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At the potentials involved in lightning (hundreds of thousands of volts), everything is a conductor. Some things do conduct better than others, but when there's that much "pressure" behind it, electricity will travel through things that we normally think of as insulators, like wood.

Since the wood can become a conductor, the water in the wood will flash to steam at the temperatures involved. That steam will blow the wood apart. It isn't really the lightning that splits the wood. It is the heat from the lightning.

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13y ago

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