Catatumbo: The Everlasting Storm That Suddenly Went Dark

Picture a thunderstorm that almost never ends, producing up to 1.6 million lightning strikes a year and flashing 40 times a minute for nine hours a night. For centuries this everlasting storm over Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo was a permanent fixture of the planet, until January 2010, when the sky went terrifyingly dark.This episode explores the Catatumbo lightning, the highest-density lightning on Earth, and the decades-long scientific quest to explain why it happens here. We trace the geography that traps the storm, the failed theories, the modern climate consensus, and the drought that briefly extinguished a phenomenon thought to be eternal.The atmospheric mixing bowl where warm Caribbean air slams into 12,000-foot mountain ranges and is forced violently upwardThe discarded theories, from Zavrotsky's 1991 uranium bedrock idea to the methane model that the data flipped on its headThe modern consensus linking the storm to El Nino, the Caribbean low-level jet, and convective potential energyIndigenous and colonial significance, from the Bari name house of thunder to its role as the Lighthouse of MaracaiboThe 2010 blackout caused by drought and the 2016 breakthrough allowing forecasts months in advance