Lightning Strike

We were up at my folks cabin in Idyllwild this weekend, and as we were all sitting around minding our own business, a bolt of lightning struck a tree about 70 feet from the cabin and caused the tree to explode. To the left is a picture of the exploded tree. If you look in this distance, you can see some of the debri from the explosion down by the creek.

The tree that exploded was a cedar, but the tree right behind it in this picture, a pine, was the one that actually got hit by the lightning, at least at first. I didn't get a picture of this :(, but the pine tree had score marks going down the side where the lightning traveled just under the surface of the bark, then, about 15 feet from the ground, the score mark stops. We think (actually it was one of the firemen who came by who pointed this out) that the lightning jumped from the pine tree to the cedar, causing the cedar to explode.

Here is another picture of another tree that was also hit. This one was only 30 feet from the house, but didn't explode:


In this tree you can see what I mean about the score marks.

Here is a closeup of one of the score marks:



Both of the trees that have score marks were pines, the one that exploded was a cedar. This leads me to believe that the pine trees carry most of their moisture right under their bark, whereas the cedar must carry a fair amount of moisture deeper in the woody part of the tree. Water conducts electricity, so the lightning is going to follow the wetter parts of the tree to the ground. As the lightning is flowing through the tree, it boils the water, causing it to rapidly expand. In the pine trees, this just caused a strip of bark to be blown off of the tree, but in the cedar, it caused the whole tree to explode.

Note that while this may help the pine tree to survive a lightning strike better, it's also probably the reason that the pine trees have been more susceptible to the bark beetle during the recent drought.

Here is a picture that shows the top part of the tree (the bottom is hiding behind one of the trees on the left). As you can see, it was really only the bottom of the tree that exploded.

As for the experience itself, it was the loudest explosion I have ever heard. I was sitting inside the cabin when it happened, but my first thought was that we were being bombed by airplanes. I was pretty sure that terrorists were involved somehow. Even so, I was pretty protected inside the house. My wife, mother, daughter, four nieces, and one niece's friend were all out on the deck when it happened. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. Most of them were only about 30 feet from the nearest pine that got hit (but didn't explode), and about 70 feet from the exploding cedar.

The case for the SUV

Here's something I'm wondering about. Life on this planet is carbon based. The less carbon there is available in the environment, the less life the world can support. Plants breathe in CO2 (during the day, anyway) and use the sun's energy to convert this CO2 into sugar and Oxygen. This sugar is then converted by the plant and the animals that eat it (here my knowledge gets a little weak) and is somehow fed into general chemistry of the organism. As plants and animals die and decay, some of this carbon is released back into the environment, but much is taken up directly by other living organisms.

Originally, the earth had a lot of carbon in the atmosphere and water. Then, over time, this carbon was taken up by living organisms and only a little was left in the atmosphere. At this point, the earth was pretty much at capacity as far as the amount of life it could support.

However, as we all know, the oil and coal that we now pull from the earth is what's left of the bodies of living organisms that died millions of years ago. Over time, carbon has been removed from the environment and is no longer accessible to living organisms. If this process were to continue undisturbed, one would think that the capacity for life on earth would gradually diminish, leaving the earth a wasteland. I'm stretching a little here, but it could be that the Sahara desert is an early result of this process.

By burning fossil fuels, such as gasoline in our automobiles, we're actually returning some of this carbon to the environment.

If done too much, of course, we could cause a greenhouse effect, and I'm not enough of an expert to say whether what we're burning now is too much or not. Of course, I'm not enough of an expert to have made any of these claims, but that didn't stop me :)

Maybe there's something wrong with this theory. Considering how much the oil companies would like to continue buring oil, one would think that if there were any merit to this theory, they would have been spouting it all over the place. On the other hand, there's just the tiniest possibility that nobody's thought of it yet, in which case the theories mine.

Remember, I'm publishing this theory on July 15th, 2005. If anybody publishes the idea after that, they're too late. I own it! (Actually, I started to write this post yesterday, so I'm not sure what date is going to show up when I post it. It may show up as July 14th.)