Our driver, an official in the regional environmental ministry, spent a disconcerting portion of the ride telling us how worried his mother was about him traveling in this part of the state. During our eight-hour drive south from the Maracaibo airport, we passed through no fewer than nine different police and military checkpoints. The area is a haven for drug-traffickers, guerrillas, and armed gangs of various stripes. State Department and many European foreign ministries advise against traveling in the state of Zulia or any part of Venezuela within 50 miles of the Colombian border. He helped spread the story of the lightning’s 2010 disappearance, and he has promoted an “International Day of the Ozone Layer” to call attention to the storm’s role as “the primary source of stratospheric ozone.” When I contacted him to let him know that we were going to be visiting Catatumbo, he offered to come along as our guide and to help make all the necessary arrangements with the local authorities. (The word ozone, from the Greek for “to smell,” was coined because of the strange odor that lingers after lightning storms.) Discharging more than 1.2 million times each year, the Catatumbo storm is, Quiroga argues, the single greatest individual natural source of ozone in the world. As it rips through the air, lightning tears apart oxygen molecules in its path, some of which rearrange to form ozone. Not only is the lightning a natural wonder, it is also, he argues, crucial to the global ecosystem. In 2002, Quiroga launched a campaign to have the Catatumbo lightning pronounced the world’s first UNESCO World Heritage Weather Phenomenon-a seemingly quixotic crusade, given that thus far the organization has only recognized physical places. “This is a unique gift and we are at risk of losing it,” he told the Guardian. “It was the longest disappearance of the lightning in 104 years,” said Quiroga, who blamed a drought caused by 2009’s especially strong El Niño. According to reports in Venezuelan papers that were then picked up by the international press, the skies above Catatumbo went dark for six weeks between the end of January and the beginning of March 2010. And then last year, suddenly and unexpectedly, the storm seemed to stop.
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