Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

https://phys.org/news/2024-10-amount-variety-gamma-large-tropical.html

by wglb • 2 years ago

166 120 2 years ago

cperciva• 2 years ago

Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end.

Or put another way, 150 MV. What's with this media obsession with using obscure non-SI units?

mhog_hn• 2 years ago

I agree in giving flak for using the term AA batteries in this context.

ctoth• 2 years ago

Shots fired!

doodlebugging• 2 years ago

They could've made it easier for laymen and laywomen to grok if they simply would've defined the volume of batteries in terms of how many Olympic-sized swimming pools one could fill with all those batteries.

shrubble2• 2 years ago

Subtly played!

throwaway314155• 2 years ago

Familiarity with the unit is important to gauge scale.

madars• 2 years ago

But familiarity gets more remote as you need larger and larger (or, smaller and smaller) multipliers. It's far more illustrative to say "the volume of a typical gas tank" than "the internal volume of hundred million poppy seeds", even though the volumes are in the same ballpark. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(voltage) says that high voltage substations are in 100 kV range and 25.5MV is "The largest man-made DC voltage – produced in a Van de Graaff generator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory" and gives me much better color than a "comparison" with 100 million batteries. (By the way, 100 million batteries stacked together is a bit over the length of one marathon - how many readers could easily tell you that just from the description alone? Much better to measure many lengths in marathons than 10^8's of battery lengths!)

calmbonsai• 2 years ago

True, but at least get the units right.

A "stack of AA batteries" as described would be a measure of electrical potential (i.e. voltage), not electric field strength (Volts / unit-length in the applicable dimension(s)).

It's been known for quite some time that high density static electric field "break-downs" generate electromagnetic radiation all throughout the spectrum--look at any wide-band antenna's reception next to any spark-gap generator. It doesn't take much--even the piezoelectric igniter on a grill wand will do it.

One can also generate X-rays by rapidly unrolling Scotch tape. It the same phenomena on a _much_ smaller scale. What's "new" here are the two distinct types of gamma discharges indicating (likely) very different field breakdowns--not that these gamma rays themselves are being produced.

amateurCoder52• 2 years ago

That's as strong as 175,000 electric eels!

amateurCoder52• 2 years ago

Connected in series, obviously.

analog31• 2 years ago

The proper units for electric field would be voltage per unit length. Fortunately an electric eel has both a voltage and a length, so it could be eels per eel.

tourmalinetaco• 2 years ago

I assume they wanted a way to make it sound massive when it’s really not. Like, that’s about enough to run the average American household for 10 years, but we have power plants that supply multiples of that daily.

idontwantthis• 2 years ago

A voltage is not a unit of power.

sneak4• 2 years ago

Nobody outside of the industry knows how much a megavolt is.

Megavolts are actually the obscure unit, for normal people.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Most people don't even really understand "million" and "billion" other than as "a lot".

labster• 2 years ago

If all of those 100M AA batteries were laid out flat, they would cover over 13 football fields (70000 sq m), including the Chargers home stadium.

lazide5• 2 years ago

How heavy do you think they’d be in elephants and/or Volkswagen beetles (up to you to pick 70’s era or newer).

k4rli• 2 years ago

Square meters yet surely you mean American football here. Further confusion ensues.

xeonmc• 2 years ago

Thus we arrive at a new unit: electric-football-fields

trhway2• 2 years ago

while the field is strong, the actual energy seems to be not much - a lightning bolt is few billions of Joules, i.e. about 1000 KW/h (100kg gasoline).

slow_typist• 2 years ago

kWh

sandworm101• 2 years ago

Well, 100kg of gas along with a similar ammount of oxygen. Even then, burning through 100kg of gasoline in the few microseconds of a lighting bolt would probably be more powerful than any non-nuclear bomb ever dropped.

hinkley• 2 years ago

How many libraries of Congress could you light with that power?

liversage• 2 years ago

In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc.

Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars".

This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands.

My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.

benterix3• 2 years ago

Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.

rsynnott• 2 years ago

The Register also have one: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

ahazred8ta• 2 years ago

There was a children's book, 'Half A Giraffe', which led to that phrase being used in size comparisons. https://old.reddit.com/r/HalfAGiraffe/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...

beAbU2• 2 years ago

How many tesla superchargers is that?

teeray• 2 years ago

“Americans will use anything but the metric system”

DCH3416• 2 years ago

And there's nothing wrong with that. Pick the best unit for the job and move on.

thanatos519• 2 years ago

Why use AA batteries? It's so hard to zap yourself with them. At least with a 9V battery you can lick it to get a sense of how much power is in them. Not that you could extrapolate that other than to get the sense that the electric field of the storm could vaporize you!

nickpsecurity• 2 years ago

One form is stating hey, scientific fact that the audience may or may not understand. The other form uses language the audience understands specifically to build up their knowledge. Reducing their confusion also helps them enjoy the article.

So, the journalist are optimizing their writing style For the majority of people to understand and enjoy the writing. That’s probably the best way to write.

jajko• 2 years ago

Yes, but that's only because societies basically gave up on trying to get better in such ways and laid back very deep in their 'comfort zone' for the lack of better words, laziness and fear of challenge may be another. You know, the place where ossification happens, be it in individuals or in millions.

Sweden switched to right hand driving in 1967, I don't think if they postponed it till today they would still dare (not bashing swedes in any way, happy to be wrong here). Now that's a brave move, and everybody gained from it. Imagine US switching say to left hand side if whole world would be driving like that... nope.

It doesn't matter if metric (of Celzius based on freakin' H2O states for fucks sake) system is vastly simpler, especially the less intelligent/educated one is (since we have 10 fingers in our face 24/7 and we learn counting on them), ego is too big, thus you guys measure in washing machines, football fields etc. You guys even fail to realize that whole US population would benefit, scientists don't care they will use whatever suits them and they are smart enough to not be slowed down by units used or their conversion.

Nice summary via great Nate Bargatze in this SNL sketch [1]. Its fun to make fun of but its also sad, because it really is pure ego game, nothing more and those are always childish and immature at their core, throttling the potential for greatness in hard to measure ways.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk

aithrowawaycomm• 2 years ago

I think they should have said 150MV regardless of the comparison, but some sort of "intuitive" illustrations is useful for non-specialists. But as other commenters have pointed out, millions of batteries is also unintuitive because you're trading an intuitive voltage for a completely unintuitive quantity.

I would have gone a different direction by making the voltages and quantities "almost intuitive" - say the electric field is as strong as hundreds of high-voltage substations (500 or so). Laypeople don't have an intuition on substations' physics but they do have an intuition on the economics (tons of homes and businesses depend on that thing) and therefore at least some appreciation for how powerful that voltage is. Likewise we can't visualize hundreds of anything, but we can (sort of) visualize a 20x20 rectangle and appreciate how many 400 is. So I think 400 HV substations is at least vaguely graspable.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

Florida units.

Lazare• 2 years ago

I mean, you can screw it up using SI units too! Eg https://x.com/HaydenDonnell/status/1503916925713547264

A strapping newborn baby boy is understood to have set a New Zealand record, weighing in at a whopping 6.85kg (15lb 1oz) - the equivalent of nearly seven 1kg blocks of cheese.

I mean, the kilogram is an SI unit, but uh, I do not know if clarity has been added here.

garrettgarcia2• 2 years ago

Andrew Hall has hypothesized that plasma flow has a large part to play in thunderstorm formation and tornados. These surprising gamma rays mentioned in the article would seem to support Hall's hypothesis.

Hall's theories are well outside of the mainstream and I don't know his credentials, if any, and cannot speak to his hypothesis's veracity. I'm not a scientist. Would any actual scientists care to comment?

Here is a video where he explains his theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU706V0bltc

dylan6042• 2 years ago

From the linked video, "while their search for green tinted lights continue..."

Such a non-chalantly delivered diss. I found the lowering of ground strike lightning during the tornado interesting.

nelox• 2 years ago

Stole Bruce Banner’s thunder

riffraff• 2 years ago

the tropical part obviously explains Street Fighter II's Blanka resemblance to the Hulk.

dschuetz• 2 years ago

So the fictional radiation storms in Fallout 4 are kinda spot on.

houseplant• 2 years ago

the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed.

these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.

bguebert2• 2 years ago

Here's an article with some pictures in case anyone else was curious about red sprites like I was.

https://earthsky.org/earth/definition-what-are-lightning-spr...

dylan6042• 2 years ago

that shot with them aligned with Milky Way is spectacular

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

The wikipedia page actually has some incredible images as well, including several from space that show their scale and position in the atmosphere (high up)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(lightning)

garrettgarcia2• 2 years ago

Sprites and similar phenomena have been reported for many years by pilots and others, but scientists didn't believe them until recently because it didn't fit their flawed models. It's similar how scientists didn't believe centuries of stories about rogue waves from mariners until one was recorded with a buoy in 1995.

Pecos Hank, the best storm chaser on Youtube, has recorded beautiful video of sprites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGPQ5kzJ9Tg

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

I wonder if this is in any way responsible for the increased biodiversity there - maybe a slightly higher mutation rate?

davidw• 2 years ago

Interesting thought, but you'd have to extract the effect from all the environmental factors like abundant water, a warm climate, soils, etc...

superbiome• 2 years ago

Makes sense. Isn’t this one method that new crops are made, by radiating seeds and seeing what new diversity arises.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

Atomic gardens!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening

throwawaymaths3• 2 years ago

The genetic diversity of rainforests is largely an illusion and/or evo biologists looking for taxpayer funded safari expeditions.

Most of the biodiversity in rainforests is in megafauna and insects, largely because the megaflora are fumigating the shit out of the soil.

If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place to look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity is extremely high -- probably because of intense competition for scarce resources plus boom/bust growth cycles driven by intermittent water and even a high degree of phased ecosystem overlay.

Of course that observation could also be evobiologists who like to go on taxpayer funded hiking junkets

Fierer, Jackson 2006 if you want a citation

vanderZwan5• 2 years ago

Most of the biodiversity in rainforests is in megafauna and insects
If you want a very high degree of biodiversity the place to look is temperate deserts, where the microbial diversity is extremely high

This sounds a bit like that "you have more bacteria in your gut than you have cells in your body" fun fact. Which may be true in terms of individually countable cells, but in terms of weight it's another story.

In the same sense comparing the genetic diversity of megafauna and insects in one region to those of the bacteria in another is a bit disingenuous imo, because that's comparing two different ecosystem "categories".

IIUC, bacteria tend to leak genetic material between each other. Genes get swapped around a lot, and if some combos don't work out, well, there are uncountably other bacterial cells around. Meanwhile, megafauna and insects have much smaller populations that only swap genes through sexual reproduction, which recombines genes a lot more slowly. It's not a fair comparison.

westurner5• 2 years ago

Does this help to explain the genetic diversity of the tropical latitudes; is the genetic mutation rate higher in the presence of gamma radiation?

So many of our plants and flowers (here in North America) originate from rainforests and tropical latitudes, but survive at current temps for northern latitudes.

idunnoman12222• 2 years ago

No, insignificant

idunnoman12222• 2 years ago

No, insignificant Is diverse because there is more biomass

westurner5• 2 years ago

/? is the genetic mutation rate higher in the presence of gamma radiation: https://www.google.com/search?q=is%20the%20genetic%20mutatio... :

- "Frequency and Spectrum of Mutations Induced by Gamma Rays Revealed by Phenotype Screening and Whole-Genome Re-Sequencing in Arabidopsis thaliana" (2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8775868/ :

Gamma rays have been widely used as a physical agent for mutation creation in plants, and their mutagenic effect has attracted extensive attention. However, few studies are available on the comprehensive mutation profile at both the large-scale phenotype mutation screening and whole-genome mutation scanning.

- "Bedrock radioactivity influences the rate and spectrum of mutation" (2020) https://elifesciences.org/articles/56830

- "Comparison of mutation spectra induced by gamma-rays and carbon ion beams" (2024) https://academic.oup.com/jrr/article/65/4/491/7701037 :

These results suggest that carbon ion beams produce complex DNA damage, and gamma-rays are prone to single oxidative base damage, such as 8-oxoguanine. Carbon ion beams can also introduce oxidative base damage, and the damage species is 5-hydroxycytosine. This was consistent with our previous results of DNA damage caused by heavy ion beams. We confirmed the causal DNA damage by mass spectrometry for these mutations.

westurner5• 2 years ago

If you dropped a thing through a storm to the water, would it charge the thing, from gamma radiation?

TIL carbon nano yarn absorbs electricity, probably from storm clouds too.

What are the volt and charge observations for lightning from large tropical thunderstorms?

(And why is it dangerous to attract arc discharge toward a local attractor? And what sort of supercapacitors and anodes can handle charge from a lightning bolt? Lightning!)

Tardigrades can handle Gamma radiation.

"Researchers create new type of composite material for shielding against neutron and gamma radiation" (2024) https://phys.org/news/2024-05-composite-material-shielding-n... :

"Sm2O3 micron plates/B4C/HDPE composites containing high specific surface area fillers for neutron and gamma-ray complex radiation shielding" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02663...

westurner5• 2 years ago

On lightning and safety and electrostatics: "Answer to Is there a device that attracts lightning when storms are near? How can I make a lightning rod to do experiments with lightning?" (202_ yrs ago) https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-device-that-attracts-lightn... :

Electrostatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatics

The Photoelectric effect that supports the Particle-Wave duality > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect :

Einstein theorized that the energy in each quantum of light was equal to the frequency of light multiplied by a constant, later called the Planck constant. A photon above a threshold frequency has the required energy to eject a single electron, creating the observed effect. This was a step in the development of quantum mechanics. In 1914, Robert A. Millikan's highly accurate measurements of the Planck constant from the photoelectric effect supported Einstein's model, even though a corpuscular theory of light was for Millikan, at the time, "quite unthinkable". [47] Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", [48] and Millikan was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 for "his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect".[49]

vanderZwan5• 2 years ago

This somehow reminds me of the fact that you can produce (surprisingly high-quality) x-rays by unrolling scotch tape in a vacuum chamber[0][1]. I wonder if it turns out to be related in any way. Thunderstorms aren't a vacuum of course, but I dunno, maybe all that frozen hail being thrown around can bumping into each other still involves a similar underlying mechanism somewhere.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07378

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o66AYhEIsU&

abc_lisper• 2 years ago

It was suprising to me when I heard it. How could we not know it would happen before hand? Doubt explanation of it needs new laws of physics, item is common place and yet we were all caught off-guard. Wonder who different other planets even in our own solar system are, even if we know all the laws of physics and chemistry that guide those reactions; never mind planets in other solar systems

Andys3• 2 years ago

When objects collide or are separated, aren't we really just witnessing tiny chemical reactions, all involving the absorption and/or release of energy?

vanderZwan5• 2 years ago

I think that's a reasonable question, but no, I wouldn't say that that is the case. A chemical reactions is by definition the kind that involves changing the chemical composition of the molecules involved (yes, that's a bit handwavy, I'm not a chemist).

The process that causes tape to produce to x-rays when peeled in a vacuum in this example does involve a change of energy states, but not in a way that we'd consider a change in chemical composition.

LorenPechtel2• 2 years ago

No. "Gamma rays" in modern scientific usage has a specific meaning: radiation coming from the nucleus or from annihilation reactions (electron + positron is considered a gamma source despite not involving a nucleus), not from the electrons. The energy bands actually overlap, you can't always tell whether a given photon is without understanding it's source. (The lowest energy gamma rays actually fall in the UV part of the spectrum.)

And what they're saying is the energy of the lightning is acting as a particle accelerator. aka atom smasher. And there's a surprising level of atom smashing going on in the big thunderclouds.

genocidicbunny• 2 years ago

You don't even need a vacuum to get a decent amount of xrays. Two drills going through a roll of scotch, reel to reel, will generate enough x-rays to take a rudimentary xray image of a hand.

westurner5• 2 years ago

What about guitar pedal velcro tape?

[0] "Correlation between nanosecond X-ray flashes and stick–slip friction in peeling tape" (2008) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07378

Triboluminescence is a phenomenon in which light is generated when a material is mechanically pulled apart, ripped, scratched, crushed, or rubbed (see tribology). [...] Triboluminescence is often a synonym for fractoluminescence (a term mainly used when referring only to light emitted from fractured crystals). Triboluminescence differs from piezoluminescence in that a piezoluminescent material emits light when deformed, as opposed to broken. These are examples of mechanoluminescence, which is luminescence resulting from any mechanical action on a solid. [...] See also:
- Earthquake light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light

- re: gold from earthquake-induced piezoelectricity in quartz: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442489

- re: sustainable alternatives to quartz countertops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857929 :

[...] make recycled paper outdoor waterproof vert ramps, countertops, siding, and flooring; but not yet roofing FWIU?
- Sonoluminesence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence

hn72774• 2 years ago

I have studied radio comms at a hobby level and learned that the voltage of a close lightning strike isn't the main danger to equipment, it's also the strong surge of EMI that can overwhelm and fry things, and induce currents where they shouldn't be.

Gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms

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