Why does lightning happen?
Sky Battery Showdown
Why does lightning happen?
Somewhere right now, a bolt of lightning is punching through a cloud and slamming into the ground. It's bright, it's loud, and it happens because clouds are secretly doing something that sounds impossible: they're building batteries in the sky.
To make lightning, you need a cloud with an attitude problem. Inside a thundercloud — a towering cumulonimbus that can stretch six miles tall — winds are thrashing around like a washing machine on high spin. Ice crystals the size of sand grains are smashing into soft hailstones the size of marbles, over and over, millions of times a second.
