Watch a tree get shredded by a lightning bolt

As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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I think the culprit is a steam explosion, as the water within the tree vaporizes. Can cause all sorts of damage, depending on the details of the tree structure.

A lightning up close will be a very sharp, shot-like sound. You need some distance to eat the high frequencies and let the low frequencies arrive to you via multipath and scattering to make the sound longer.

Got that when one hit nearby some aeons ago, and triggered a bunch of car alarms and fried a transistor and a resistor in my modem.

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At the last GOP debate Dr.Ben went completely of the rails in a response ostensibly addressing cyber-security but seeming to be instead about a great EMP blast in heaven. I don’t know, at least that’s what it seemed to me that he said, reports differ.

‘Until the End of the World’ is one of my very favorite movies and may have colored my understanding.

Ahhh. Makes sense now. Likely he refers to a nuclear EMP pulse. That thing could be quite annoying with today’s dependence on all things electronic.

Think an ESD on steroids. If it won’t kill your equipment, it is likely to at least damage the inputs, worsen the noise, lower the gain, shift the threshold voltages and do all sorts of other annoyances the silicon does when not-quite-fatally overstressed.

I’d suggest “Nukes in Space - The Rainbow bombs”.

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Must’ve been the spread gun from Contra, to hit the entire height of the tree at once and nothing else.

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I think maybe the camera doesn’t actually have a mic, and the “pop” sound is tape static caused by the power surge. You don’t hear the rain falling, the branches collapsing, or chunks of wood clattering down in the parking lot, either.

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I bet the large tree overhanging the parking lot had a guy-wire. That makes a greast secondary channel for as long as it isn’t vapor, Then the body of the tree does just fine.

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Funny, it’s two of my favorites.

yes this. exactly this. if it has been dry before a lightening strike the tree will char and burn but remain intact, if it has been wet they split and explode, because when water turns to steam it needs some place for all that pressure to go.

Interesting observation, upon re-watching you might be right.

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What Dr.Carson refers to only Dr.Carson will ever know for sure (guy’s crazy).

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I’ve not yet seen the ‘good’ one, have you?

I want to wield lightning bolts like a Norse god.

That was awesome.

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I like the way the background hum is interrupted by the tick of the lightning pulse, then resumes.

That’s the result of the real cause, the government blowing the tree up just like they did the twin towers. Look at the videos side by side, you’ll see, clearly planted charges going off. They just want you to think it’s lightning

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But I thought lightning fuel can’t melt wooden trees.

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Not sure of the source, but here’s the same footage with better audio.

Edit: Ok. This is not accurate sound. It’s apparently been added from another source and synced with the video, but it’s still a lot more satisfying than a crappy mic pop.

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Why rely on the vagaries of mother nature to deliver an appropriately timed bolt of the good stuff when we already have perfectly workable EPFCG devices?

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I’m gonna go with: This camera doesn’t have a mic, but is recording silence anyway, since in all likelihood whoever installed it doesn’t know what they’re doing. As the lightning struck, the pulse of RF got picked up by a coil or something in one of the writing heads a click got written down to the audio track.

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That seems very likely to me.

Half the system already exists.

Not sure how you’d tune the vircator to the excitation from the lightening strike though.