• Question: What causes lightning?

    Asked by sammy1 to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Lightning is caused by static electricity. The same thing that causes little sparks when you wear clothes made of man made fibers, or when you’ve been walking around on a nylon carpet.
      Materials are made of atoms that are normally electrically neutral. But sometimes when particles rub against one another electrons get pulled off one atom and attatched to another. This makes one of the atoms negatively charged (the one that lost an electron) and the other positively charged (the one that gained an electron).
      This is not a very stable situation and the atoms want to get back to their nice normal neutral state. they do this by firing off a little spark of electricity which carries the electron back to its right place. These are the sparks you see.

      Lightening is just static electricity on a very large scale. Atoms in the atomosphere rub against one another, and some lose electrons and some gain electrons. Making lots of charged atoms, which want to get back to their neutral state. They do this by firing off a big spark of electricity and this is the lightning that we see.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      All the particles in the cloud rub against each become charged. This happens due to static electricity, the same way a balloon gets charged when you rub against your jumper. The electrons from one side jump to the other, and you get a charge building. The same happens in the clouds, the positive charge builds at the top the negative at the bottom.

      Eventually the charge is too much to be stable and the electrons have to jump somewhere. They need somewhere to dump all that charge and they need a big object to do that, so they find the nearest which is usually the ground. When it jumps to the earth it creates a huge spark: lightning.

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