
I was watching a T.V. Program last wednesday, on it they were talking about super lightning apparently it shoots upwards instead of downwards and is more powerful than a nuclear warhead. Yet another testament of how pathetic we really are against nature.
Lightning (Hover)
Actually if you do some research on the movement of static electricity you will find that positive and negative charges move both up and down during the same strike however the standard cloud-to-ground lightening that you generally see does have the lighted burst of charge that moves down. This is called in some cases a negative strike. Lightening the is referred to as ground-to-cloud lightening is much more rare and more commonly seen in the winter months is a positive strike.
In these scenarios the clouds will hold the negatively charged particles as the ground will hold the positively charged. This is how the positive and negative come into play. A positive strike is much more deadly and dangerous than a negative strike and lasts in many cases 10 times longer and may be seen much more vibrantly.
Here is a link where more can be found that may better explain what lightening is and what it does to produce it's effect. Link
I had heard this when I was younger. Lightening doesn't really shoot downward to begin with. It is actually a connection made from ground to sky and can be initiated from either end. But the formation meets in the middle usually. Often times lightening can seem like its going from the ground to the sky.
lightning that shoots towards space, now that would be amazing to see. I guess the potential difference betweent he cloud layer and the stratosphere, (or further) could be relatively compared with nuclear fission. I wonder if there is any way of measuring this, or indeed capturing a photo... fantastic