What Happens To Sand When Struck By Lightning

Stronger lightning strikes and thinner beds of sand make for larger ones.

Such current may propagate into silica rich. And you can find them on the. When the lightning perfectly strikes the sand it branches through it like the root system of a tree to make this beautiful anomaly. Fulgurites are classified as a variety of the mineraloid lechatelierite.

The lightning creates a tube of glass through the ground not above it. Scientists call these creations fulgurites. You can actually see the impact hole when it occurs in rock. When ordinary negative polarity cloud ground lightning discharges into a grounding substrate greater than 100 million volts of potential difference may be bridged.

But that simple fact is key to getting to the root of the viral photo. Fulgurites are natural tubes clumps or masses of sintered vitrified and or fused soil sand rock organic debris and other sediments that sometimes form when lightning discharges into ground. When lightning does strike sand it has to create a temperature of at least 1 800 degrees first of all and when that happens something is created known as fulgurite and it is not nearly as pretty as the piece of blown glass shown in the movie. As revealed by a rather unique 1975 study artificial fulgurites exist too and they ve been made in.

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When such a powerful lightning bolt strikes a sandy area like a beach or a dune the sand particles can melt and fuse together in less than a second. You might ve seen this phenomenon depicted in the 2002 reese witherspoon romcom sweet home alabama or maybe in a viral photo that circulated the internet in 2013. Enjoy the videos and music you love upload original content and share it all with friends family and the world on youtube. The strike vaporizes the sand to make unique geologic creations.

It creates glass sculptures. When lightning strikes sand on the beach or in a desert it creates glass tubes called fulgurites. Sand melts at about 1800 degrees celsius but the temperature in a bolt of lighting can reach 30 000 degrees or more than five times the temperature on the surface of the sun.