An applied physicist at the Severe Storms Research Center at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Peterson recently confirmed the longest horizontal lightning flash ever measured: a staggering 829 kilometers (or 515 miles). The bolt stretched across multiple states from near Dallas, Texas, to Kansas City, Missouri.

Scientists have revealed that a lightning bolt that occurred over a swath of the southern U.S. in 2017 was the single longest lightning strike ever recorded. At 515 miles long, the flash was the equivalent distance from Boston to the Outer Banks of North Carolina,