Here's what happens when lightning doesn't hit the ground

Everyone loves a lightning show: big bolts of electricity heading to Earth. But there’s an entire display above those billowing masses that you are probably missing.

In 2001, researchers scanning the sky with a low-light camera at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory noticed something bizarre: Lightning exploding from a cloud’s top and heading straight for space. The trajectory was baffling. Thunderbolts form when a negative electrical charge—gathered from an incoming storm—builds up near the bottom of a cloud. If enough energy accumulates, it breaks free, sending the classic bolt to Earth. More often, however, the electrons stay in the cloud, traveling upward until they hit the positively charged top, where they cancel out.