Rare Form of ‘Red Lightning’ Caught on Camera Over Puerto Rico

Remote cameras recently captured a rare natural light show in the sky over Puerto Rico. The hauntingly beautiful bursts are called gigantic jets, an uncommon form of lightning that originates in clouds and shoots upwards, high into the atmosphere, rather than down towards the ground.

Cameras operated by the Caribbean Astronomy Society captured the images in the early hours of August 4. While members of the society were reviewing the footage to examine meteors, they instead saw the bright bursts, which lasted for a few seconds. In a Facebook post, the organization said they had received reports of people seeing the jets from several areas of the island.

“The images we obtained suggest that these discharges seen from the Island must have lasted longer than usual,” the CAS said.

Gigantic jets are a recent discovery, only being documented for the first time in 2002. They are similar to red sprites, in that both are electrical discharges that rise from clouds, shooting 56 miles (90 kilometers) high into the ionosphere. The jets are powerful, with an intensity up to 10 times that of conventional lightning. On some occasions, their force can even affect satellites in low Earth orbit.

Since their discovery, researchers have found that gigantic jets only happen when temperatures low in the atmosphere are colder than those in the mid-atmosphere, leading to clouds forming relatively close to the ground. While the exact mechanism that causes gigantic jets is still being researched, they occur when there is a difference in charge between two layers of the atmosphere. As the electricity passes through the mesosphere, it interacts with nitrogen, which is what gives the jets their reddish color.

Although gigantic jets only originate from clouds that are part of intense thunderstorms, they shoot so high into the sky that they can be seen from a long distance away. That’s why the Puerto Rico video shows the jets against a clear night sky: The thunderstorm was actually miles away from the cameras.

Although rare, gigantic jets have occasionally been caught on camera. In 2021, a photographer in Puerto Rico was able to get a detailed shot of a jet’s bright red colors.