William O. Mendoza: Where Do Lightning Come From?

When we are little kids we ask older people many questions about our surroundings to understand better what we see, but when I was 4 years old I saw something that attracted my attention.  I ask a different question: “Where does lightning come from, and what are they made of? But the answer I received wasn’t enough because I didn’t understand.  So I develop this fascination with what I think is nature's perfect expression of beauty, magnificence and power: the lightning. But it wasn’t until I studied physics and chemistry in university that helped me to understand the specific phenomenon that make the conditions for lightning to occur.  So my question now is, how can so much power and energy can come down from the sky in a beautiful and simple way known as lightning? 

Nature is a very interesting creator of many wonderful things we know and study, but also it has some very specific ways to make things.  To be able to form lightning, there must be certain conditions in the atmosphere; the sky, filled with electric charges, negative and positive accommodate the positive charges on top and the negative charges on the bottom; called updraft and downdraft to basically make a polarized cloud.  Since opposite charges attract themselves, these two highly charge clouds try to be together, but the charge is too big that they need a neutral way to discharge the energy, so the electrons of the air between them are accommodated and the flow of energy is transferred to the current of electrons given place to liberate energy and land in a positively charge object in form of light, power and sound leading place to what we know as a lightning.  

The physics of the electromagnetism is defined as: “The science of the interactions of charges, electric fields and electric currents” is where the topic of the physics that studies lightning; since in the process of a formation there are generated many electric fields, electric currents and changes into other forms of energy. The lightning is a pure example of energy and different types of electromagnetism physics in nature, generating a big fascination to physicists, inspiring them to study the behavior of it.  One of nature’s most extraordinary aspects of lightning is the energy that it produces; with an incredible 5 GW of power, lightning leaves anything it touches incinerated in a matter of 0.2 seconds.  Another very interesting aspect of lightning is its form; the way the electrons manage to form a neutral path for the energy to come through makes it look like a crack in the sky. 

Even with all the advances in technology and researches to find new methods for clean and non-damaging energy, I’ve never heard of a way to manage the electric fields of a lightning.  It would be a good idea to harness the energy from it in places that thunderstorms are very frequent, but I’m looking forward to developing great jobs with lightning.  A possibility would be to create crystal sculptures with the lightning; the lightning melts the sand by channeling the electromagnetic energy, and allows people to create a magnificent crystal sculptures.  Using this concept, we can use lightning's energy to make goods for humanity.