#Life little alchemy free

Each bolt is equally destructive all the way along its typical 5km length through the air.

#Life little alchemy free

Where lightning meets the ground, a direct hit is easily powerful enough to blow apart mature trees – and create conditions totally different to the everyday (see box P set free below). Each lightning bolt is only about 2–3cm thick, but carries so much energy it heats the surrounding air to 30,000☌, far hotter than the surface of the Sun.īut in the upper troposphere, where it comes out of thunderstorms, ozone is a greenhouse gas NO limitsĪ flash of lightning can light up the sky. As the primary oxidant of Earth’s atmosphere, key to the air’s ability to cleanse itself, the finding was potentially as significant as it was puzzling.Ī decade after the final flight of the field campaign, Brune and his colleagues’ latest work on the hydroxyl spikes suggests lightning’s influence on the chemistry of the atmosphere reaches far further than previously thought. During several flights, the team detected baffling spikes in hydroxyl concentration around thunderstorms, orders of magnitude above any previous atmospheric measurement of the reactive radical. The flying laboratory is heavily modified with instruments to sample the atmosphere in and around storm cloudsĮqually spectacular, it has proved, was the data the team collected. ‘Flying around these storms and into the cloud anvils, it was spectacular.’ ‘They don’t let you get too close, but as close as we could to maximise what we were seeing of what is coming up and out of the storm,’ Brune says. Monitoring their radar, the pilots would skirt the storm’s core, circling up into the cloud anvil. ‘The pilots were fantastic,’ recalls William Brune, an atmospheric chemist at Penn State University who was one of the scientific leads on the campaign, and who occupied the cockpit jump seat on many of the flights, deciding which storm to chase. The study was expected to have relevance in subjects ranging from urban air pollution to greenhouse gas production. By comparing the molecular make-up of air going into a thunderstorm with that coming out, the team aimed to understand the influence of powerful convection currents and lightning strikes on the atmosphere’s chemical composition. The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry campaign was a major US collaborative project studying the impact of large thunderstorms on atmospheric chemistry. The bigger the storm, the better.Īboard each flight was a precious cargo of chemists and their analytical instruments. During a field campaign over the great plains of the central US in early summer 2012, the DC-8’s pilots spent their time in the air deliberately intercepting thunderstorms. Hollywood may yet be to option their story, but the pilots flying Nasa’s DC-8 Earth Science Laboratory aeroplane unquestionably have the right stuff.