An Independent Enquiry into the sky, the sound, and the myths built on top of both
Stand at a window during a summer storm and count. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi. The flash comes first, always — light does not wait for anything. Then the sound arrives, a beat or a breath or several long seconds later, and something in the body reacts to it that has nothing to do with reasoning. It is loud. For a strike close enough, it is not only heard but felt — a pressure in the chest, a rattle in the glass — and that feeling is not imagination. It is entirely ordinary. Weather happens; thunder is what weather sounds like, and sometimes feels like, when it happens close enough.
And yet.
Pull on that ordinary moment and it does not stay ordinary for long. Thunder turns out to be a genuinely strange event — one that only exists at all because of a physical accident of scale, that begins its life as the same category of phenomenon as a nuclear blast or an asteroid impact, that connects the sky directly to the ocean through mathematics rather than metaphor, that is partly created by whatever it happens to strike, and that has been mistaken for the voice of an angry god in more human cultures than almost any other single phenomenon on Earth. This piece follows that thread from the sky it happens in, through the mechanics of the sound itself, out to the myths built on top of it — messily, because the science itself is messy, and because no one thing about thunder has all the answers.
Before thunder itself can be explained, the atmosphere it happens in needs describing properly — and the honest description is not really "the atmosphere" as a separate category of thing at all, so much as a second ocean.
This is not a loose comparison. Meteorologists and oceanographers use closely related mathematics for both, because the atmosphere and the ocean are the same category of physical system: rotating fluids on a spinning planet, governed by the same equations. The formal name for the large-scale wave motion both share is the Rossby wave, or planetary wave, first identified by the meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, driven by the Coriolis effect and the conservation of potential vorticity as fluid moves across latitudes (Rossby, 1939). A ridge of high pressure is a crest, in the same technical fluid-dynamics sense as an ocean swell. A trough of low pressure is a trough. When a Rossby wave amplifies enough, meteorologists describe it as breaking — the same word used for a wave crashing on a beach — and that breaking produces the recognisable features of a weather map: blocking highs, cut-off lows, the kind of stalled weather pattern behind events like the 2003 European heatwave (Fiveable, 2026).
The parallel extends further. Jet streams are the atmospheric equivalent of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream — fast channels that steer the larger wave pattern along. Oceanic Rossby waves travel along the thermocline, the boundary between warm surface water and the cold deep; the atmosphere's rough equivalent is the tropopause. A storm, in this frame, is the atmosphere doing precisely what the ocean does in a gale: amplitude building until the fluid can no longer hold its shape.
Thunder, then, is a single violent, localised sound event nested inside a sky that is — in the same physical sense as the sea — sometimes flat calm and sometimes heaving.
Thunderstorms form from convective instability: warm, moist air rising fast through much colder air above it. The steeper that temperature gradient — measured by meteorologists as CAPE, convective available potential energy — the more violent the updraft, and the taller the storm grows.
The charge itself comes from a specific, well-studied process called non-inductive charging, first demonstrated in the laboratory by Reynolds, Brook, and Gourley (1957). High in the storm's mixed-phase zone, typically somewhere between about -10°C and -20°C, two kinds of ice collide: graupel — dense, soft pellets built up as supercooled water droplets freeze onto a falling ice nucleus — and much smaller, lighter ice crystals still forming by vapour deposition, all suspended together in cloud that still holds liquid water below freezing point. Each collision is a brief, rebounding contact, and charge transfers between the two particles during that instant. Decades of laboratory experiments (Takahashi, 1978; Saunders, Keith, & Mitzeva, 1991) show the direction of that transfer is exquisitely sensitive to temperature and liquid water content: below roughly -15°C the small ice crystal typically ends up positively charged and the graupel negative, while in warmer parts of the same cloud the polarity can reverse entirely. The precise atomic-level cause is still debated among specialists — leading explanations point to differences in how fast the two ice surfaces are growing or subliming, with mobile ions in the thin, liquid-like layer that coats any ice surface redistributing along the resulting temperature gradient during the fraction of a second the particles touch — but the empirical pattern, mapped across hundreds of lab trials, holds even where the underlying molecular physics isn't fully settled.
What turns billions of these small, temperature-dependent transfers into a storm capable of lightning is exactly the convective lifting one might expect. Graupel is dense enough to fall, or at best hang suspended against a strong updraft; the ice crystals it collides with are light enough to be swept upward with the rising air. Every collision, in other words, is followed immediately by gravity and the updraft pulling the two newly-opposite charges apart — negative graupel sinking toward the cloud's middle, positive crystals carried on up toward its top. Repeated across millions of collisions over a storm's lifetime, this builds the huge, cloud-spanning voltage difference that eventually breaks down as a lightning strike, and it is why more vigorous convection reliably means more lightning: faster updrafts mean more collisions, happening faster, separating charge more effectively. A rapid pressure transition — a cold front forcing into a warm air mass — is exactly the kind of event that triggers this instability in the first place, so sharp, energised pressure changes genuinely do drive more violent storms.
That extra energy affects thunder's reach in two separate ways. A more energised storm grows taller — some severe storms carry lightning 12 to 15 kilometres up, against a few kilometres for a weak one — which gives the sound further to travel down through the atmosphere and puts the strike above obstructions that would otherwise block it. Separately, the atmosphere the sound has to cross afterward — temperature layering, humidity, wind shear — determines whether it actually survives that journey. Storm energy and atmospheric conditions are two independent variables, not one.
And this holds beyond Earth, with an important qualification. Lightning has been confirmed on Jupiter — first proven when Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected whistler-mode radio signals matching Earth's own lightning-generated whistlers (Gurnett, Shaw, Anderson, Kurth, & Scarf, 1979) — and on Saturn, with contested but strengthening evidence for it on Venus and Uranus, all inside convective cloud systems using broadly the same charge-separation mechanism as Earth's storms (Astronomy.com, 2023; NASA, n.d.). But it is notably absent where conditions might suggest it should exist: Titan has thick storms in an atmosphere denser than Earth's, yet no lightning has been detected there, and Mars, despite immense dust storms, has produced no confirmed lightning either (Astronomy.com, 2023). Thunder, it turns out, is a property of any sufficiently energised, convective planetary atmosphere with a working charge-separation mechanism — which is common, but conditional. Not automatic.
The assumption that other planets simply run the same charging process on different gases turns out right for most of it, and far stranger than expected for one specific case. The deep lightning long detected on Jupiter and Saturn, tens of kilometres below the visible cloud tops, is thought to form in essentially the same way as Earth's — both planets have a layer where water condenses into liquid droplets and ice, and the terrestrial graupel-ice charging process is assumed to operate there too. But NASA's Juno spacecraft, flying closer to Jupiter's cloud tops than any earlier mission, found something with no equivalent on Earth at all: a second, shallower form of lightning. High above the water clouds, rising ice crystals meet a layer of ammonia gas cold enough that the ammonia acts as an antifreeze, melting the ice into a liquid ammonia-water solution rather than letting it refreeze — and it is this exotic liquid, colliding with ordinary water ice, that generates the charge for Jupiter's "shallow lightning" (Guillot et al., 2020; NASA/JPL, 2020). The droplets are theorised to grow into slushy ammonia-rich hailstones nicknamed "mushballs," which then fall deep into the planet — a mechanism that conveniently also explains a separate Juno mystery: why ammonia appears to be missing from much of Jupiter's atmosphere.
Venus breaks the pattern altogether, and remains genuinely unresolved. Its clouds are sulfuric acid rather than water, and while sulfuric acid droplets can hold a charge, models suggest the surrounding atmosphere may simply be too electrically conductive to let that charge accumulate into a lightning strike — the very property that makes charge separation so effective on Earth and Jupiter is largely absent there (National Geographic, 2021). Radio signals resembling lightning-generated whistler waves have been detected near Venus for decades, but a 2023 study using NASA's Parker Solar Probe proposed an entirely different, non-lightning explanation for at least some of them — reopening a debate that has now run for roughly forty years without a confirmed answer (Science Friday, 2023).
What the person at the window is feeling, not just hearing, is not a metaphor. Right at the lightning channel, the pressure spikes to more than ten atmospheres, and the heated air expands at a rate faster than the local speed of sound (Few, 1969; Holmes, Brook, Krehbiel, & McCrory, 1971). That is the precise technical definition of a shock wave — the same category of disturbance as a sonic boom, an explosive blast, or the airburst of a house-sized asteroid entering the atmosphere. In each case, an explosive, near-instantaneous release of energy drives a pressure front outward faster than sound itself can carry it, even though the energy source differs completely in each case — electrical heating for lightning, chemical or nuclear reaction for a bomb, kinetic energy for an impact. Blast overpressure of exactly this kind is, in fact, one of the primary damage mechanisms in both large detonations and impact airbursts, alongside thermal effects.
The shock does not last, though. Within a few tens of microseconds and only a few tens of metres from the channel, it has already slowed to the ordinary speed of sound and become nothing more exotic than an acoustic wave (Few, 1970; Fleagle, 1949). Anyone standing close to a strike is, briefly, genuinely inside the shock-wave zone — which is why very close thunder can crack windows and pop drywall from its studs, and at extreme proximity has even ruptured eardrums. Everyone further out is hearing the decayed remnant: the same original event, arrived as ordinary sound.
Part of what survives that decay is not audible at all. A portion of thunder's energy sits below 20 Hz, genuinely infrasonic, thought to arise particularly from intra-cloud discharges displacing large volumes of air (Dessler, 1973; Few, 1985). Infrasound of that kind is not heard so much as felt — pressure and vibration rather than tone — which is exactly the sensation people describe with very powerful or very close thunder, quite apart from the noise of it.
Remarkably, this same felt-not-heard effect has become deliberate engineering. The dedicated Low-Frequency Effects (LFE) channel, carrying dedicated sub-20Hz content separate from the rest of a film's soundtrack, originated with Dolby's 70mm "Baby Boom" tracks in 1977 and became a standard feature of home theatre systems through the 1990s and 2000s, purpose-built to reproduce explosions, earthquakes, and other deep rumbles down into the same infrasonic register thunder occupies (HomeTheaterHiFi.com, 2000). Filmmakers use it because infrasound produces a genuine physiological unease distinct from ordinary loudness — a link popularised, if not fully settled, by a well-known 1980s account of a "haunted" laboratory that turned out to be a badly mounted extractor fan producing 19 Hz infrasound (No Film School, 2025). Cinema and, more recently, home subwoofers have spent decades quietly reverse-engineering the exact sensation a thunderstorm produces for free.
The practical limit for hearing thunder is commonly cited as around ten miles, or sixteen kilometres, from the strike (National Weather Service, n.d.). Under favourable conditions — still air, particular temperature layering — it can carry further, fifteen to twenty miles, with rarer reports of detection out to twenty-five (NOAA, n.d.). Beyond that, the sound has simply been absorbed and bent away to nothing.
The mechanism matters more than the number. A lightning bolt superheats the column of air along its path to somewhere in the region of 30,000 Kelvin — roughly five times hotter than the surface of the Sun — in a matter of microseconds (Few, 1969). That air expands explosively and then contracts, and the resulting shockwave is thunder. As it travels outward, two things work against it. Sound waves refract upward, because the atmosphere typically cools with altitude and bends the wavefront away from the ground. At the same time, water vapour and other gases steadily absorb the wave's energy, and it is the higher frequencies — the sharp crack of a close strike — that get filtered out first, leaving only the low, rolling bass notes to survive any real distance (Holmes, Brook, Krehbiel, & McCrory, 1971; Fleagle, 1949). Past roughly ten miles, both effects together are usually enough to silence even a powerful bolt entirely. This is also the explanation for so-called heat lightning: not a distinct phenomenon, but ordinary lightning simply too far away for its thunder to have made the journey.
The ten-mile limit, though, is a limit of the human ear specifically, not of thunder. African elephants can perceive sound down to roughly 1 Hz — a full order of magnitude below the human floor near 20 Hz — and a thunderstorm generates genuine infrasound from its own internal convective turbulence, quite apart from the crack of any individual bolt, that propagates through the atmosphere over vast distances. Using instrumentation similar to the international network built to detect nuclear tests, atmospheric scientist Michael Garstang and colleagues have measured storm-generated infrasound detectable at ranges exceeding 100 kilometres — ten times the reach of anything a human ear could register (Garstang, 2004). GPS-tracked elephant herds in Namibia have been observed changing direction toward distant rainfall events, plausibly following that infrasonic signal toward both water and the vegetation growth that follows it — though the researchers are careful to call infrasound a "possible," not proven, trigger for the behaviour (Garstang et al., 2014).
A popular and researcher-endorsed version of this story credits elephants' feet rather than their ears — the idea that a distant storm sends seismic vibrations through the ground, picked up by pressure-sensitive pads and nerve endings in the sole of the foot. That feet-based mechanism is genuinely well established, but for a different signal: elephants can detect other elephants' rumbling calls and foot-stomps as ground-transmitted seismic waves (Günther, O'Connell-Rodwell, & Klemperer, 2004). Extending that same mechanism specifically to storm-generated ground vibrations is a plausible, researcher-proposed hypothesis rather than a directly measured finding — and the one paper that modelled elephant seismic detection quantitatively concluded that, under normal atmospheric conditions, the ground-based route is unlikely to reach further than the airborne one (Günther et al., 2004). The tidier, more viral version of the story — elephants "hearing" storms through their feet — may well turn out to be true. What is actually nailed down in the published record is the less cinematic version: their ears, reaching into a register no human ear has ever had access to.
It is tempting to assume that thunder's hard distance limit means sound simply cannot cross a true vacuum — and to extend that logic outward, to ask whether an explosion in the empty space between the Earth and the Moon would make any sound at all. The honest answer complicates the question before it can be answered.
Interplanetary space is not, strictly, a vacuum. Between the Earth and the Moon sits the solar wind: a thin stream of plasma, mostly protons and electrons, at a density of roughly five to ten particles per cubic centimetre near Earth's orbit, as measured continuously by spacecraft instruments and compiled in NASA's long-running OMNI solar wind dataset (King & Papitashvili, 2005). Even far beyond the solar system, in the space between the stars, there is still on average about one atom per cubic centimetre (Draine, 2011). A perfect vacuum, in the strictest sense, does not exist anywhere.
But the physics of sound is not really about whether a medium is present at all — it is about density relative to wavelength. Sound propagates through collisions: one particle strikes the next, which strikes the next, fast and often enough to carry a coherent pressure wave. At sea level, air molecules collide roughly a billion times a second, effortlessly fast enough to carry anything from a bass rumble to a dog whistle. In the solar wind, particles are so sparse that the average distance one travels before it meets another — the mean free path — can run into millions of kilometres. There is no way for a compression wave at any audible frequency to propagate through that. The medium is real. It is simply too thin, and too loosely connected, to carry sound at any scale a human ear was built to register.
This is where the picture becomes genuinely interesting rather than simply restrictive, because sound in space is not hypothetical — it has been detected. In 2003, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team led by Andrew Fabian at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, identified real pressure waves rippling outward through the hot gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million light-years away (Fabian et al., 2003). The pitch of that wave translates to a B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C — a frequency over a million billion times lower than the limit of human hearing, produced by genuine explosive activity around the black hole and thought to have kept the cluster's gas from cooling for around 2.5 billion years (Fabian et al., 2003; Chandra X-ray Center, 2003). It is not a metaphor and not a figure of speech. It is a real sound wave, existing in a real physical sense, at a scale and register no instrument built by human hands could ever catch.
There is an old idea this quietly resurrects. The Pythagorean musica universalis — the "music of the spheres" — held that the motion of celestial bodies produced harmonic tones, inaudible to human ears but real nonetheless (see the companion Why Music essay for the fuller lineage of this idea through Gurdjieff and Fripp). For over two thousand years that stood as either mysticism or poetic metaphor. The Perseus black hole is that claim made observationally true, without needing the metaphor at all: the sound was already there, in the plasma, and Chandra simply found it.
Thunder sits as the one register in between — the single scale at which "cosmic" sound, bounded by exactly the same density-and-medium physics that governs everything from a lightning strike to a black hole, happens to line up with the instrument evolution gave humans to hear it with. A detonation between the Earth and the Moon would not be silent because space has nothing in it. It would be silent because whatever sound could theoretically exist there is shaped entirely wrong for a human ear — the wrong density, the wrong scale, the wrong register. Not absent. Simply somewhere else on the same dial.
The channel-heating mechanism described above accounts for almost all of what reaches a human ear as thunder — the whole kilometres-long path the current takes through the air, not merely the point where it terminates. That is true regardless of what the bolt eventually strikes.
But the target adds its own layer, and it is a real, physically distinct event happening at the same instant. Trees genuinely explode: the sap and water in the sapwood flash-boil into steam in microseconds, and the resulting pressure blows the trunk apart, sometimes violently enough to eject debris across a wide area — though a long-term field study tracking over ninety directly struck trees in Panama found survival and damage vary enormously by species, with some large trees tolerating repeated direct strikes with little harm while killing neighbouring trees and parasitic vines in the process (Gora et al., 2025). Water struck directly can flash-boil at the surface with its own crack or hiss. Structures add a further wrinkle: a properly earthed lightning conductor is specifically engineered to minimise this kind of secondary explosive effect, giving the current the lowest-resistance path to ground so it need not violently force its way through brick, timber, or wiring. An unprotected building, by contrast, can produce several distinct secondary bangs — arcing at loose electrical connections, expanding pipework, cracking masonry — on top of the main channel boom. A tree, in effect, is genuinely a second instrument sounding alongside the thunderclap. A well-earthed lightning rod is closer to a mute.
A friend of mine, the bassist Chas Cronk, gave me a live, human-scale version of what a target-struck shock can do, well before I had any of the physics above to explain it. Chas toured in guitarist Steve Hackett's band, alongside John Hackett — Steve's brother, on flute and bass pedals — and keyboardist Nick Magnus. Bass pedals were something of a signature of that band's sound; Hackett himself has described the bass pedal solo on his 1979 track "Every Day" as one that "shakes the foundation of the buildings" (Stratton's Setlist, 2019). Chas recounted to me the fun he and John had during a soundcheck at the old Hammersmith Odeon, maxing out the venue's sound system and playing their bass pedals together, feeling the entire building shake as though caught in an earthquake. Two musicians, two sets of Moog bass pedals, and a room full of people briefly standing inside a purpose-built version of exactly the same felt, target-dependent shock a lightning strike delivers for free.
It is the same band, decades on, that supplies a companion thread to this one. Drummer Nick D'Virgilio later took up the drum stool in Hackett's touring outfit, and the discipline behind that kind of preparation — the invisible work that makes a single day's rehearsal succeed — is the subject of the companion essay Hiring, Rehearsing and Performing: Lessons from Nick D'Virgilio's Brain Preparation. Where this piece is about a building shaking from bass pedals struck in fun at a soundcheck, that one is about what it takes, cognitively, to be trusted with the stage in the first place.
At least four independent mechanisms stack together to produce the difference between a sharp, close crack and a long, rolling rumble, and none of them are variations on a single cause.
The lightning channel is a line, not a point — it zigzags for kilometres through the sky, and every segment along that path is its own small sound source, each a slightly different distance from the listener. Close up, the geometry is simple enough to read as one sharp crack. Further away, dozens of these mini-booms arrive at slightly staggered times, smeared out over a second or more, producing the rolling character of distant thunder (Few, 1970). A single flash is usually not one discharge either — it is typically three to seven separate return strokes within a second or two, each producing its own shockwave (Holmes et al., 1971). Terrain and cloud cover add genuine echo on top of that: hills, valleys, forests, buildings, and the underside of the storm cloud itself all reflect sound, which is why thunder in mountainous or valley terrain can roll on for far longer than the same storm would sound over open, flat land (Fleagle, 1949). And temperature layering can bend sound entirely away from an observer — a surface temperature inversion can create genuine acoustic shadow zones, pockets where lightning is visible but nothing is heard at all, even close by.
Four unrelated physical effects, stacking on top of each other in real time, to produce what is experienced as a single continuous sound.
Thunder gods appear in almost every polytheistic culture, and with striking consistency they are not minor figures — they are overwhelmingly the chief god of the pantheon. Zeus and Jupiter, Thor, Indra (originally the supreme deity of the Vedic period), Perun, Taranis — still echoed today in Yoruba-derived traditions like Santería and Candomblé. Comparative philologists trace the Indo-European branch of these figures back to a single reconstructed proto-god, Perkwunos, and to a shared mythic pattern in which the thunder-wielding sky-god slays a water-hoarding serpent or dragon to release the rains — a story told, with local variation, from the Vedic Indra's defeat of Vṛtra to the Greek Zeus's battle with Typhon (West, 2007). The image of a sky-father hurling thunderbolts from above is not dozens of independent inventions, but one very old idea that fissioned and travelled as populations spread across Eurasia.
Notably, this pattern is coded overwhelmingly male: sky-father, judgement-from-above, sitting at the top of the pantheon rather than emerging from it. Framings of thunder as an earth-mother's grief or displeasure exist, but they are the minority tradition — worth naming as such rather than assuming the two readings are equally common.
The formal literary term for weather mirroring a story's emotional register is the pathetic fallacy, coined by the critic John Ruskin in the "Of the Pathetic Fallacy" chapter of Modern Painters, Volume III (Ruskin, 1856), where he defined it as the "falseness in our impressions of external things" produced by heightened emotion. Thunder is its single most reliable tool in modern storytelling — precisely because the sky-as-judgement instinct was already centuries deep in human culture before cinema had the technology to stage it. Screenwriters and sound designers use the shorthand so consistently that it has its own catalogued trope name, Dramatic Thunder (TV Tropes, 2026).
Some of that instinct was trained by remarkably little raw material. A single stock recording nicknamed "Castle Thunder", first used in Universal's 1931 Frankenstein, was reused across countless Disney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons for decades afterward (All The Tropes, 2026) — meaning a significant share of an entire culture's "thunder equals danger" instinct was built, quite literally, on the same few seconds of sound effect playing on repeat for fifty years.
And the mythology restages itself almost unchanged the moment the technology exists to show it. In Disney's Fantasia (1940), the "Pastoral Symphony" segment depicts a bacchanal on Mount Olympus interrupted by Zeus, who has Vulcan forge lightning bolts for him to hurl down at the revellers below, played largely as slapstick (Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940). It is a striking moment because it is the oldest thunder myth in the Western tradition — sky-father punishing mortals from above — re-staged in full colour and sound for the first time, at the precise point where cinema technology finally made that staging possible.
None of these threads is really separate from the others. The sky above a thunderstorm obeys the same fluid mathematics as the sea beneath a gale, and thunder is what happens when that fluid gets energised enough to snap. Sound needs a medium the whole way there, and no true vacuum exists anywhere to make that a clean rule — only degrees of thinness, all the way out to a black hole 250 million light-years away, still singing the same note it has held for 2.5 billion years. What a bolt strikes is part of what a listener hears. The same rumble owes its shape to four unrelated physical accidents happening to overlap in time. And long before any of this could be measured, cultures around the world had already decided, independently and almost unanimously, that the loudest thing in the sky must be the voice of whoever was in charge of it.
None of it resolves into a single tidy explanation, and that is rather the point. Thunder rewards being followed rather than summarised — messily, the way most interesting things turn out to be, once someone actually goes looking.
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Topics: #WhyThunder #IndependentEnquiry #Acoustics #Meteorology #RossbyWaves #PlanetaryScience #ElephantInfrasound #Mythology #ThunderGods #PatheticFallacy #YoungFamilyLife #InformationWithoutInstruction
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