The new world record holder for longest flash is a bolt of lightning that spanned over 500 miles across three US states. According to the World Meteorological Organization, a single flash in April 2020 spanned 477.2 miles (768 kilometres) across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi which shattered the previous record of 440.6 kilometres (709 kilometres) achieved in Brazil in 2018.
A single lightning strike over Uruguay and northern Argentina in 2020 lasted 17.1 seconds, breaking the previous record of 16.7 seconds. Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, chief of records confirmation of the meteorological organization, said that normally, lightning doesn’t travel more than 10 miles and lasts less than a second. ‘These two lightning flash records are absolutely extraordinary’, Cerveny said.
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He added that as they were cloud-to-cloud and many thousand feet above the ground, no one was in danger. As per Cerveny, thanks to modern satellite monitoring technology, these records, which are unrelated to climate change, were discovered and confirmed. Both regions are among the few places in the world prone to the type of intense storms that can produce what are called ‘megaflashes’.
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