Every hour, more than a million lightning discharges occur on our planet, and people who find themselves on earth, in the sky or on the water often become their victims
According to the American physicist Jerry Aytman, the losses from being struck by lightning strikes can be comparable to the number of victims of a small local conflict and similar to the number of people annually dying under mudflows, in typhoons and tornadoes. Lightning bolts, following their unpredictable laws, reap their unfortunate harvest with constant constancy.
In July, several people died from lightning, hiding during a thunderstorm under a tree, recently three more young people died, because one of them used a cell phone during a thunderstorm. Tourists, going on a trip to unfamiliar countries, sometimes more often than at home, risk getting caught in a thunderstorm.
Linear lightning striking from clouds or from a clear sky directly is less dangerous. You can protect yourself from them if you do not leave your home in a thunderstorm, ground electrical appliances and do not wait out the bad weather on the water or under a tall tree. Ball lightning is much more dangerous. In most cases, ball lightning is a luminous spheroid, 12-25 centimeters in diameter, floating freely in the air and lasts 1-2 seconds. Less commonly, ball lightning is shaped like a crown. Such lightning bolts are painted in any shades of yellow-red, they can be gray-blue, lilac or even greenish. In many of them, you can see a luminous core and a shell, the core can rotate and occasionally flash like sparks on a toy ball.
Ball lightning is solar plasma. Under certain conditions, clumps are formed from the plasma, which are held back by the changed magnetic field. And if under normal conditions the plasma is instantly cooled, in contact with air, then this does not happen here. Ball lightning arranged in this way can exist only in clean air. When it comes into contact with dust, it instantly disappears. And this does not correlate with many reports of lightning passing through walls and other objects. For example, as in the famous case of climbers, to whom ball lightning flew into the tent. According to the participants in the events, more than once she flew into sleeping bags right through all layers of fabric and stung, pulling out pieces of people's meat. Moreover, there were narrow burnt holes on the sleeping bags of the participants of the ascent.
According to physicists, ball lightning can easily kill several people - it contains colossal energy. It is measured in several thousand joules. That is, a ball the size of a ping-pong ball contains a force that can lift 500 kilograms off the ground and lift them up a meter into the air.
Lightning can simply disappear, it can scatter like a fan of sparks, it can explode so that nothing alive around will survive. It is impossible to predict how she will behave. This is one of the most unpredictable phenomena on our planet. Moreover, sometimes the irrationality of the appearance and strikes of lightning seems amazingly orderly and, it would seem, meaningful. For example, in 1899, an Italian Primarda died from a lightning strike in his own yard. Thirty years later, in the same place, under the same circumstances, his son died, and on October 8, 1949, Rolland Primarda, the grandson of the first and the son of the second, was killed in the exact same yard, in the same place, and also struck by lightning.
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Some scientists believe that ball lightning is obtained from an ordinary linear lightning when a number of conditions are met. However, no one has yet been able to formulate precisely these conditions, or to reproduce ball lightning artificially, which would confirm the correctness of the theory. And like any secret of nature, this riddle attracts numerous researchers, both scientists and amateurs of the mysterious.
A number of amateurs and lightning hunters believe that work on this natural phenomenon is being carried out by different countries very actively, they are simply classified because of the high military and commercial value of research. They say that the articles published on the Internet are convincingly asked to be removed, and everyone who came close to solving the secret of ball lightning disappears without a trace. However, there are, of course, the most diverse versions of the disappearance of talented researchers. Indeed, accidents follow on the heels of paranormal lovers, and if something happens to them, like any ordinary person, the true essence of what is happening, of course, lies in the mysterious obstacles on the way to the Great Secret.
Lightning mystery hunters are different. Some, like the famous Nikola Tesla, who, according to scientists, as close as no one came to unraveling ball lightning, conduct physical experiments in laboratories. Others, like the Swiss scientist Karl Burger, lure natural lightning onto steel towers by photographing and studying them. Still others go on long journeys to valleys and mountains, which are natural traps, anomalous zones that attract ball and other lightning, and these researchers often become victims of "celestial electricity".
An example of such anomalous zones is Medveditskaya Mountain, where various mysterious things are happening - UFOs appear, people disappear, and incomprehensible tunnels appear. There is also a whole slope of "mad lightning", a place where they strike constantly. Lightning hunters constantly travel to Medveditskaya Mountain in order to most likely capture the discharges striking the slope, or even admire the fireballs live - after all, the probability of seeing this miracle of nature for an ordinary person is almost incredibly small.
Another anomalous zone is located in the Altai Territory - in the triangle between the regional center of Maima, the village of Platovo and Mount Babyrgan. Observations of scientists have shown that in this place 100 or more lightning discharges per minute can be observed, while in ordinary places during the same time, a maximum of 15 strikes are possible, no more. Some of the researchers who visited this triangle during scientific expeditions agree that this place can be attributed to heliosensitive zones - all processes occurring here are closely related to the Sun.
In China, which hosts the Summer Olympics in August this year, thousands of people die from lightning strikes every year, and losses exceed $ 120 million. And this country has its own anomalous places - here lightning is most attracted by Shandong province. Regularly arriving tropical cyclones provide researchers with a wide field for observations, and a developed complex of meteorological radars makes the conditions for their conduct almost
ideal.
Someday the riddles of linear and ball lightning will be solved, and humanity will tame the heavenly fire, putting at its service the unprecedented hitherto gratuitous and wasteless, environmentally friendly energy. Perhaps this is the very new source of energy that scientists are still looking for in vain.
