Flash, flood

Lightning strikes make atmospheric electricity look vertical. In reality, the bolts are both horizontal and vertical as seen from space.

The size of a lightning bolt is huge, at least five kilometers high and long. On 31 July, a new world record for the longest lightning bolt was announced, CBS News reports.

Dubbed “megaflash,” the 829-kilometer long, seven-second bolt occurred between eastern Texas and Kansas City, Missouri, USA on 22 October 2017, according to a report published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The previous record reported by the World Meteorological Organization, according to CBS News, was 767 kilometers long and occurred across the southern US and the Gulf of Mexico on 29 April 2020.

Scientists are able to measure megaflashes using satellite technology, said Michael Peterson, the report’s lead author and a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Meanwhile, researchers identified the biggest flood ever as occurring in Greenland, Lancaster University (LU) of the United Kingdom reported on its website, citing a study on the deluge published in the journal Nature Geoscience in July 2025.

According to the study authored by glaciologist Jade Bowling, a lake beneath the Greenland ice sheet rapidly drained and the force of the so-called meltwater fractured the ice above, causing it to burst out across the surface,

“The researchers discovered that over a period of 10 days in the summer of 2014, an 85-meter-deep crater appeared across a two-square kilometer area on the ice surface, as 90 million cubic meters of water flooded out of the underlying lake,” LU reports.

State-of-the-art satellite data and numerical models were used by the researchers to identify the flood, including a 385,000-square meter area of fractured and distorted ice that suddenly appeared in a region of previously unblemished ice.