The Explanation of Why Lightning Has Zigzag Shape
- Fernando Flores/Wikimedia
VoxPop – Lightning can light up the sky in a bright flash and take on a variety of shapes, but most people know that lightning has a zigzag shape. Well, here’s the explanation of why lightning has zigzag shape..
In the study published in December 2022 in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics Lowke and colleagues suggest that the characteristic zigzag pattern of lightning is caused by a highly conducting form of oxygen that builds up irregularly as the bolt travels toward the ground, sometimes over great distances.
Extremely fast photographs of the lightning show that a lightning bolt is preceded by "leaders" of ionized (electrically charged) air that branch out from the bottom of a thundercloud, he said. In most cases, these leaders are too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
Air usually acts as an insulator, but the leaders create regions with high concentrations of a special form of highly conducting oxygen called "singlet delta oxygen” that is, oxygen molecules with a lower-than-normal energy state.
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- U-Report
Each "zig" (or "zag") of a leader, a "step" which is about 165 feet (50 meters) long is caused by electric charge discharging across such a region, Lowke stated.
The powerful magnetic fields from the last step almost instantaneously create additional singlet delta oxygen molecules from the regular oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, and concentrations of this highly conductive oxygen can branch out in all directions from where the step ends, as quoted from the Live Science site.
The leading discharges traverse successive steps in about a millionth of a second, each followed by a brief dark period during which the photographs show no visible discharges and finally hit the ground or a tall object connected to it.
The collision produces a visible and very loud lightning backlash for about a thousandth of a second, traveling back along the zigzag path of the high-conduction delta singlet oxygen. The other head lost control at this point and disappeared.
