Half-hour thunder and sulfur smell reported across Spain

Half-hour continuous thunder and sulfur smell in the storm

Physics allows thunder to last between 30 and 40 seconds. In June, several witnesses across Spain reported hearing a single one for half an hour. And the rain that fell afterwards did not smell like wet earth.

The story repeats with few variations. A roar without pauses, hail of excessive size, and an odor no one could name: smoke, sewer, sulfur. Alerts came from Madrid, Zaragoza, Logroño, Asturias and a town on the coast of Málaga. The explanation remains divided.

A roar like an airplane engine

The most repeated description did not speak of thunder separated by seconds of silence, but of a single, continuous sound. "It was continuous thunder, like a continuous roar, like the jet of an airplane that lasted half an hour," summarized one of the witnesses. Another compared it directly to a huge engine that did not stop. The word that returns again and again is uninterrupted.

Not everyone measured the same. There were those who spoke of ten minutes, not thirty. And who set the time for the episode: a storm that started at 6:00 and ended at 6:50 in the morning, almost an hour of noise and ice. In one of the houses, the hail reached a cat that had gone out to eavesdrop; it entered terrified and went under the bed. That detail explains the morning better than any graph.

How long can thunder last?

Less than a minute, with exceptions. The lightning heats the air channel through which it passes to up to 30,000 ºC; that air expands suddenly, collides with the cold air around it, and contracts, and that lash is the sound wave we call thunder. The International Cloud Atlas sets the duration of the roar at 30 or 40 seconds and admits it can lengthen in mountainous areas or cities, where sound bounces.

From there, it is not easy to get out. Half an hour is 1,800 seconds, forty-five times the record collected in the manual. To make sense, those defending the long version need something more than reverberation: they need the noise to keep being born.

What did the rain smell like?

The smell of wet earth has an explanation for years: it is produced by soil bacteria when soaked. It was the first argument of skeptics. The problem is that the witnesses insisted on the opposite. "It is not that smell. It is a different smell," pointed out one of the residents, who said he knew the smell of rain since childhood.

The alternatives discussed were ozone from a dry storm, sulfur from acid rain, and the simple stench of a sewer. The proposed test to clear up doubts had its charm: buy an ozone generator and compare. Ozone is not remembered, it is smelled.

From DANA to geoengineering

Here the conversation took a turn. From discussing the duration of thunder, it moved to discussing who manufactures it. Part of the analysis suggests that the climate is deliberately modified, that there are techniques enabled by administrative routes, and that clouds are seeded by fumigation. The white dust settled on cars, seeding programs, and even a public map of geoengineering projects were cited.

The counterpoint came from another side: the average surface temperature would have risen 1.2 ºC, a figure that some accepted and others flatly denied, recalling that the Roman pools in Cádiz still fish with the same tides. No one closed the matter. And in between, a description that does not fit any pattern: a red sky, like a Martian movie, for two hours on the coast of Málaga.

Many overlapping thunder or a single thunder

The most economical explanation is also the least epic. Thunder can overlap: if lightning falls frequently, the ear does not find silence and perceives a continuous rumble, like an open nightclub nearby. An identical episode had been lived years before 10 or 15 kilometers away, with lightning non-stop and a sound that did not cease.

The discrepancy is one of perception, not thermometers. A single half-hour thunder requires a sound source that does not stop; many chained thunders only require a very active storm. The difference between the two things is the difference between an unprecedented phenomenon and a particularly noisy night in June.

With these threads, it would be reasonable to expect a measurement and not a memory. How many half-hour thunders are needed for the standard explanation to no longer suffice?