Arctic Lightning Strikes Tripled in a Decade
As global warming remakes conditions at the top of the world, lightning inches closer to the North Pole.
Cameras aboard the International Space Station orbiting over Rhode Island capture a lightning storm near the arctic circle on June 3, 2018.
Source: NASA
Meteorologists flipped their lids when they found out that a summer storm—more common to temperate latitudes—had produced a lightning strike just 32 miles from the North Pole on Aug. 13, 2019. Never before had lightning been detected so close to the top of the world, and the event was duly inscribed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
This seeming fluke may not be a novelty for long. Not only did the number of Arctic lightning detections triple from 2010 to 2020, the numbers rose in tandem with global average temperatures over the same period, according to a paper published Monday in Geophysical Research Letters.