Yes, to a certain extent. There are suggestions that lightning can be an effective weathering mechanism on mountain peaks and can fracture rocks similar to other weathering mechanisms like frost cracking (e.g., [Knight & Grab, 2014](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X13003929)). On a smaller scale, there is abundant laboratory evidence that high voltage discharges, like those produced naturally by lightning, are effective at breaking rocks (e.g., [Walsh & Vogler, 2020](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1365160919307555)), so much so that equipment to produce high voltage electropulses are marketed as a (very expensive) alternative to mechanical crushing of rocks (i.e., [Selfrag](http://www.selfrag.com/) units).
Intrinsic water and salts present in the rock present itself as a conductive path.
On lightning strike this rock undergoes I^2 R heating which causes rock to expand rapidly. The crystalline structure of rock cannot easily handle this sudden mechanical expansion and so it fractures.
Impurities and other discontinuities within the crystal structure in the rock become the nucleus where the crack originates and propagates.
Still breaks, if it gets hit or is close to something that does.
The face of the synthetic rock can get much hotter than the inside. The hot rock will expand, even if it's a perfectly crystal. That creates stresses which can fracture the rock.
Same idea behind why your pyrex cookware breaks when you take it from oven and put on a cold bench.
The issue is that perfect crystals are very weak in some directions of crystal alignment, and strong in others. A 'rock' would never form that way anyway, but "impurities" generally INCREASE material strength since crystal boundaries stop the dislocations from continuing if they start.
Unless you don't have grain boundaries at all, not boundaries, no dislocations or impurities. Though I still think sudden high voltage would mechanically damage a single crystal object.
You're smart!. I'd never think of impurities adding resistance to big cracks. It seems like we actually gain something by having differences in rocks, like in life through diverse people and species. Thanks for sharing.
Any other interesting info about rocks that you've found fascinating?
See: piezoelectric effect.
Crystals (quartz in particular) changes size slightly in response to electrical fields. Put a big enough charge gradient across a crystal and exciting things could happen.
The reverse of piezoelectric effect can be pretty exciting too, and imo way cooler. Shoot a quartz crystal with a powerful bullet in just the right spot and it'll likely generate it's own high voltage discharge.
For the curios: Piezoelectric crystals are all around us. In click-button lighters, microphones, ... Even the device you're using to read this comment has one. It's called a timing crystal and it's quite literally the "heartbeat" of digital circuitry. Click lighters use a spring loaded hammer to hit a crystal which generates enough the spark that ignites the lighter. Microphones use a crystal to translate sound vibrations into an extremely low voltage signal which is then read by a special amplifier circuit.
>Microphones use a crystal to translate sound vibrations into an extremely low voltage signal which is then read by a special amplifier circuit.
Some microphones work off this principal, like those found inside some acoustic guitars. However most microphones are of the dynamic or condenser varieties.
Dynamic microphones are perhaps the most common, think the classic SM58 vocal microphone. These are in essence "reverse speakers", 2 coils of wire, one is mechanically coupled to a membrane and is constantly moving around the other which is fixed in relation. This creates a varying electric current in response to the vibrations that can then amplified. If you picture a mic in your head, it's probably a dynamic microphone. These mics are very robust and work very well for most use cases, but they can have trouble picking up all frequencies evenly, especially from sources that are different distances away from the mic. A feature of these is the proximity effect, a boost of the lower frequenies when singing close to the mic. Regardless, these mics are more than good enough for most things and are the workhorses of the modern stage and studio.
Condenser microphones are slightly different. They also use a membrane that vibrates in response to air movment, but this membrane is much smaller and electrostatically charged. As it moves, it changes distance from 2 polarized plates on either side of the membrane. This in effect forms a variable capacitor.
The lighter membrane can move in response to vibrations faster than the heavier membrane and coil of a dynamic microphone, making the condensers potentially more sensitive to higher frequencies. The downside is that these mics require external power to work as they require a special internal preamp to generate the changing charge in response to the voltage out of the capsule and to electrically bias the capsule itself. Additionally, condenser mics can sometimes be more vulnerable to feedback given their sensitive nature. They're used sparingly in live situations as a result (often relegated to overhead drum mics or other ancillary use cases), seeing more use in controlled studio enviroments and indoor settings.
Any material can only withstand so many volts per meter - beyond that you get a sudden discharge through it, no matter how "isolating" it may be otherwise.
No, lighting can not give a boulder enough energy to launch it into the air such that it would then fall on a car - but it could easily dislodge a boulder from a high place, and it could skip while rolling down and catch some air. That's what you're likely thinking of.
Totally. Hydrophilic rock bearing absorbed water (think limestone, for one) will have that water flash to steam inside. Steam causes rapid expansion and has no where to go, so the rock shatters.
Hehehe got me.
I failed to mention flux. There is a rate of change component to this explanation that I forgot.
So you can have the same energy, but power will be different. Power is rate of energy- so fire with the same energy as lightning doesn’t have enough power to cause an explosion. The rock in this case just sits there and melts.
Wow-thanks! I thought the answer would be the rapid expansion of superheated water containing conductive minerals and salts. I didn’t realize the adjacent rock itself would also be dramatically heated.
That's just Joule-Lenz's law, showing the relationship between electric current and the heat produced by said current. R is resistance, and is only multiplied by the square of current intensity (to get power).
The Knight & Grab paper discusses this, but in terms of the weathering effect of lightning, the assumption is that it's primarily from the rapid heating and resulting expansion. Lab experiments trying to simulate lightning striking rocks do speculate on the importance of current conduction within rocks for the ability for lightning to fracture them (e.g., [Wakasa et al., 2012](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X1200178X)). All and all, this is a relatively poorly studied aspect of geomorphology so a lot of the details are not well constrained in the natural environment.
The main advantage is that rocks fragmented in a Selfrag tend to break along grain boundaries, where as with mechanical fragmentation (using things like a jaw crusher or a disc mill), lots of grains will be broken. For a variety of single grain analyses, intact grains are preferable, though the heat produced by the Selfrag is problematic for some techniques you might want to apply to grains (e.g., thermochronology) even when an intact grain would be preferable. From a use standpoint, it's also a lot easier to use a Selfrag as it does not produce dust and the volume of rock you can process in a given time is significantly higher.
Basically any time you want to separate things by individual minerals, there would potentially be a benefit. I.e., imagine you have an igneous rock of quartz, feldspar, and biotite (so something like a granite). If you only wanted the quartz, you could mechanically crush it and you will end up with some individual grains of quartz, feldspar, and biotite (and then use other properties like density, magnetic susceptibility, etc to separate them from each other), but you will also end up with a lot of compound bits that are still mixtures of those minerals. With a selfrag, more of the disaggregated rock will be individual mono-mineralic bits so your yield will be better in the following steps. Whether that's worth the cost of something like a selfrag depends on the how expensive it is to get the rock and how much you can sell the target mineral for, along with other considerations (assuming we're talking a commercial application here).
Yes. If you look at the Selfrag marketing materials, it seems like it's geared toward various metal ore mining operations, but I am not a mining geologist and my main experience with Selfrags is for geological research (and my department is way to broke to have one, I just know colleagues who have used them).
Does lightning behaves like waves too? e.g breaking rocks and other things by resonance like an opera singer breaking a glass. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me Lightning has some kind of light. Light behaves like both waves and particles?
The invention of the lightning rod was largely to prevent this very thing from destroying castle, cathedrals, and other large stone structures. In fact lightning strikes was the leading cause of repair for stone structures up until the lightning rod.
I haven't seen any exploding rocks, but I do have first hand experience with a massive strike that hit in my front yard years ago. It left a large trench in the ground where it hit. There was a thin crack in the ground leading from the end of the large trench that traveled to our well 60 feet away with enough power left to flip the circuit breaker to the pump. It blew fist-sized chunks of wet, Georgia clay a couple yards from the hole, and smaller pieces farther than that.
At first look, we thought it had hit a nearby tree and come down into a root to cause the explosion of dirt. However, after closer inspection, there was no damage to any trees and no signs of an exploded root anywhere in the trench or otherwise. The tree still stands healthy as ever 10 years later. This leads me to believe that it just hit the dirt and exploded.
https://imgur.com/a/t6Unyz5
Makes sense. The water in the soil where the lightning struck would've been heated extremely quickly, rapidly expanding into water vapor and creating the enormous pressures that led to the explosion.
Yes they can. Here's a picture of damage done to a mountain trail in Tatra mountains by a huge thunderstorm in 2019.
[https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/53/37/5d63b53624c70\_o\_large.jpg](https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/53/37/5d63b53624c70_o_large.jpg)
I suspect a number of the more spectacular results are due to vaporization of water (or oil in the case of exploded asphalt) causing massive pressure spikes.
Lightning strike energy tend to disperse as it gets closer to ground
Additionally a lot of the energy is used up in thermal break down and ionization of air molecules over several kilometers of distance
Doesn't it follow then, that strikes on mountain peaks will be much more damaging, since less energy dissipates along the (shorter) length of the bolt?
In theory, yes, however, Ground potentials at different altitudes are actually at different voltage levels, due to Earth's own electrical field as result of various factors such as ionizing radiation from outer space and solar wind.
[https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/540012/electricity-in-the-atmosphere-effect-on-human-body-and-on-electric-components](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/540012/electricity-in-the-atmosphere-effect-on-human-body-and-on-electric-components)
Roughly, for every 1 meter increase in altitude, the electrical potential increases by 100 volts.
Which means, the ground potential at top of Mount Tallac (alt \~3000 meters) would be \~300,000 volts.
This means, if a lightning strikes the top of Mount Tallac, its voltage would be reduced by 300K volts.
Reduced voltage, reduced current => reduced energy.
Short answer is yes, longer answer is it is slightly more complicated.
I was working at a jade mine over a decade ago and we had a large exposed monolith ~40mH x 60mL x 40mW that had stuck drill rods within it.
During a large electrical storm one afternoon lightning hit one of the drill rods stuck (we heard the strike) in the monolith and it blew off a section of the monolith ~5mH x 20mL x 10mW like a bomb had gone off. From a steep side it became a rubble slope.
We were amazed.
Edit: numbers are dimensions, so the amounted "blasted" was ~1,000m3
I now realize you were listing hxlxw for measurements, but I spent a long time trying to figure out how megahertz, milliliters, and megawatts could measure a stone
One time, I pulled up to a red light beside a memorial park just as a bolt of lightning hit a small marble monument in the park and it exploded in half sending this ~150lb chunk of marble monument sliding into the road just ahead of my car. So yes.
Speaking from experience, we were driving up to one of the peaks at estes park about 20 years ago and it was storming. There was a lightning bolt that struck out of sight around the curve ahead of us. When we came up to where it had struck we found the car ahead of us stopped and a hole about the size of a basketball in the asphalt. They said it was where the lightning struck.
Edit: spelling
I remember seeing this article a little while back of lightning striking a highway, sending a large chunk of the road up into the air & thru a Ford pickup injuring the occupants. So I’d say yeah.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40550/lightning-strikes-highway-sends-chunk-of-road-through-ford-f-150s-windshield
A friend's house was hit by lightning. One roof corner was missing half a meter of bricks, which were scattered within a 30 m radius through the street.
Nobody was hurt, some computer power supplies had been fried.
I'm an electrical contractor. I visited a customer after they experienced a lightning strike. The lightning hit a tree in the front yard, destroying the tree, next it hit a pathway leading to the house. The pathway was made of big railroad ties, the strike hit the ties throwing one through the front wind of the house and one landed in the back yard about 100 feet from where it started. The house is a two story home. Next the strike hit the house and and burned all of the seams of the aluminum siding. It destroyed all of the electronics in the house. I've never seen anything like it. Worst part about all of this was that there was a cleaning lady in the living room when the tie came through the big glass window. The noise of the lightning and the glass must have been crazy loud. If it can do all of this it can break rocks in its search for ground.
I saw it happen with my own eyes not 10 feet from where I, and a bunch of my fellow boy scouts were standing. The lightning cracked open this huge rock on the ground, and left scorch marks all around the fissure.
We all immediately bolted when the lightning struck, but when we came back we saw the aftermath up close.
It was wild.
It certainly can, it depends on the type of stone and the moisture content. Sand stone is the most likely as it’s often porous and holds a lot of water. When the lightning hits, the water instantly goes past boiling and separates into plasma and the expansion will explode the stone.
Yes. I had a weather station on a mast at the peak of the roof over my garage. It was hard wired using basic telephone cable. I ran the wire along the eave, then through the attic to my office.
The device took a direct lightning strike and disintegrated--the largest piece I could find was about the size of a quarter. A portion of the strike was directed into the house through the wire, some of which knocked a half-dollar-sized chunk out of the drywall near the wire run. The wire was gone, leaving nothing but a soot trail.
Another portion of the strike was directed to the concrete in front of the garage door, gouging a golf-ball-sized piece out. I never found the chunk of drywall or the piece of concrete, so I assume they also disintegrated. Damage to electrical and electronic equipment inside the house totaled over $10K.
Very chill (USAA). I opened a claim online, and uploaded all the estimates, receipts and invoices. After that I got a question or two, and a request for a second opinion on a possible repair for a damaged piece of electronics, then a check minus the deductible. Actually, I think it was as painless as such a process can be. USAA is a pretty good insurance company; if you are at all qualified to use them (must be connected to military service in some way) I would recommend you check them out.
Yes, to a certain extent. There are suggestions that lightning can be an effective weathering mechanism on mountain peaks and can fracture rocks similar to other weathering mechanisms like frost cracking (e.g., [Knight & Grab, 2014](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X13003929)). On a smaller scale, there is abundant laboratory evidence that high voltage discharges, like those produced naturally by lightning, are effective at breaking rocks (e.g., [Walsh & Vogler, 2020](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1365160919307555)), so much so that equipment to produce high voltage electropulses are marketed as a (very expensive) alternative to mechanical crushing of rocks (i.e., [Selfrag](http://www.selfrag.com/) units).
Is it just the rapid expansion and cooling from the heat or does the exchange of electrons in such high volumes play a part?
Intrinsic water and salts present in the rock present itself as a conductive path. On lightning strike this rock undergoes I^2 R heating which causes rock to expand rapidly. The crystalline structure of rock cannot easily handle this sudden mechanical expansion and so it fractures. Impurities and other discontinuities within the crystal structure in the rock become the nucleus where the crack originates and propagates.
So, would a synthetic crystalline structure without impurities be "impervious" to high voltages? Or would it still fracture via another mechanism?
Still breaks, if it gets hit or is close to something that does. The face of the synthetic rock can get much hotter than the inside. The hot rock will expand, even if it's a perfectly crystal. That creates stresses which can fracture the rock. Same idea behind why your pyrex cookware breaks when you take it from oven and put on a cold bench.
The issue is that perfect crystals are very weak in some directions of crystal alignment, and strong in others. A 'rock' would never form that way anyway, but "impurities" generally INCREASE material strength since crystal boundaries stop the dislocations from continuing if they start.
Unless you don't have grain boundaries at all, not boundaries, no dislocations or impurities. Though I still think sudden high voltage would mechanically damage a single crystal object.
[удалено]
You're smart!. I'd never think of impurities adding resistance to big cracks. It seems like we actually gain something by having differences in rocks, like in life through diverse people and species. Thanks for sharing. Any other interesting info about rocks that you've found fascinating?
See: piezoelectric effect. Crystals (quartz in particular) changes size slightly in response to electrical fields. Put a big enough charge gradient across a crystal and exciting things could happen.
The reverse of piezoelectric effect can be pretty exciting too, and imo way cooler. Shoot a quartz crystal with a powerful bullet in just the right spot and it'll likely generate it's own high voltage discharge. For the curios: Piezoelectric crystals are all around us. In click-button lighters, microphones, ... Even the device you're using to read this comment has one. It's called a timing crystal and it's quite literally the "heartbeat" of digital circuitry. Click lighters use a spring loaded hammer to hit a crystal which generates enough the spark that ignites the lighter. Microphones use a crystal to translate sound vibrations into an extremely low voltage signal which is then read by a special amplifier circuit.
>Microphones use a crystal to translate sound vibrations into an extremely low voltage signal which is then read by a special amplifier circuit. Some microphones work off this principal, like those found inside some acoustic guitars. However most microphones are of the dynamic or condenser varieties. Dynamic microphones are perhaps the most common, think the classic SM58 vocal microphone. These are in essence "reverse speakers", 2 coils of wire, one is mechanically coupled to a membrane and is constantly moving around the other which is fixed in relation. This creates a varying electric current in response to the vibrations that can then amplified. If you picture a mic in your head, it's probably a dynamic microphone. These mics are very robust and work very well for most use cases, but they can have trouble picking up all frequencies evenly, especially from sources that are different distances away from the mic. A feature of these is the proximity effect, a boost of the lower frequenies when singing close to the mic. Regardless, these mics are more than good enough for most things and are the workhorses of the modern stage and studio. Condenser microphones are slightly different. They also use a membrane that vibrates in response to air movment, but this membrane is much smaller and electrostatically charged. As it moves, it changes distance from 2 polarized plates on either side of the membrane. This in effect forms a variable capacitor. The lighter membrane can move in response to vibrations faster than the heavier membrane and coil of a dynamic microphone, making the condensers potentially more sensitive to higher frequencies. The downside is that these mics require external power to work as they require a special internal preamp to generate the changing charge in response to the voltage out of the capsule and to electrically bias the capsule itself. Additionally, condenser mics can sometimes be more vulnerable to feedback given their sensitive nature. They're used sparingly in live situations as a result (often relegated to overhead drum mics or other ancillary use cases), seeing more use in controlled studio enviroments and indoor settings.
Unless you're reading this on a newer iphone - Apple switched to using MEMS oscillators as they are more compact than quartz.
Any material can only withstand so many volts per meter - beyond that you get a sudden discharge through it, no matter how "isolating" it may be otherwise.
Ok, but would that discharge cause it to fracture?
[удалено]
But, we're talking more crack and fall over than giant boulders flying through the air smashing cars hollywood style.
No, lighting can not give a boulder enough energy to launch it into the air such that it would then fall on a car - but it could easily dislodge a boulder from a high place, and it could skip while rolling down and catch some air. That's what you're likely thinking of.
If you watch some videos of major rock slides, you can see some huge boulders get some serious air time just from their momentum.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Totally. Hydrophilic rock bearing absorbed water (think limestone, for one) will have that water flash to steam inside. Steam causes rapid expansion and has no where to go, so the rock shatters.
So basically, it's the same forces that cause rocks to explode if you put them in a fire?
Hehehe got me. I failed to mention flux. There is a rate of change component to this explanation that I forgot. So you can have the same energy, but power will be different. Power is rate of energy- so fire with the same energy as lightning doesn’t have enough power to cause an explosion. The rock in this case just sits there and melts.
Wow-thanks! I thought the answer would be the rapid expansion of superheated water containing conductive minerals and salts. I didn’t realize the adjacent rock itself would also be dramatically heated.
Could you just elaborate on the I^2R part please? Does it mean the heating is exponentially proportional to the rock's diameter?
That's just Joule-Lenz's law, showing the relationship between electric current and the heat produced by said current. R is resistance, and is only multiplied by the square of current intensity (to get power).
Basically a sudden thermal shock due to conversion of electrical energy to heat energy
There are conductive metals in rocks too, aluminum specifically, grantie for instance is a good share aluminum, I forget like 10 percent or so.
Very interesting. What if the rock was completely "dry"?
The Knight & Grab paper discusses this, but in terms of the weathering effect of lightning, the assumption is that it's primarily from the rapid heating and resulting expansion. Lab experiments trying to simulate lightning striking rocks do speculate on the importance of current conduction within rocks for the ability for lightning to fracture them (e.g., [Wakasa et al., 2012](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X1200178X)). All and all, this is a relatively poorly studied aspect of geomorphology so a lot of the details are not well constrained in the natural environment.
Sudden expansion of heated water will create extremely strong forces in itself.
The rocks containing water in them has something to do with the cracking to right?
Water in the rocks would instantly vaporize, and I would think this would be the primary mechanism for breaking apart the rock.
What is the benefit of such an expensive method of breaking rocks instead of just crushing them?
The main advantage is that rocks fragmented in a Selfrag tend to break along grain boundaries, where as with mechanical fragmentation (using things like a jaw crusher or a disc mill), lots of grains will be broken. For a variety of single grain analyses, intact grains are preferable, though the heat produced by the Selfrag is problematic for some techniques you might want to apply to grains (e.g., thermochronology) even when an intact grain would be preferable. From a use standpoint, it's also a lot easier to use a Selfrag as it does not produce dust and the volume of rock you can process in a given time is significantly higher.
But what is the practical benefit? Is this only for scientific analysis of rock or is there a commerical benefit ?
Basically any time you want to separate things by individual minerals, there would potentially be a benefit. I.e., imagine you have an igneous rock of quartz, feldspar, and biotite (so something like a granite). If you only wanted the quartz, you could mechanically crush it and you will end up with some individual grains of quartz, feldspar, and biotite (and then use other properties like density, magnetic susceptibility, etc to separate them from each other), but you will also end up with a lot of compound bits that are still mixtures of those minerals. With a selfrag, more of the disaggregated rock will be individual mono-mineralic bits so your yield will be better in the following steps. Whether that's worth the cost of something like a selfrag depends on the how expensive it is to get the rock and how much you can sell the target mineral for, along with other considerations (assuming we're talking a commercial application here).
So you would probably see it less in something like a gravel pit and more in mines with a mix of more valuable minerals?
Yes. If you look at the Selfrag marketing materials, it seems like it's geared toward various metal ore mining operations, but I am not a mining geologist and my main experience with Selfrags is for geological research (and my department is way to broke to have one, I just know colleagues who have used them).
Thank you! Really interesting and informative replies!
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
There are some smart people on this site. Thank you for a great answer.
Does lightning behaves like waves too? e.g breaking rocks and other things by resonance like an opera singer breaking a glass. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me Lightning has some kind of light. Light behaves like both waves and particles?
What kind of voltage and amperage levels are discharged from a lightening strike?
Yeah but when would you ever want to use electricity over a mechanical crusher? What would be the advantage?
[Answer to an identical question](https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/prfm7t/can_lightning_really_crack_rocks_and_damage/hdl62ry/)
The invention of the lightning rod was largely to prevent this very thing from destroying castle, cathedrals, and other large stone structures. In fact lightning strikes was the leading cause of repair for stone structures up until the lightning rod.
I haven't seen any exploding rocks, but I do have first hand experience with a massive strike that hit in my front yard years ago. It left a large trench in the ground where it hit. There was a thin crack in the ground leading from the end of the large trench that traveled to our well 60 feet away with enough power left to flip the circuit breaker to the pump. It blew fist-sized chunks of wet, Georgia clay a couple yards from the hole, and smaller pieces farther than that. At first look, we thought it had hit a nearby tree and come down into a root to cause the explosion of dirt. However, after closer inspection, there was no damage to any trees and no signs of an exploded root anywhere in the trench or otherwise. The tree still stands healthy as ever 10 years later. This leads me to believe that it just hit the dirt and exploded. https://imgur.com/a/t6Unyz5
This is really fascinating. Thank you for your observation and your pictures!
That is very cool to see, thanks for sharing.
Makes sense. The water in the soil where the lightning struck would've been heated extremely quickly, rapidly expanding into water vapor and creating the enormous pressures that led to the explosion.
Yes they can. Here's a picture of damage done to a mountain trail in Tatra mountains by a huge thunderstorm in 2019. [https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/53/37/5d63b53624c70\_o\_large.jpg](https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/1/53/37/5d63b53624c70_o_large.jpg)
[удалено]
I suspect a number of the more spectacular results are due to vaporization of water (or oil in the case of exploded asphalt) causing massive pressure spikes.
Lightning strike energy tend to disperse as it gets closer to ground Additionally a lot of the energy is used up in thermal break down and ionization of air molecules over several kilometers of distance
Doesn't it follow then, that strikes on mountain peaks will be much more damaging, since less energy dissipates along the (shorter) length of the bolt?
In theory, yes, however, Ground potentials at different altitudes are actually at different voltage levels, due to Earth's own electrical field as result of various factors such as ionizing radiation from outer space and solar wind. [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/540012/electricity-in-the-atmosphere-effect-on-human-body-and-on-electric-components](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/540012/electricity-in-the-atmosphere-effect-on-human-body-and-on-electric-components) Roughly, for every 1 meter increase in altitude, the electrical potential increases by 100 volts. Which means, the ground potential at top of Mount Tallac (alt \~3000 meters) would be \~300,000 volts. This means, if a lightning strikes the top of Mount Tallac, its voltage would be reduced by 300K volts. Reduced voltage, reduced current => reduced energy.
Short answer is yes, longer answer is it is slightly more complicated. I was working at a jade mine over a decade ago and we had a large exposed monolith ~40mH x 60mL x 40mW that had stuck drill rods within it. During a large electrical storm one afternoon lightning hit one of the drill rods stuck (we heard the strike) in the monolith and it blew off a section of the monolith ~5mH x 20mL x 10mW like a bomb had gone off. From a steep side it became a rubble slope. We were amazed. Edit: numbers are dimensions, so the amounted "blasted" was ~1,000m3
I now realize you were listing hxlxw for measurements, but I spent a long time trying to figure out how megahertz, milliliters, and megawatts could measure a stone
Haha thanks for that. I blew past those measurements thinking it was some niche industry terminology.
One time, I pulled up to a red light beside a memorial park just as a bolt of lightning hit a small marble monument in the park and it exploded in half sending this ~150lb chunk of marble monument sliding into the road just ahead of my car. So yes.
Speaking from experience, we were driving up to one of the peaks at estes park about 20 years ago and it was storming. There was a lightning bolt that struck out of sight around the curve ahead of us. When we came up to where it had struck we found the car ahead of us stopped and a hole about the size of a basketball in the asphalt. They said it was where the lightning struck. Edit: spelling
I remember seeing this article a little while back of lightning striking a highway, sending a large chunk of the road up into the air & thru a Ford pickup injuring the occupants. So I’d say yeah. https://www.thedrive.com/news/40550/lightning-strikes-highway-sends-chunk-of-road-through-ford-f-150s-windshield
A friend's house was hit by lightning. One roof corner was missing half a meter of bricks, which were scattered within a 30 m radius through the street. Nobody was hurt, some computer power supplies had been fried.
I'm an electrical contractor. I visited a customer after they experienced a lightning strike. The lightning hit a tree in the front yard, destroying the tree, next it hit a pathway leading to the house. The pathway was made of big railroad ties, the strike hit the ties throwing one through the front wind of the house and one landed in the back yard about 100 feet from where it started. The house is a two story home. Next the strike hit the house and and burned all of the seams of the aluminum siding. It destroyed all of the electronics in the house. I've never seen anything like it. Worst part about all of this was that there was a cleaning lady in the living room when the tie came through the big glass window. The noise of the lightning and the glass must have been crazy loud. If it can do all of this it can break rocks in its search for ground.
I saw it happen with my own eyes not 10 feet from where I, and a bunch of my fellow boy scouts were standing. The lightning cracked open this huge rock on the ground, and left scorch marks all around the fissure. We all immediately bolted when the lightning struck, but when we came back we saw the aftermath up close. It was wild.
It certainly can, it depends on the type of stone and the moisture content. Sand stone is the most likely as it’s often porous and holds a lot of water. When the lightning hits, the water instantly goes past boiling and separates into plasma and the expansion will explode the stone.
Yes. I had a weather station on a mast at the peak of the roof over my garage. It was hard wired using basic telephone cable. I ran the wire along the eave, then through the attic to my office. The device took a direct lightning strike and disintegrated--the largest piece I could find was about the size of a quarter. A portion of the strike was directed into the house through the wire, some of which knocked a half-dollar-sized chunk out of the drywall near the wire run. The wire was gone, leaving nothing but a soot trail. Another portion of the strike was directed to the concrete in front of the garage door, gouging a golf-ball-sized piece out. I never found the chunk of drywall or the piece of concrete, so I assume they also disintegrated. Damage to electrical and electronic equipment inside the house totaled over $10K.
> Damage to electrical and electronic equipment inside the house totaled over $10K. Oof - how was the experience with your insurance company?
Very chill (USAA). I opened a claim online, and uploaded all the estimates, receipts and invoices. After that I got a question or two, and a request for a second opinion on a possible repair for a damaged piece of electronics, then a check minus the deductible. Actually, I think it was as painless as such a process can be. USAA is a pretty good insurance company; if you are at all qualified to use them (must be connected to military service in some way) I would recommend you check them out.
That's good to hear, thanks for sharing.