Lightening Strike Kills Over 300 Reindeer


The apocalyptic scene of carcasses spread across a Norwegian national park, where more than 300  reindeer were killed by a lightening strike, in an area not prone to severe storms. More than 70 of the reindeer were calves.

The national park, the largest in Norway with wild reindeer populations, spans some 8,000 square kilometers (3,088 square miles) and is home to 10,000 to 11,000 wild reindeer.

It’s not the first time that lightning has caused animal herds to die en masse. In 1990, a thunderstorm killed 30 cattle on a farm in Orange County, Virginia, leaving their bodies scattered in a field. In 2005, a lightning strike killed 68 cows at a dairy farm outside Dorrigo in New South Wales, Australia. And in 2008, lightning outside of Montevideo, Uruguay, struck a paddock’s wire fence, killing 52 of the cattle grazing inside.

This mass number of deaths is unprecedented, said Norwegian Environment Agency spokesman Kjartan Knutsen.

Source: National Geographic



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