Detailed footage reveals what triggers lightning
The clickbait headline belies the content of the article: researchers still don’t know exactly what triggers lightning.<p>Personally I find the leading hypothesis a bit absurd or at least unbelievable. The idea that colliding ice crystals shed electrons and form ionized air in masses great enough to trigger the most energetic phenomenon on the plant seems … like a Newtonian hammer looking for a nail.<p>It’s well known that the sun emits a powerful electric field which causes the “northern lights” to appear at the poles of the planet. And it’s well known that solar activity is correlated with large scale weather patterns and atmospheric thermodynamics.<p>How is the Sun not a viable explanation for the origin of lightning? Cosmic rays initiating an electron cascade is interesting, but I would expect the sun to play a bigger role than that.