The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) observatory has recorded five blue jets , an anomalous type of lightning that strikes from the top of a thundercloud into the stratosphere. This is reported in an article published in the journal Nature.
On January 20, a video filmed from the International Space Station was posted on the channel of the European Space Agency, which puzzled all academics who study the atmosphere and build theories about how everything works there:
The 10 microsecond jets were sighted on February 26, 2019, near Nauru Island in the Pacific Ocean. One of the lightning flashes produced a jet that reached the stratopause – the boundary between the stratosphere and the ionosphere at an altitude of about 50 to 55 kilometers. In addition to the jets, “elves” were recorded, which are expanding rings of optical and ultraviolet radiation in the stratosphere, lasting no more than a millisecond.
Electrical phenomena in the upper atmosphere are poorly understood and attract a lot of attention from physicists from around the world. They are short-lived and vary greatly with altitude.
Blue jets occur during electrical breakdown between the positively charged top of a thundercloud and the negatively charged air layer above it. As a result, a leader is formed – a conducting channel of ionized air, through which the discharge propagates. However, in this case, the radiation from the leader was weak, which indicates that the leader itself was short compared to the conductive channels of conventional lightning.
The blue jets belong to streamers – branched filaments of electrical discharges, similar to those generated by Tesla coils. In addition, blue jets are more likely to occur as a phenomenon than previously thought.
Some of the most mysterious are the “elves”. Their name comes from the abbreviation ELVES , which stands for “Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.”. These phenomena reach four hundred kilometers in diameter and occur at an altitude of about one hundred kilometers. The list of optical phenomena associated with electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere does not end there. There are also TROLL , Pixie , Ghost, and Gnome , but their nature is even less understood.
There is nothing like this, that is, such strange huge lightning has never been observed before. Something is happening in the Earth’s atmosphere, and it started quite recently. How it will end and what will result in – we do not know, since people living today have no such experience.