How can human body survive lighting strike if it can reach over 100 millions volts, while cows struck by lighting die instantly.
In: Biology
Lightning hits the ground and then spreads out to dissipate the energy. Cows have their front and back legs relatively far apart, so their bodies can act like an alternate path to more distant ground when lightning strikes nearby.
Moving up through the cow and back into the ground further away is a path of less resistance than moving through the dirt itself, and multiple cows can get fried by a single nearby strike.
Humans stand with just two feet close together, so we can get struck directly and killed, but as aren’t likely to get injured by a voltage dump from a nearby strike.
Cows and humans die as easily from lighting. There’s some slight differences depending on the situation that could differ between us and cows or other mammals. Posture at the time (particularly important if not a direct hit, but say a tree near you and dealing with step potential), surroundings, skins wetness, terrain, etc. might come into play, but it’s mostly the same.
Major difference in survival rates would be humans usually receive expert medical attention, cows don’t.
One key difference, in addition to cows having two extra paths to ground) is that cows are almost always standing on soil and they never wear shows that could provide some insulation against current flow. If the soil is soft enough, their hooves may be sunk up to several inches in the soil, which increases the area available for current flow.
if you get a direct hit, you aint walking out, doesn’t matter what you are.
what often happens in these survivors of lightning strikes, they either dont take a direct hit getting hit a branch of it instead, or they were in the vicinity of the actual impact without insulation causing them to take some of the current that hit the ground.
electricity is gonna take the fastest path through your body to the ground that it can, so it depends where you get hit and what falls in its path of least resistance through you that determines whether you’re gonna die, i think.
When going through MSHA training, i was taught that if I have to walk away from an electrical hazard that is penetrating the ground (having to leave a truck after a downed power line falls on it instead of burning alive, for instance), you are supposed to take really small steps, or even “bunny hop” away so that your feet don’t have different amounts of current, which is more dangerous.
How the hell do you even tell a 5-year-old this??? Physics and chemistry are like high school level lessons. I didn’t even know about cloud to cloud lightning or red sprites until I was out of college.
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