Curious and exotic places.
An Everlasting Lightning Storm
The
third hidden wonder of South America.
PUERTO CONCHA, Venezuela—Normally,
there is just an hour between the sun going down and the sky lighting up over
the Catatumbo Delta. It's already dusk, and Dylan and I are sitting on a dock
in a dusty fishing village, warily watching the clouds and waiting for a small
boat to carry us up the shore of Lake Maracaibo and into the middle of what may
be the world's most perfect storm.
We've traveled nearly 15 hours from
Bogotá, Colombia, to get to this out-of-the-way corner of western Venezuela,
with the hope of seeing one of the strangest weather phenomena in the world.
Here, where the Catatumbo River empties into South America's largest lake, an
"everlasting lightning storm"
rages continuously for up to 10 hours a night, in exactly the same place, 260
nights a year. Nowhere else on Earth is so much lightning concentrated in one
spot, with such regularity.
Erik Quiroga, a Caracas-based
environmentalist who has accompanied us, looks down at his watch. "It's
going to start any minute," he says, excited. All day, as we sped across
the scorched, flat Venezuelan countryside in an air-conditioned SUV, he'd been
predicting a 7:15 p.m. start for the storm. Promptly, as if on cue, the clouds
flash a phosphorescent pink, and a bolt of lightning fractures the sky. Quiroga
grins and flashes us his watch. It shows exactly a quarter past 7.
Known as the "Beacon of
Maracaibo," the Catatumbo lightning has guided sailors for centuries. It
can sometimes be seen on the horizon from as far away as the Lesser Antilles,
more than 200 miles distant. In his 1597 poem "The Dragontea," which
tells the story of Sir Francis Drake's last expedition, Spanish poet Lope de
Vega tells how the lightning—"flames, which the wings of night
cover"—illuminated the silhouettes of the English privateer's ships,
tipping off the garrison at Maracaibo to his surprise attack. During the last
major naval skirmish of the Venezuelan war of independence in 1823, the
lightning was said to have helped steer the ships of Adm. José Prudencio
Padilla to victory over the Spanish fleet. The storm is so central to the
region's identity that the state of Zulia put a large lightning bolt in the middle
of its flag.
And then last year, suddenly and
unexpectedly, the storm seemed to stop. According to reports in Venezuelan
papers that were then picked up by the international press, the skies above
Catatumbo went dark for six weeks between the end of January and the beginning
of March 2010. "It was the longest disappearance of the lightning in 104
years," said Quiroga, who blamed a drought caused by 2009's especially
strong El Niño. "This is a unique gift and we are at risk of losing
it," he told the Guardian.
In 2002, Quiroga launched a campaign
to have the Catatumbo lightning pronounced the world's first UNESCO World
Heritage Weather Phenomenon—a seemingly quixotic crusade, given that thus far
the organization has only recognized physical places. Not only is the lightning
a natural wonder, it is also, he argues, crucial to the global ecosystem. As it
rips through the air, lightning tears apart oxygen molecules in its path, some
of which rearrange to form ozone. (The word ozone, from the Greek for
"to smell," was coined because of the strange odor that lingers after
lightning storms.) Discharging more than 1.2 million times each year, the
Catatumbo storm is, Quiroga argues, the single greatest individual natural
source of ozone in the world.
Quiroga is the Catatumbo lightning's
No. 1 cheerleader and fan. He helped spread the story of the lightning's 2010
disappearance, and he has promoted an "International Day of the Ozone
Layer" to call attention to the storm's role as "the primary source
of stratospheric ozone." When I contacted him to let him know that we were
going to be visiting Catatumbo, he offered to come along as our guide and to
help make all the necessary arrangements with the local authorities.
The U.S. State Department and many
European foreign ministries advise against traveling in the state of Zulia or
any part of Venezuela within 50 miles of the Colombian border. The area is a
haven for drug-traffickers, guerrillas, and armed gangs of various stripes.
During our eight-hour drive south from the Maracaibo airport, we passed through
no fewer than nine different police and military checkpoints. Our driver, an
official in the regional environmental ministry, spent a disconcerting portion
of the ride telling us how worried his mother was about him traveling in this
part of the state. 
Cloud-to-cloud lightning over Lake Maracaibo
Quiroga, who makes the trip at least
once a year, didn't seem so concerned. He stuck his hand out of the window and
sized up the hot, dry air, which was approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and
pronounced that the conditions were shaping up perfectly for a massive evening
storm. He pointed at a nearly symmetrical mushroom-shaped cumulonimbus cloud
floating alone at the horizon and dubbed it the "most perfect" he'd
seen in months. "Tonight will be something special," he said.
Why this particular spot should be
the site of the world's most perfect storm is still an open question. For a
while, during the 1960s, it was thought that uranium in the bedrock of the
Maracaibo basin might somehow be the trigger. According to Ángel Muñoz, who
leads a team that studies the lightning at the University of Zulia's Center for
Scientific Modeling, the storm is caused by a more mundane, but still unique,
convergence of local and regional factors.
The Catatumbo region is ringed by a
V-shaped wall of mountains, which captures the warm trade winds blowing in off
the Caribbean. When those winds pour into the Maracaibo basin, they collide
with frigid air cascading down off the Andes. That collision of
temperatures—the essential recipe for a thunderstorm—is fed by the enormous
quantities of water that evaporate off the lake each day under the equatorial
sun. The topography alone would make the area a hot spot for storms. But
there's one other factor that may give the lightning over Catatumbo an extra
punch: methane.
Part of the reason gas in Caracas
costs 6 cents a gallon is that the Maracaibo basin sits atop one of South
America's largest oil fields. Where there is oil, there is also methane, and
sometimes you can see little bubbles of the gas percolating to the surface of
the lake. In the swampy lagoons directly under the epicenter of the Catatumbo
storm, the presence of methane seems to be especially pronounced.
The
"everlasting lightning storm" rages for up to 10 hours a night, 260
nights a year
Muñoz believes methane may increase
the conductivity of the air over Catatumbo, allowing lightning to recharge
faster and fire more frequently. But he cautions that the mystery of Catatumbo
hasn't necessarily been solved, and he implored me to convey his reservations
in anything I wrote. He was disappointed by the way the press trumped up the
Catatumbo storm's supposed "disappearance" last year. The lightning
always dies down during the dry months of January and February, he said. There
was no reason to be concerned—a sentiment he says he communicated to
journalists. "We were interviewed, and we showed them we have no
scientific evidence that the Catatumbo lightning is disappearing," says
Muñoz. In fact, not only is the Catatumbo storm not abating, its intensity has
actually been increasing over the last decade. Though they don't yet have the
data to prove it, Muñoz and his team suspect that methane released by expanded
oil drilling in the lake may be the cause.
Muñoz refers to Quiroga as "a
very excited man" and a terrific promoter of the Catatumbo storm, but he
challenges some of his scientific claims. Even more than the story of the
storm's disappearance, Muñoz is bothered by Quiroga's insistence that the
Catatumbo lightning is a major player in the regeneration of the ozone layer.
While it's true that the Catatumbo storm generates ozone, those molecules
remain in the lower-altitude troposphere and decompose before they could ever
migrate up to the ozone layer in the higher-level stratosphere. At lower
altitudes, ozone can actually be poisonous to humans.
Our plan had been to get as close to
the storm as we could by car, and then travel the rest of the way on the water.
We would take boats 40 minutes down the Rio Concha and up the coast of Lake
Maracaibo to a small palafito, or stilt village, called Congo Mirador,
which lies almost directly beneath the storm's epicenter. But when we pulled up
to the dock in Puerto Concha at about 5:45 p.m., the boats that were supposed
to be there waiting for us were nowhere to be found.
Nowhere
else on Earth is so much lightning concentrated in one place with such
regularity
Eventually, we located a pair of
local fishermen, who both insisted that there was no way they could take us. It
was already too late in the day, they said. By the time we got out to Congo
Mirador, it would be too dark for them to turn around and make it back.
"There's just no way."
"Can't you bring a light?"
I asked.
"Criminals," one of the
men responded gruffly.
I asked Quiroga what he meant.
"Bandits," he clarified, making a gun with his fingers and pointing
it at his palm. They didn't want to be out on the river after the sun went
down. Negotiations continued, and frantic calls were made by a government
official who had joined us from the municipal capital of Encontrados. The sun
fell closer to the horizon. A new idea was broached: We'd pay one of the
boatmen to stay with us overnight on the lake and to take us back in the
morning.
The fisherman disappeared and
returned 15 minutes later with a group of younger men, who looked like they
might be teenagers. By now, the sky was almost black, and it was no longer a
question of getting back before nightfall but of getting there at all.
Our government escort brokered a
deal. He pointed at the younger men. "They will take you," he said.
"They say we will bring two boats instead of one, in case something
happens. We will bring lights, and life vests. And we will bring guns."
I walked over to the first fisherman
we'd spoken to, a tall middle-aged man with a moustache and a commanding
presence.
"You look like you've been
doing this for a long time," I said to him. "And I understand that
you're not willing to come with us. I need you to give me your honest opinion
here," I said. "Is this a bad idea?"
He raised his eyebrows and nodded
his head.
Dylan and I stepped back and caucused. We weren't the only ones who would be
traveling downstream through the darkness. We were also responsible for
Quiroga, a local fireman, and a local photographer who were accompanying us.
Instead of strapping on guns and riding through the night to Congo Mirador, we
realized that we had no choice but to observe the storm from a distance. And so
we settled into our seats on the dock and watched as the clouds lit up around
us. They refused to wait.
GoPro
providedthe travelers with some camera equipment free of charge.
For more on the world's wondrous, curious, and esoteric places, check out Atlas
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