It seems like we can’t go a week these days without hearing about some new weather phenomenon that’s some harbinger of doom.
I’m not sure this red lightning qualifies, but I mean…it’s definitely unsettling.
The red spurts of electricity are apparently a rare natural event known as “gigantic jets” or “giant sprites.”
The electrical discharges are intense and rise up into the atmosphere rather than zapping down toward the ground.
The footage was captured by the Caribbean Astronomy Society on August 4, 2024 during a group of thunderstorms on Puerto Rico.
In their Facebook post, they were obviously thrilled to capture three gigantic jets and some red sprites, too.
“The images we obtained suggest that these discharges that were seen from the Island must have had a longer duration than usual. So much so that probably some people could have seen them.”
Several people in the comments confirmed they had seen the show with their naked eyes.
Gigantic jets are the rarest form of lightning and occur only around 1,000 times a year. They are 10-50 times more intense than regular lightning and last a fraction of a second.
They occur most often with thunderstorms that are high above the clouds, and the red color is due to a reaction with nitrogen in the mesosphere.
The first ones were caught on camera in 1989. NASA says the cause isn’t yet known, but that it likely has something to do with an imbalance between different parts of Earth’s atmosphere.
So if you’ve ever thought you saw something red in the lightning, you weren’t crazy.
Which is always nice to know.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.