21 JANUARY 2021 Of all the weather phenomena our magnificent planet throws at us, lightning is one of the most spectacular - and the most mysterious. Even though storms are a regular occurrence, we're still at pains to understand and describe their crackling electrical discharges generated in the sky.
One kind of lightning is so strange and rare, in fact, that we didn't even have concrete evidence it existed until 1990, when researchers identified its signature 'rocket-like' motion in video shot from NASA's Space Shuttle the previous year. Later dubbed 'blue jets', the streaks are now recognised as brilliant flashes of light that last just a few hundred milliseconds, as lightning streaks upwards from the clouds and into the stratosphere.