Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the “highest concentration of lightning”. With 250 lightning flashes per square kilometre each year, the phenomenon is known as the Beacon of Maracaibo or Catatumbo Lightning. There is an average of 260 storm days per year occurring over the mouth of the Catatumbo River as it enters Lake Maracaibo. The storms have an average of 28 lightning strikes per minute. Globally, there are about 44 lightning strikes every second; that’s about 1.4 billion flashes a year.
Shortly after dusk, lightning strikes Lake Maracaibo about twenty-eight times a minute for up to nine hours. “The lightning can be so continuous that you see everything around you,” Muñoz said. Suspended over the mouth of the Catatumbo River, which locals call the “river of fire,” this strobe light brightens night into day. “You should be afraid, but it is so impressive that your fear gets overwhelmed. You actually don’t feel fear,” said Joaquín Díaz-Lobatón, a physicist and researcher at the Centro de Modelado Científico at Universidad del Zulia in Venezuela.
Sailors have embraced this phenomenon for centuries, using the Maracaibo lightning as a beacon. When Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed into Lake Maracaibo in 1499, he encountered a city of huts built on stilts. He called the floating city Venezuela, or “Little Venice,” or so one story goes. Today, the lake supports 20,000 fishermen, and many live in palafitos, one-room, tin shacks. “These people, the forgotten people, are frequently getting struck by lightning,” Muñoz said. Catatumbo Lightning strikes people three to four times more here than in the United States. Most fishermen understand fish bite best at dusk when Catatumbo Lightning brews. “We want to make life easier for them with lightning detection and prediction,” Muñoz said.
Picture Credit : Google