WTF!

Post Reply New Topic

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... g-weather/

seriously wtf, that does not seem like a good thing at all.

It sounds like a freak weather incident. The article said something similar happened in West Virginia around twenty years ago. What rotten luck though...

Well from what I gather all the reindeer where electrocuted, but that is a crapload of animals to die all at once like that. For some reason it kind of really disturbs me,,,but no sense to go into that as it wouldn't make sense.

I just found it weird the Norwegian officials said they had never seen anything like it before yet there is actual video evidence.

I think they were all gathered in one area to wait out the storm, and picked a crummy spot.

Kind of unrelated, but it reminds me of those people who have been hit by lightening multiple times. Sometimes the odds just aren't in your favor.

yeah the article I read implied the reindeer gather together during storms, it's just 300 is a s**t ton of reindeer to die all at once like that. IDK it's just brutal but still that is a s**t ton to have died I mean 300+.

It IS rather shocking (no pun intended).

And the fact that the world's record for animals slaughtered by lightning is now held by a wild animal instead of by domestic cattle is also curious. You would expect livestock held in man made fields surrounded by barbed wire to be an easier target for random lightening bolts than a wild species. But this reindeer body count exceeds all of those cow incidents cited in the article (of like 50 each) combined.

Also makes you wonder if the same thing couldnt happen to humans at a crowded outdoor event.

Well. Water and electricity isn't a good combination. And I bet the ground was wet.

Actually lighting strikes happened quite a few times to humans during outdoor events. For example:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36451614 (2016)
The thing is people know CPR and have hospitals so there is less death rate.

I would think that the strength of the lightning can vary? If so, this was probably a h**l of a lightning.

Not only powerful but physically big. I think of a lightening bolt as being inches wide, and being able to toast things out to a few feet.

Three hundred reindeer must take up a lot of space on the ground even when they are huddled together. Like as much a 1000 people would take up, which would be like a big fraction of an acre. That's a big sized hunk of lightening!

It certainly had to be massively brutal lightning strike that's for damn sure. Lightning certainly isn't something to take lightly I had a rather close encounter myself one time a long time ago, me and my siblings were on a walk and it started storming and there was a lightning strike pretty much right next to me close enough to where I could feel the static from it.

If it had been the sort of strike that took out all these reindeer, not so sure me or my siblings would have made it home that day.

I read a description that they were not directly hit, but were killed from the ground current, passing along the surface from the direct hit at the center.

The current went up one leg, across their hearts, and down the other - which is why you want to keep one hand behind your back when you're doing risky electrical stuff.

Sad reindeers....

I have seen similar events, that is lighting strike a group of people over a considerable area (for instance it once struck the picture at a softball game, killing the pitcher and knocking over/injuring the whole infield, another time it killed or injured several soldiers in tents over a small area, at Fort Dix, NJ ). Sometimes it has to do with the conductivity of the ground. At Dix the ground was soaked.

It's really sad that it took out the whole herd.

It's happened here to cattle and horses that were standing under trees during storms.One man lost his whole herd of cattle.Supposedly the meat is no good to eat,it will be tough.

The animals were grazing in a permafrost area and the temperature was just high enough to leave a lot of liquid water on the ground. The animals were up to their ankles in water which is what carried the the current. It was a groundstrike. If the weather had been a few degrees cooler and the water were ice the current would not have flowed as much.

That's what I thought, too.

Russians reported a similar event, which they attributed to the release of anthrax from thawing permafrost.

Notice, that the Norwegians have furnished no material proof, that the animals were electrocuted.