This video is a slideshow of a series of photos I took with my drone as a storm approached Brisbane, with a strange phenomenon that I’m unfamiliar with.
You can see a horizontal bolt of lightning slowly crawling its way across the sky from left to right. What’s interesting is that each frame of the slide is an 8 second still, meaning that the bolt was visible in the sky for over a minute!
Lightning is just electricity moving. Electricity is one of those natural forces that wants equilibrium. When it’s far enough out of equilibrium, it has pressure or power of whatever you think of it as. It wants equal, a zero difference, a flat and dead environment. And a difference in that between regions creates something actionable. Nature can do something with that.
Lighting is basically a spark we can see with the charge being equalized. It’s a trade nature is making to level things out.
A minute long continuous discharge, slowly travelling across the sky is a little unusual though!
It only looks slow. There’s a lot going on there!