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  • Science Illustrated

    EARTH’S ELECTRIC HEARTBEAT

    Aug 18, 2021 5 minutes
    By Rolf Haugaard Nielsen

    Slowly count to three. Have you finished? In the course of those three seconds, around 150 lightning bolts will have struck Earth somewhere on its surface. Every year, 1.4 billion lightning bolts strike Earth’s surface. But data gathered from satellites and from the International Space Station (ISS) show that a similar number of mysterious lightning bolts are shooting high up into the atmosphere. These observations confirm a 100-year-old theory by Scottish physicist Charles Wilson, according to which opposed directions of lightning hold the world together in a huge electrical circuit. It’s like a global pulse, constantly charging and discharging the atmosphere – and it’s a process which might see the global climate of the future spin out of control.

    Energetic space particles

    Traditional lightning originates when water rises as clouds to heights where it freezes, then as hail and ice crystals descend into more rising water, electrons are stripped away. The result

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