Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Catatumbo Lightning

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Catatumbo lightning is one of nature's most amazing displays of showiness, with strikes occurring 28 times per minute for nine hours a day, 300 days a year. So take cover and take a listen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and here's Jerry and Dave's not here, but that's okay because this is short stuff and that's just how we do it. And Chuck, I'm excited about this one because I had no idea about this, had never heard of it and you totally scored with this one, so thank you. It wasn't too long ago. It was when the last six months or so, I became aware of the catatombo lightning. I think I was just looking through like weather phenomena because that's always interesting.

Want to shout out explorersweb.com, scienceabc.com, nasa.gov along with some other websites because there's plenty of websites talking about the catatombo lightning. Yeah, I want to shout out Atlas Obscura who I saw a pretty neat little two minute video on and learned some extra stuff too. So catatombo lightning is this very specific, very isolated phenomenon that takes place in one specific spot in Venezuela on a very giant lake. Lake, I'm going to say Marasayibo. Marasayibo.

Okay. What do you think? I was going to say Maracaibo, but I don't know if that's a hard sea or a saucy. Oh, that's a great one. Let's go with Maracaibo. Mine was way too fancy. One specific part of this lake even, it's that like localized. Yeah.

And so you'd think like, okay, big whoop, there's some lightning that happens is one specific part of this lake. And you would be right if it weren't for the fact that these lightning storms take place at roughly the same time every day, about 300 days out of the year. That's right. And you're saying, okay, who cares, still big whoop, you got some lightning. That is lightning such that you are getting a possible lightning strike maybe every two seconds.

Yeah. During this timeframe, such that it almost provides a near constant night skylight. It's that constant. Here's the other thing too about it that just makes this one of the most amazing weather phenomenon around. It takes place over like nine hours. So every night, almost 300 nights a year, this lightning strikes about 28 times per minute over this one localized area for nine hours.

It's amazing. Yeah. That's remarkable. And like you said, I mean, it lights up enough stuff that you can see everything. And there was actually a very famous raid from 1595 that Francis Drake was carrying out or about to carry out on the city of Maracaibo, on the shore of Lake Maracaibo appropriately. And he was found out because of that lightning storm. He was seen before he could attack and they managed to repel the attack.

That's amazing. It's also known as the beacon of Maracaibo because it had served as a beacon for sailors over time. It's one of the oldest lakes on earth dating back to 36 million years. And it was a big shipping route. If you were going to the port of Cabimas and Maracaibo, you would go through there and navigators would count on this lightning as a beacon. It's sort of like having a lighthouse around at all times in a way except a lot more dangerous

because if you're thinking like, do people get struck by lightning more there and killed more? The answer for sure is yes. Yeah. NASA calls it the lightning hotspot of the world, which apparently in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that used to be the lightning hotspot, but I'm not sure how it ever would have thought to have beaten the catatumbo lightning, but now it's official. The lightning, it's it.

If you're talking about the indigenous people, the Wari, W-A-R-I, they believed that it might have been the work of fireflies paying tribute to their creator guide, which... And that was wrong, wrong, wrong. It was wrong, but it's always fun to hear what the early folks thought about things. Sure. But instead, we now know exactly what's going on thanks to some friends at NOAA. And I think we should take a break and we'll come back and explain how this works. What do you think?

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And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. There's a skyline drive in the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So the reason why this phenomenon is so isolated and also so reliable, it starts about after dusk, and again, it lasts for about nine hours, is because of the geography of Lake Mericaybo and where it is.

Apparently it's right about at the mouth of the Caribbean. The Caribbean is very nearby. So there's a big steady supply of warm water that keeps the lake warm. Okay? Right. That's part one. Yeah. And as we talked about in our wind episode, wind is created when warm air rises and cooler

air flows in to kind of fill its spot and even things out. But one of the other consequences of warm air rising, especially warm air in the tropics that's impregnated with humid Caribbean air, or yeah, humid Caribbean air, as it floats up, it starts to come in contact with colder air that often contains colder ice particles. And when that warm water vapor and those cold ice particles collide, they actually generate static electricity. And it's on a minuscule, minuscule level for each of these collisions. But if there's enough of them, and in this area there's plenty, all of that stuff can

create lightning and it can create it in aces. That's right. And in the case of Lake Mericaybo, what's going on is you have these, it's sort of surrounded on three sides by these mountain ridges. So what that leaves is a really narrow little pathway to the Gulf of Venezuela where that Caribbean seawater is just constantly bringing in warm water through that little channel. And then you've got also, you know, you've got, you're in the tropics there, so you've got the sun that's also pulling moisture from the lake.

And then you've got these winds. And I think they found, there's this researcher, what's the, Angel Muñoz, right? And Angel did a bunch of research on this, basically trying to predict a, like coming up with a model to predict conditions that might lead to occurrence of lightning and not, not just here, but period. And then applying it here to see like what the deal was. Yeah. Because they used to suggest that it was uranium deposits or maybe methane deposits beneath

the lake that were somehow electrostatically charging the air above it. But I guess they've never found uranium or methane deposits to support that. And it's not even clear whether that could happen. So Angel Muñoz said, I think I've got this figured out. He managed to trace and track the, the wind that's generated every night. And it's so reliable. It has its own name. He calls it the Maricabo Basin Nocturnal Low-Level Jet.

Yeah, he needs to work on that name a little bit. Sure. It should at least be an acronym. Yeah. I was going to say it's not even the NBNLJ. Yeah, not a vowel in there. So because of the geography and the topography, that wind comes in every night and it's funneled through that little narrow mouth that you were talking about.

But as it pushes along inward, landward, it eventually runs into those mountains that ring the lake itself, right? And when that happens, it goes up and it's pushing all of that warm air right up into that colder air. And this wind, this jet picks up about the same time every day around dusk. So there's your wind right there. And then you've got the hot water or the hot, warm air that's full of water being pushed up into the colder air.

Yeah. And it's kind of interesting. So you have this air that sort of has a tidal motion going as well. So this air is flowing in and then receding again. And just the fact that it's, it's happening at about the same time every day because of the way that everything just happened to be laid out and sit in just the right way to make this happen at the same time every day, well, not every day, but what is it, two hundred is 300 days a year?

300 days a year. And there was a period in 2010 where it went six weeks without it. And that was a huge deal because it doesn't usually do that. And they figured out that it was because of El Nino bringing very dry wind in. Yeah. And to be clear, these are storms. It's not like you just sit back and watch the light show and it's just like this warm summer heat lightning or something.

Like oftentimes it's accompanied by really strong surface winds and it's, I don't know what it's like to live there. I think about a, what about a quarter of the population of Venezuela lives sort of nearby. Yeah. So it's, it's a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, that's just every single day, I guess they just count on these big, big storms coming in.

Yeah. So they've got the lightning show, the Catatumbo lightning 300 nights a year and the stormy about 160 nights a year, there's a ton. So what's happening when it's not stormy, but you're getting the lightning? They're probably, oh, so I saw on that Atlas Obscura video that sometimes it's, it can be like hundreds, a hundred kilometers in the sky. Oh, okay. So you get that light show, but it's really quiet.

So that's pretty cool too, huh? Yeah. Those are the money nights to be there, I guess. For sure. Yeah. And I saw one other thing that I not only saw this here, I didn't realize it, but I had some Bader Meinhof stuff going on because there's this website called Futility Closet that is just an amazing website.

So I saw this fact in this article and then last night I was on Futility Closet and I saw the same fact. So it has to, that means it's worth sharing, don't you think? Yeah, let's hear it. Venezuela, supposedly it was named by Amerigo Vespucci, who named it Venezuela because when he got to the Lake Maracaibo region, he saw people living in huts on stilts. And it reminded him of people living in houses on stilts in Venice. So Venice apparently means little, or Venezuela apparently means little Venice.

That's amazing. I thought so too. I think it's so cool. What else you got? I got nothing else. Well, I'm glad we explained it. I love ones that are like, this is amazing and here's exactly how it works. So thank you very much, Angel Munoz.

Thanks Atlas Obscura, NASA, Science ABC, Explorer Web, and Futility Closet. I love it. Short stuff is out, everybody. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.