However, the traditional newspaper (if there really is such an animal) is threatened by shrinking readership. Television is focused on entertainment, even when it dresses it up as news.. Radio is threatened by satellites. All are confronted with the frictionless distribution enabled by the Internet, the disruptive effects of digital information. None have figured out a business model that pays for content at today's rates.
Thunder is a compression wave and will dissipate with time and distance. Under excellent conditions, thunder can be heard about 12 miles away from the lightning strike. However most of the time conditions arenât this good and we usually canât hear thunder any more than about 5 miles away.
Counting the seconds between the strike and the arrival of the thunder and dividing the number of seconds by five gives us a rough estimate of the distance to the strike in miles (dividing by three for a distance in kilometers). So, in the example above, the strike would have been about 1.4 miles (about 2.3 km) away.