Breaking Update: Here’s a clear explanation of the latest developments related to Breaking News:Astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla shares jaw-dropping view of lightning fury over Earth– What Just Happened and why it matters right now.
Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla has gifted Earthbound viewers a mesmerising glimpse of nature’s raw power: thundering lightning storms filmed from the International Space Station.
In a captivating X post, Shukla shared time-lapse videos revealing thunderstorms as “fleeting pulses of purple fire,” transforming night passes into spectacles of silent chaos.
From 400 kilometers above, these storms eclipse ground-level drama. Each bolt, just a millisecond flash, unleashes 5 billion joules, superheating air to 30,000 Kelvin, five times the Sun’s surface.
A full tempest packs enough juice to power a city for 30 minutes, yet one strike lights up thousands of square kilometers, dwarfing the urban grids it could energise.
Shukla’s footage captures what ground-dwellers miss: cloud tops rippling with hundreds of flashes per minute, resembling “neurons firing inside a gigantic brain.”
Scientists echo this, likening lightning networks to neural activity, Earth “thinking out loud” in electric bursts. During night orbits over storm-swept regions, entire cloud decks ignite like wars under cotton blankets, silent from space but deafening below.
Shukla, on a landmark mission as one of India’s pioneering spacefarers, timed these shots during dark-side passes. The ISS’s speed, nearly 28,000 kmph, compresses storms into hypnotic timelapses, where purple veins pulse across oceans and continents. “Few spectacles from orbit rival the silent fury,” he wrote, highlighting scale: a Tuesday drizzle hides apocalyptic energy.
Lightning stems from charge separation in thunderclouds, where ice particles collide to build voltage.
Space views reveal “sprites” and “elves,” upper-atmospheric phenomena invisible from below, while exposing storm anatomy.
Shukla’s clips aid research into global electric circuits, climate patterns, and even earthquake precursors, as lightning spikes correlate with tectonic stress.
For Shukla, amid microgravity experiments like his recent microalgae spins, these views blend awe with science. Shared amid India’s Gaganyaan ambitions, the post shows how Earth’s weather is a planetary brain at work in real time.
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