There's a place on Earth where lightning flashes almost every night—until, one day, it stopped. What ... [+]
For as long as people have traveled through Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, they’ve known about the storm that never sleeps. Sailors in the 16th century called it “El Faro del Catatumbo”—the Catatumbo Lighthouse—because its relentless flashes of lightning illuminated the sky for miles, making navigation possible even on the darkest nights.
The phenomenon was so reliable that Spanish poet Lope de Vega wrote about it in 1597, describing how it gave away Sir Francis Drake’s fleet during a failed raid on Spanish-controlled Maracaibo.
For centuries, this great electrical storm never truly stopped. But then, in 2010, something unimaginable happened: The Catatumbo lightning went silent.
Catatumbo Lightning—The Conditions That Make ‘Perpetual’ Lightning Possible
Deep within Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo basin, where the Catatumbo River meets the lake, intense thunderstorms light up the sky as often as 260 nights a year. To understand how something as extreme as this is possible, we have to look at the unique geography, climate and atmospheric forces that make this one of the most electrically charged places on Earth.
For one, the region where this phenomenon takes place is a literal “storm trap” between the Andes. Lake Maracaibo is one of the largest in South America and it sits in a geological bowl, surrounded by the Andes Mountains to the west, the Perijá Mountains to the north and the Mérida ranges to the south. These peaks act like walls, creating a perfect environment for storms to brew.
The Catatumbo lightning occurs only over the mouth of the Catatumbo River where it empties into Lake ... [+]
But geography alone isn’t enough to explain the mysterious lightning.
The real secret lies in the interaction between unique atmospheric conditions provided by the vast lake (which is actually, more accurately, an estuary) and the storm-trapping topography provided by the mountains that turns this region into a near-permanent electrical storm.
Lake Maracaibo breathes energy into the sky every single day. The lake, stretching over 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 square miles), is a massive heat reservoir, absorbing the sun’s energy throughout the day. As night falls, this stored heat rises, pushing warm, moisture-laden air upward—the perfect recipe for cloud formation.
At the same time, cool air cascades down from the Andes and surrounding mountain ranges, rushing in to replace the rising heat. When these two air masses collide, the warm air is forced even higher into the atmosphere, rapidly cooling and condensing into towering thunderclouds.
This cycle repeats night after night, creating a perfect storm system where lightning thrives.
Why the Lightning Here is So Extreme
But here’s what makes Catatumbo lightning different from a regular thunderstorm:
- The updrafts are incredibly strong. The rapid lifting of warm air means that clouds build fast and high, creating the perfect conditions for electrical charges to accumulate.
- Lake Maracaibo’s humidity fuels the storm endlessly. Unlike other storm systems that burn out when their moisture source is depleted, this one is constantly replenished by the lake.
- Wind currents keep the storm trapped in place. The mountains act as a natural barrier, preventing the weather system from moving away like a normal thunderstorm.
The result is a lightning machine that never fully shuts down.
Catatumbo Lightning Temporarily Vanished In 2010—This Is Our Best Guess As To Why
For around a 160 days in the year 2010, Catatumbo lightning—the most reliable storm system on Earth—was nowhere to be seen. No towering thunderheads, no nightly flashes lighting up the sky. The great atmospheric engine that had raged for centuries had simply…stopped.
The most widely accepted explanation has to do with El Niño, the climate-disrupting powerhouse of the Pacific Ocean. Every few years, this massive weather phenomenon sends shockwaves across the globe, shifting rain patterns, raising temperatures and throwing entire ecosystems off balance.
And in 2010, it may have been responsible for the dark skies over the mouth of Catatumbo River, where it empties into Lake Maracaibo.
El Niño begins in the Pacific, when warm ocean waters spread eastward toward South America, disrupting atmospheric circulation. Normally, moist trade winds carry warm air and humidity across the tropics, but during El Niño, these winds weaken or reverse, disrupting rainfall patterns worldwide. And in Venezuela, that meant one thing—drought.
That year, the normally moist, storm-feeding air over Lake Maracaibo dried up. Water levels dropped. Humidity plummeted. The thunderstorms that relied on the lake’s steady supply of evaporating moisture had nothing to fuel them.
By April of the same year, El Niño’s grip had weakened. Rain returned to the lake, water levels stabilized and the air grew thick with moisture once more. The convection currents that had been missing for months kicked back into action, and with them came the lightning. Almost as if the sky had simply been paused.
El Niño had proved that even a storm that never stops has its limits. It had found the one thing that could silence Catatumbo lightning—cutting off its fuel source. But the moment the conditions returned, so did the storm. It was almost as if nothing had ever changed.
This story is a reminder that even the most unstoppable forces have breaking points. Does this make you wonder about your feeble place in the planet? Take this free, science-backed Connectedness To Nature Scale to understand your attitude toward nature better.
