WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES SAND CRACK

This is a sunset on Mars ! This is what happens when a parasitic fungus replaces all the tissue of a tarantula ! But nature’s ability to astound has us jumping at every weirdness no matter its scientific validity. Nature provides us with truly amazing images. On Reddit, where the picture was first picked up, the first commenter nails it :Īs someone who lives near the beach, this is a stick stuck in the sand had wet drippy sand slowly dripped/poured on it.Ĭurrently circling the internet is a piece of positioned driftwood with some sloppy sand castles on it. Nothing about the photo is consistent with the already understood phenomenon. But the most likely scenario is that this isn’t what happens when lightning strikes sand at all. That’s the best-case scenario: An amazing piece of petrified lightning with wet sand dripped on it by playful beachgoers. The spires on the top of it were put there afterwards.Įven if it were fulgurite underneath, the extra weight would surely topple or break it. Third, looking again at all the other examples of fulgurite specimens (that it looks nothing like), the object in the viral photo has obviously been tampered with. It would never make it to that size without having a team of geologists quickly excavate it in front of tanning swimmers for the shot. He viral photo is on the edge of a beach with foot traffic and a tide. Second, when petrified lightning is exposed by erosion, it is in a relatively calm area (they are fragile after all). First, the photo supposedly shows a specimen of fulgurite that looks nothing like any of the other myriad, cataloged examples that you can easy find on Google. This brings us all the way back to the viral photo.

But even though the constant push of erosion can exposure these underground wonders, they are still fragile, requiring careful excavation to unearth a whole specimen without breaking it. Just a few months ago, chemists used gas trapped in fulgurite bubbles to determine the flora of ancient deserts. Petrified lightning.įulgurite is always a rare find, so specimens like the photo above (and these less believable ones ) are awesome opportunities to glimpse nature’s raw power. The blast of a billion Joules radiates through the ground making fulgurite - hollow, glass-lined tubes with a sandy outside.

When it hits a sandy beach high in silica or quartz and the temperature goes beyond 1800 degrees Celsius, the lighting can fuse the sand into silica glass. Incredibly, lightning can and does in fact create something amazing when it hits sand, but the conditions have to be perfect. It was impossibly stable and the spires on top looked curiously like the wet sand I used to make odd sand castles as a boy. Spotted in multiple places on Reddit, the image was simply titled “What happens when lightning strikes sand.” You may have seen the photo above making its rounds on the Internet. And we know people can mistake that art for a stick in the sand. We know that it can be hotter than the surface of our Sun we know that it can absolutely strike in the same place twice and we know that when it hits sand, it can create wonderful art.

WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES SAND CRACK

Before science, the flash of lighting that followed a crack of thunder was the will of Greek gods or a violent outcropping of animism.

When lightning strikes sand