When we looked at these fulgurites in depth, something odd came out of the data. Unfortunately, given its sporadic and unpredictable nature, no power grid will ever be able to harness lightning effectively.īut with that much power, perhaps breaking the space-time continuum in a souped-up Delorean is not so unfeasible after all…. That's enough energy to power about a billion houses, albeit only for a few millionths of a second. So a gigawatt is actually on the low side – lightning power may be a thousand times that, reaching into the terawatts, though the average is probably tens of gigawatts. Power is energy per time, and our measurements of fulgurites suggest that megajoules of energy make rock in thousandths to millionths of seconds. So based on our calculations, how close does Hollywood come, with estimates like in Back to the Future of 1.21 gigawatts of power in lightning? We calculated the energy per meter since, again in most cases, the fulgurites we had collected were broken. Image: Matt PasekĪfter measuring our fulgurites, we determined that on average, the energy required to form these rocks was at least about one megajoule per meter of fulgurite formed. The largest fulgurite found during recovery at the sand mine. household consumes in six hours, or the kinetic energy an average car would have if it were going 300 miles per hour. That's about the amount of energy the average U.S.
It takes about 15 megajoules of energy to heat and vaporise a kilogram of sand. The molten sand then has to heat to just shy of 3000☌, when it vaporises. First the sand has to be heated to around 1700☌, about the temperature of molten lava.Īt this temperature, the sand melts. It takes a specific amount of energy to vaporise sand into gas. Most fulgurites we recovered were short fragments, though the longest ones found were a yard or two long. The thicker ones had to be formed by much more energetic lightning bolts: a thicker fulgurite means more sand had to be vaporised. The fulgurites range in thickness from about the size of a baby's little finger to about the size of man's arm in thickness. They're easy to find – since glass isn't something you want in commercial sand, the mine filters them out. These sand mines probably have about one million year's worth of fulgurites buried inside of them.
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