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Good news for those who have an unholy fear of being struck by lightning. Covering your head in rainwater can increase your chances of survival by up to 90%.
This is the conclusion reached by a team of scientists who created a fake human head, hit it with powerful bolts of electricity, and measured the results. The sham heads immersed in water were characterized by significantly less damage and less internal exposure to electrical current.
The results suggest that staying in shape and getting wet can significantly increase your chances of encountering a thunderstorm. However, your best bet is to not experience any thunderstorms at all.
The research team, led by engineer René Machats of Germany’s Ilmenau University of Technology, said: “Our experiments with human head phantoms suggest that rain-soaked skin may provide better lightning protection than dry skin.” “We have provided practical evidence of the theoretically hypothesized effect that there is.” ”
Lightning is not a phenomenon that can be ignored. They can carry a current of over 200 kiloamps. This is far more power than would be required to kill a human.
However, several studies suggest that water may reduce the effects. Theoretical analysis suggests that wet skin may reduce electrical current exposure to the human body, while other studies show that wet animals survive lightning strikes better than dry animals. I found that it happens frequently.
However, experimental studies have not investigated changes in wet human skin. Machts and his colleagues sought to address this gap in our understanding of the effects of lightning. Specifically, how surface moisture changes the way lightning travels over a naked human head.
They created two fake human heads designed to mimic the electrical conduction properties of a real human noggin. They are modeled based on CT scan data, and each consists of the scalp, skull, and tissue volumes within the skull. The building materials were carefully selected to have properties similar to human tissue, including sodium chloride, water, graphite, and agarose.
Next, the phantom head was placed over the electrode array. The team kept one head dry, sprayed the other head with artificial rainwater, and blasted both with the maximum current available in the pulse generator, 42 kiloamps (most cloud-to-ground lightning strikes It has a current of about 30 kiloamps).
The results were, no joke, surprising.
Wet heads had fewer “injuries” and were less severe than dry heads. In other words, it is an area that has been affected by electricity.
But that’s not all.
The electrode array also measured the current flowing through the surfaces of the two heads. Now, when lightning strikes a person, that person may experience something called a surface flashover. Surface flashover is a path of electrical discharge on the surface of the skin caused by a high voltage difference between the entry and exit points of the electrical current flowing through the body. Most of the lightning current travels along the flashover, and very little current enters the body.
The team’s results showed that fully formed flashovers occur whether the head is wet or dry. However, for the wet head, the current entering the head was significantly reduced. Specifically, the energy entering the brain cavity was 32.5% lower in wet heads than in dry heads.
This, combined with reduced electrical current exposure to the brain and less physical damage, could significantly increase a wet person’s chances of survival by up to 70 to 90 percent, the researchers said. .
Your best chance of survival is not to get struck by lightning at all, but if you get caught in a storm and don’t have shelter, you could do a lot worse than getting drenched in the rain. The research findings are suggestive. .
The team’s findings are scientific report.
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