Lucky strike: Lightning brings seismic surprise
Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 12:30
in Earth & Climate
As dark clouds rolled in from the west on a July afternoon last year, Klaus-G. Hinzen, a seismologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, knew a big storm was brewing. He was watching from the window of the university's earthquake observatory in Bensberg, a small town outside of Cologne, as lightning struck a nearby hotel. Less than a minute later, a flash took out a tree next to the earthquake lab itself, turning that stormy afternoon into a rare seismic experiment.