one of those radio pulses from a lightning stroke,
somewhere in the globe.
Cummer uses this data to measure the size of each bolt
He matches this with sightings of sprites from other research stations
A pattern emerges.
Sprites occur in the fractions of a second after lightning strikes,
but only after the most powerful lightning bolts
Cummer thinks this huge release of energy
causes a disturbance in the atmosphere above.
This high speed footage,
the most detailed film of a sprite ever shot,
supports Cummer's theory.
45 miles up,
electrical charge momentarily increases
It triggers a giant spark.
Millions of electrically charged particles accelerate outwards
at 33 million feet per second.
Sprites tend to be about 40 miles high
The bottom here is maybe 25 miles
and the top is 60 or 65 miles.
Sprites come in many shapes and sizes
from the so-called A-bomb sprite up to 60 miles in diameter,
to a tall skinny one less than a mile wide
and nicknamed the diet sprite.
Five years after the first sprite was spotted,
researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks
hunt for sprites high above a monster storm
They use a sensitive low light camera
and capture the first ever colour images of sprites.
It's a spectacular surprise.
What causes this colourful display?
With each new discovery, come new questions.
But sprites are elusive, unpredictable
and almost impossible to observe at close range.
So Earle Williams from MIT made his own.
He calls it - sprite in a bottle.
In a disused printing factory in Brockton, Massachusetts,
Williams and his team use a Plexiglass tube,
an old steering wheel and plenty of ingenuity
to create their very own sprite.
They recreate conditions in the middle atmosphere
fifty miles above the earth.
There's the good sprite light.
We start with a tube filled with air at atmospheric pressure
like the air in this room we're breathing.
With vacuum pumps beneath the table
we pump the tube down to pressures corresponding to 50 mile altitudes.
By running an electrical current through the tube
they create a magical light show.
It's the same process that lights up Las Vegas.
The neon gas in these tubes is invisible
But run a current through it
and it produces coloured light.
In the atmosphere most of the gas is nitrogen.
Hit the air near the ground with a current
and it produces a dazzling white light
But change the pressure and the colour changes too.
50 miles up in the earth's atmosphere
low pressure means nitrogen produces red light,
but as the sprite stretches towards earth
air pressure increases under gravity,
the colour changes to purple and then blue.
In the skies sprites last less than ten thousandths of a second.
But with the sprite in the bottle,
Williams can study the forces that shape them in his own time.
But even in the controlled conditions of the lab,
the sprite is a volatile creature.
I'm gonna let in air,
yeah give me all you've got,
oh that's a nice display, yeah that's neat,
I like that... nice flat disks.
Sprites are very much alive
and as you can see the patterns in the tube are very much alive,
moving and writhing around, very unsteady.
That's nice. Look at that.
The bottle lets Williams look deep inside the hidden world of sprites
I've never seen that one before.
and discover there may be even stranger phenomena waiting to be found.
Sprite scientists expect the unexpected
but even they aren't prepared for this.
Oh yeah! You see it?
Yes! It was so beautiful.
Puerto Rico 2001.
A jet of blue light shoots from the top of a thunder cloud
and travels over 40 miles into the sky
Other sightings confirm: this is not a sprite.
It travels up not down, from the cloud not the middle atmosphere.
It's an entirely new species: called a blue jet.
When I saw the videos I was like, huh, that's pretty spectacular,
wonder what those are
Blue jets are a mystery
that nobody really knows what it takes to generate them.
And it doesn't stop there.
Next come an even rarer species:
elves, a pulse from a lightning bolt
triggers a horizontal halo of light about 60 miles above the earth
that spreads out rapidly to a diameter of up to 250 miles.
Just about everybody who has gone with a new instrument
or to a new region of the world to look above thunderstorms for something new,
they have found something new.
Lightning's weird offspring inhabit a world that we've only glimpsed.
Too high for balloon or aircraft samples
Too low for satellites.
Like the depths of the oceans
nobody knows what other creatures wait to be discovered.
Since there have been so many things discovered in the last 15 years, new things
it would not surprise me at all
if there were, if there were more things out there waiting to be discovered.
We've followed a lightning bolt on its way through the earth's atmosphere.
From its devastating impact on the ground
to its spectacular after effects above the clouds.
Now, our journey takes us into outer space
as we discover why life as we know it could depend on lightning.
We've followed lightning from creation to destruction and beyond.
Now we travel into space
for the final stage of lightning's strange journey.
The Cold War.
A top secret US operation.
Codename Starfish Prime.
The objective:
to investigate the effects of a nuclear war - in space.
9 July 1962
a 1.5 megaton nuclear warhead is detonated 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean.
The explosion takes place in an area of natural radiation
called the Van Allen Belts.
Wrapped around the earth like two giant donuts,
they're full of deadly radioactive particles
and a threat to astronauts and satellites
At NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre near Washington DC
Jim Green monitors the radiation in the belts
It's a very hazardous area
because these particles are moving so fast they'll move through skin,
through flesh, tissues, also through spacecraft,
damaging delicate circuits
and eventually leading to satellites that will no longer function in Space
Between the belts is an area with much less radiation
called the safe slot.
It's home to commercial satellites,
operating in the safety of its low radiation environment.
But the Starfish Prime warhead sends a massive dose of radiation
straight into the safe slot.
Radiation levels soar.
Satellites cease to function.
But then, just a few weeks later the slot is free of radiation.
NASA scientists are stunned.
Something has created the safe slot.
What?
We have been on the hunt to determine why that slot region is there ever since
Soon there's a breakthrough.
Researchers realise violent solar storms pump radioactive particles into space.
When these head in our direction,
radiation saturates the safe slot.
Then, as if by magic,
it clears, and the slot becomes safe again
But not all at once.
And that's the vital clue.
Whatever clears the safe slot
seems to be more effective at some times than others.
It's more intense on the day side than it is on the night side
and it's more intense during the summer than it is in the winter.
The evidence points to the sun.
But in 2004 Green takes a chance look at a magazine
and everything changes.
An article on the distribution of lightning captures his attention.
The beautiful maps of lightning, changed my concept of where lightning was
was actually being generated,
drew my attention to the article immediately
Green notices lightning exhibits exactly the same characteristics
as the clearance of the safe slot.
It occurs more over land than sea,
more during the day than night,
more in the summer than the winter.
It's a match.
That was the time that we then knew
that this had to be related to phenomena that was occurring on the Earth.
And the only thing of course that we know enters into space is lightning
But how could lightning on earth affect the safe slot
4000 miles up?
A lightning bolt tears through the air.
It doesn't just produce light and sound,
it also creates radio waves
Turn on your radio when there's a storm nearby,
and you can hear them as interference
But tune in with an all frequencies receiver
and you can pick up more than just crackle.
This eerie whistling is the sound of those radio waves
after they've travelled through space
What we've been listening to are lightning spherics
and these are emissions that occur from lightning hundreds of miles away
that are propagated to us and are received in our antennas.
Green realises that these radio waves are the missing link,
they connect lightning on earth with the safe slot in space.
We never realised the importance that the ground is having on space
In 2005 Jim and his team come up with a radical new theory.
Less than a second after a lightning strike on earth
the radio wave reaches the radiation belts
There it interacts with the electrically charged particles - the radiation.
It forces the particles out of the safe slot.
The radiation is cleared and the safe slot returns to normal.
We always had thought about lightning in the past,
I believe, as a destructive mechanism
But I think we're discovering many of its beneficial factors.
If Green is right, without lightning,
radiation would soon fill the safe slot
Satellites would go down
taking out many things we've come to rely on.
Global communications, navigation systems,
cell phones, satellite television - all could shut down.
Life as we know it would grind to a halt.
If lightning stopped tomorrow
we would see a dramatic change in the way we live today.
It's probably one of those fundamental parts of the equation
that really contribute to life on Earth.
Lightning.
For millions of years it's stalked our darkest visions,
struck terror through our oldest myths
Now, we're closer than ever to unlocking its secrets.
And the more we discover
the more lightning defies expectation
It's origins may lie far beyond our world.
It can take strange forms,
and create dazzling light shows.
Lightning is devastating, beautiful
and essential to life as we know it.
The incredible journey of a lightning bolt:
From outer space to the inner workings of the human body.
Life and death. Destruction and creation.
All in less than the blink of an eye.
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