‘Megaflash’: Record Breaking 515-Mile-Long Lightning Strike

Spanning Eastern Texas to West-Central Missouri, the lightning bolt sets a new world record.

Horizontal 'megaflash'

In October 2017, lightning flashed across the sky in America’s heartland. But this wasn’t your average storm. The single, enormous bolt - known as a 'megaflash' - stretched across multiple states, from eastern Texas to west-central Missouri, covering a total distance of 515 miles.

It lit up the sky across an area that’s five times larger than the state of Massachusetts, illuminating parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri at the same time, reports the Washington Post.

Now, experts say that lightning flash was the longest ever documented. The World Meteorological Organization, the UN agency that maintains official records of global, hemispheric and regional extremes, announced the new world record in a paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

'Megaflashes' - defined as bolts that span more than 60 miles - remain rare and mysterious, and scientists are still trying to understand them. The majority of thunderstorms are shorter than ten miles in height, so megaflashes extend horizontally over a wide area of ground.

Although megaflashes travel horizontally, they also emit lightning bolts that strike the ground below. The October 2017 megaflash, for instance, produced more than 116 of these offshoots over the course of its seven-second duration, says Scientific American.

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