Happy Thought for 27 February 2026

 

Have a Happy Thought:

Lightning can be spectacular to watch. It’s beautiful, and a little bit awesome (in the “terrifying” meaning of the word) to see the visible manifestation of electricity in the atmosphere. Especially in those dramatic cloud-to-ground discharges.

 

Lighting strikes the ground in Placitas, New Mexico, July 25 2009. Image: John Fowler

 

What I had never thought of before, is that there is a lot of cloud-to-ground transfer of electricity that doesn’t wait for a massive bolt of lightning.

It can happen in lots of little transfers, say across the tops of trees. And that these small transfers might create corona:

Coronae glow on the tips of spruce needles, induced by charged metal plates in a laboratory. These weak electric discharges subtly singe the tips of leaves and needles, and new observations indicate they may occur ubiquitously across treetops under thunderstorms. Credit: William Brune

 

Researchers recently used essentially an ultraviolet-light camera to capture this visually, showing how the very tip-tops of trees had mini lightning – corona – forming as the thunderstorm passed overhead. They first captured this looking at trees in North Carolina, but have seen this happen up and down the US East Coast.

The study authors put it beautifully: “Coronae glowed on a sweetgum tree and a pine tree during a thunderstorm in North Carolina. It hopped among leaves and sometimes followed a branch as it swayed in the wind... Our observations indicate that corona shimmer on the swath of trees beneath a thunderstorm.” The images above were made in a lab, here’s the real from-the-field data, showing these corona in real time during a thunderstorm:

Corona UV signals observed on a sweetgum under a thunderstorm on 27 June 2024. From Corona Discharges Glow on Trees Under Thunderstorms - McFarland - 2026 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library

 

The really cool thing about this study is how it goes on to explain that these mini-electrical-discharges actually do some damage to the treetops. This is happening on every tree: (again from the study authors: “Everywhere along the tops of trees and every tree observed under thunderstorms had similar amounts of coronae.”) And since this has been happening since trees existed, this means that trees have evolved to deal with this sort of damage, and also that trees are always moderating the strength of thunderstorms!

 

So if you’re ever out for a walk in the woods, and think you see some blue lights dancing at the tops of the trees…

GET OUT OF THERE IT’S A THUNDERSTORM!

 

 

 

This week for #ShareGoodNewsToo:

On the border with Peru and Brazil, Bolivia recently added two new protected areas to stitch the western Amazon together. Created by municipal governments, the 7,300 km² of intact forest, rivers and floodplains will give jaguars, tapirs, river dolphins, giant otters and spider monkeys corridors to move around vast territories.

The first section (Los Palmares de Villa Nueva, in orange in the map below) was established in October 2025, and the second section (Guardián Amazónico Pacahuara, in dark green, just above the orange section) came into protection in November 2025.

You can visit the Andes Amazon Fund’s announcement of this to see some cute otters and amazing insects that are protected by this work. 

Image: Andes Amazon Fund

 

 

 

Thanks to Corey S Powell on Mastodon for bringing us news of dancing lights on treetops

And thanks to Fix the News for letting us know about the newly protected sections of the Amazon rainforest.