What happens to the ground when lightning strikes it?
What tends to happen when lightning strikes ground is that it fuses dirt and clays in to silicas. The result is often a black, glassy rock (called a fulgarite) in the shape of a convoluted tube. The shape in the ground is the shape of the path the lightning current followed in the ground. There is often damage to grasses along this path too. Lightning traveling down a tree trunk turns water to steam. If it gets under the bark into the surface moisture of the wood, the rapidly expanding steam can blast pieces of bark from the tree, and the wood along the path is often killed.
