Charged up!

If you've ever watched lightning strike the ground, you know the sizzling electric bolts pack a powerful punch. Now researchers have discovered a new kind of lightning--only you can't see it from the ground. Their find, called a "gigantic jet," is, like all forms of lightning, an electrical discharge (release of electric energy). Only these jets shoot upward from the tops of clouds. And they form amazing shapes, like glowing trees or carrots! The jets stretch from clouds 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) above Earth to the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles about 90 km (56 mi) high.

Electricity flows when one place has more electrons (negatively charged particles that orbit an atom's nucleus, or center) than another. In gigantic jets the electrons flow upward rather than downward from clouds. Scientists say the rare gigantic jets are part of Earth's global electric circuit--which includes the ground, thunderstorms, the ionosphere, blue jets, and even exotic forms of electricity called "sprites" and "elves" (see below). "You're immersed in a significant vertical electric field even on a clear sunny day," says Mark Stanley, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "One can think of the Earth and ionosphere as two terminals of a battery, with all weather and most of humanity in between."

But don't count on spotting the rare gigantic jets. They disappear in just half a second.