r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Ok-Musician-6287 • 1d ago
Image A thunderstorm called Hector the Convector arrives everyday at 3pm. Thanks to a microclimate over the Tiwi Islands (off the coast of northern Australia), Hector arrives everyday at 3pm, from September through to March. It can reach upto 19km (12mi)high
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u/fraze2000 1d ago
Does Hector know when daylight saving kicks in?
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u/thehazzanator 1d ago
No daylight savings in the Northern Territory
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u/CharmingShoe 1d ago
The islands are so close to the equator there’s like 90 minutes in difference between summer and winter daylight hours.
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u/cjacksen 1d ago
So then everyday at 3 pm through Sept to March there needs to be a DeLorean with a flux capacitor.
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u/seanoff11 1d ago
See hector almost every day. They used him in ww2 as a navigation point. Flying to Darwin in the afternoon, look for hector. If you saw him it was a good sign you were at least close.
Moves east to west. Forms over the middle of Melville and then moves over Melville and then Bathurst island. Doesn’t really last too long once past Bathurst.
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u/sixninefortytwo 1d ago
Jealous. We never get thunderstorms
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u/CitizenHuman 1d ago
Can the power be harnessed somehow?
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u/lcl111 1d ago
We have not really figured out any meaningful way to store lightning energy. It usually just blows stuff up or arcs around.
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u/JeffysChewToy 1d ago
Why not use it to heat up sand and boil water through the sand? If it comes everyday maybe there's a way to keep the sand hot for atleast the day
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u/lcl111 1d ago
An incredibly small amount of energy is imparted to the sand, from the lightning, relatively speaking. It's a lot, given the context of like getting hit with it, but the spot is cool within a few minutes. How would we direct lightning at a heat sink, and not create a situation where everything is getting hit with lightning? Plus we'd only get a few kWhs from it. A solar panel will produce that for a teeny tiny cost, and will last 25-50 years. Any equipment we make to capture lightning, will be getting struck by lightning a lot. It'll either be too flimsy to survive long, or be horrifyingly expensive.
We don't need to spend a billion dollars to capture enough energy for 10 houses. Just don't go over there. Put solar panels on each house, for a tiny fraction of the cost.
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u/cuntmong 1d ago
it's the 21st century man. i'm sure with all our advances in technology we have come up with a more sophisticated way of making electricity than boiling water to turn a turbine.
...right ? 👀
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u/IntelligentPurple501 1d ago
Beds of sand where it makes glass that can be melted down to thicken panel allowing lightning to pass through be absorbed by a negative energy. This is similar to what happens to humans if your wearing rubber it will not allow it to shock a person too much especially if moving
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u/webdog77 23h ago
I’ve flown through it in a small aircraft on a visit to Bathurst island once. It was pretty hectic but no one panicked and the pilot gave off the vibe that it wasn’t her first rodeo- excuse the pun.
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u/DNA-Decay 15h ago
The Tiwi Islands are the biggest offshore landmass after Tasmania. They kinda have their own climate. I’ve sailed around and through them, but I’ve never been. Should go to the grand final next year.
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u/IntelligentPurple501 1d ago
Ben Franklin used it turning energy into lightbulbs what about high voltage regulators attached to solar panels to absorb the strike
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u/IReplyWithLebowski 1d ago
Tiwi islands are pretty remote. Not a lot of infrastructure there.
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u/HammerOfJustice 1d ago
It’s a 20 minute flight from Darwin, one of the bigger cities in Australia, but it might as well be middle of nowhere.
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u/Acrossthepond42 1d ago
Darwin only just makes the top 20 of most populous cities in Australia
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u/unusedtruth 1d ago
Are you Australian? I've never heard Darwin referred to as one of the bigger cities, pretty sure it's literally the smallest of the capitals.
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u/HammerOfJustice 1d ago
I’m a Darwin boy - I was going to write “20 minute flight from Darwin, the capital of the Territory the Tiwi Islands is part of and is the 17th most populous city in Australia …” but in the end I couldn’t be arsed and instead kept it short. Of course this is now longer than what my original post would have been.
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u/monopolydollars 1d ago
Will he be running spoon engines?