Over one Venezuelan lake, lightning flickers for up to nine hours a night.
Where the Catatumbo River meets Lake Maracaibo, storms gather on 140 to 160 nights a year, flashing up to 40 times a minute for about nine hours at a stretch. It is the most lightning-dense place on Earth, and for centuries sailors used it as a natural lighthouse.
The Catatumbo lightning, also called the Everlasting Storm, plays out over and around the south-western part of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, especially above the marshes where the Catatumbo River flows in. NASA satellite counts put its lightning density at around 250 flashes per square kilometre per year, the highest in the world. Most of the flashes happen within the clouds, and in summer the storms can even produce dry lightning without rain.
The leading explanation is geography. The lake and its swampy plains are enclosed on three sides by high mountains: the Andes, the Perijá range, which rises to about 3,750 metres, and the Mérida Cordillera. Winds carry warm, moist air across the lake and marshes; when that air runs into the mountains it becomes unstable, fuelling thunderstorms. Researchers at the University of Zulia have linked the storm's ups and downs to wider climate patterns, including El Niño, the Caribbean Low-Level Jet and local winds, and a 2016 study showed the lightning can be forecast months ahead.
Other explanations have come and gone. Between 1997 and 2000 a series of studies proposed that methane from the swamps and the region's oil deposits drove the lightning, but critics pointed out that this model predicts more lightning in the dry season, the opposite of what is observed. An earlier suggestion even invoked uranium in the bedrock. Nor is the storm truly everlasting: it stopped from January to March 2010, apparently because of drought, prompting fears it had gone for good before it returned.
Indigenous peoples including the Barí, Wayuu and Yukpa have known the storm for millennia; Catatumbo is said to mean 'house of thunder' in the Barí language. Colonial sailors called it the Lighthouse of Maracaibo, and in 1841 the geographer Agustin Codazzi described it guiding navigators like a beacon. Today it appears on the flag and coat of arms of Venezuela's Zulia state.
Source: Wikipedia — Catatumbo lightning · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
