Lightning, it turns out, can strike multiple times in the same place.

Luckily, those thunderbolts are likely to happen almost simultaneously from a specific storm cloud so people don't have to worry about avoiding a single place where lightning has struck the ground.

So-called anvil crawling lightning from storms passing over Sydney in February 2019. Credit:Nick Moir

The possibility of multiple strikes had been "imagined" before but they hadn't been observed in detail until now, said Harvey Butcher, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University and an author of research published on Thursday in Nature.

Lightning is "one of the most dangerous and poorly understood natural phenomena", the paper said.