However, the traditional newspaper (if there really is such an animal) is threatened by shrinking readership. Television is focused on entertainment, even when it dresses it up as news.. Radio is threatened by satellites. All are confronted with the frictionless distribution enabled by the Internet, the disruptive effects of digital information. None have figured out a business model that pays for content at today's rates.
Thunder is a compression wave and will dissipate with time and distance. Under excellent conditions, thunder can be heard about 12 miles away from the lightning strike. However most of the time conditions arenât this good and we usually canât hear thunder any more than about 5 miles away.
While heat lightning is really just ordinary lightning from a far away thunderstorm, the typical sound of rumbling thunder is muffled either by long distances or by a blocking, mountainous terrain. The cracking sound of lightning is thunder, which results from the rapid expansion of hot and cold air masses. Another reason no sound accompanies heat lightning is the idea that thunder travels much more slowly than light, and it's unlikely to hear thunder from a distance greater than 10 miles. The distribution of hot and cold temperatures around a thunderstorm causes sound waves to be bent, or refracted, upward into the sky rather than toward the ground where an observer may be listening.