One night in May 2022, two astrophotographers camping near Lake Puma Yumco in Tibet caught something extraordinary on film: bursts of glowing red lightning dancing in the sky. These weren’t UFOs or camera glitches, though, they were red sprites, a rare form of upper-atmosphere lightning that flashes silently in the skies above powerful storms.
The video they captured featured 105 red sprites over Tibet, making it the most ever documented over South Asia. Even more impressive, though, is that nearly half of them performed a strange, flickering dance—jumping between different positions in the sky. You can see the video for yourself embedded in the StudyFinds report or in the video from IFL Science:
16 of the red sprites exhibited what scientists call “secondary jets.” These are intense lightning outbursts stretching even higher toward space. Among them were four mysterious green afterglows known as “ghosts,” a phenomenon so rarely observed that scientists only recently even confirmed it exists.
These sky-bound phenomena fall under a category of atmospheric events known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs). Unlike standard lightning that bolts from clouds down to the ground, sprites leap upward from storm tops, glowing red as they interact with nitrogen in the thin upper atmosphere.
Most last mere milliseconds, invisible to the naked eye, but they are dazzling when caught on camera. The high elevation of the Tibetan Plateau—nicknamed Earth’s “Third Pole”—gives observers a rare view above the densest layers of the atmosphere, making Tibet one of the best places on the planet to witness red sprites.
Lake Puma Yumco, which sits 5,000 meters above sea level, offered a perfect vantage point to observe a massive thunderstorm unfolding over the South Asian plains below. And, it just so happened, the storm itself was a behemoth, stretching across 200,000 square kilometers and generating ultra-powerful positive lightning bolts.
Researchers analyzed the footage frame by frame, using star maps and satellite positions to precisely timestamp each of the red sprites over Tibet. This allowed them to trace the electrical flashes to their parent lightning strikes with unprecedented accuracy.
What makes these sprites appearing over Tibet so fascinating is not just their beauty, but their scientific value. These events offer a rare glimpse into the middle layers of Earth’s atmosphere—an area that remains poorly understood. And as our inability to slow climate change helps fuels more extreme weather globally, studying how energy flows from thunderstorms into space is more relevant than ever.
