Lightning comes in different varieties, the most common kinds don't reach the ground, called intra-cloud and cloud-to-cloud. Cloud to ground lightning actually only makes up about 10-20% of strikes. About 1% is ground to cloud. Then one of the outlier forms of lightning stretches for miles (sometimes dozens of miles) horizontally and can resemble a spider web, and that’s why it’s called spider lightning. We learn about ongoing research at Florida Gulf Coast University into this form of lightning with the instructor who is leading it and a student who helped her work with the data.