Lightning That Forgot Which Way Is Down

There is a kind of lightning that does not strike the ground. It strikes the sky. From a thunderstorm top, it fires upward, past the clouds, past the mesosphere, reaching toward the ionosphere 50 to 90 kilometers (30 to 55 miles) above Earth's surface. Scientists call it a gigantic jet, which is, for once, a name that earns its adjective.

On July 3, 2025, NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured one of these events from the International Space Station. She originally thought she had caught a sprite — another rare upper-atmospheric phenomenon — before scientists confirmed she had documented something even rarer: a gigantic jet.

Gigantic jets appear to result from excess electrical charge building up in a cloud that has no viable path to the ground, so it escapes upward instead. Most sightings are accidental: a passenger glancing out a plane window, a ground camera pointed at something else when the jet fires. Pilots reported odd flashes for decades, but the first confirmed recordings only arrived in 1989, which is why this field still feels surprisingly young.

Capturing a gigantic jet from space gives researchers data about energy transfer between the troposphere and the ionosphere — two atmospheric layers that, until recently, we assumed a thunderstorm had no particular reason to connect. Many questions about how and why these events form remain unanswered, which is why NASA has set up a citizen science project, Spritacular, to gather as much footage as possible for further study.

The atmosphere has been running electrical experiments above our heads for as long as there have been storms. We only started looking up.

Read the full story at NASA Science, September 24, 2025

Hot Take: The fact that pilots were reporting upward lightning for decades before anyone with a camera and credentials could confirm it is a small, useful lesson about what the atmosphere thinks of our observational infrastructure. There is an entire zoo of light and electricity playing out above every thunderstorm, and the primary data collection strategy, as of 2025, is asking the public to please look up and take notes.