1. Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela
232.52 lightning flashes per square kilometer per year
This brackish bay on the Caribbean is the kind of place that makes you believe in an angry Zeus. The mammoth body of water—it would be South America’s biggest lake if not for a tiny inlet—is the perfect place for lightning strikes, with storms almost nightly. When the warm air off the lake meets the cool winds from the Andes, it sets off what locals call the Never-Ending Storm of Catatumbo. The storms are so dramatic, they’ve been used by ships for navigation for centuries and locals operate tour boats to offer visitors prime views of the show.
“One of the most interesting aspects was to discover that the place with the most lightning on Earth is over water, and during the night, opposing the general behavior of more thunderstorm development during the afternoon and over land,” Rachel Albrecht, a researcher at the University of São Paulo and the paper’s lead author, told the American Meteorological Society.