The Norwegian Environment Agency has released eerie images showing a jumble of reindeer carcasses scattered across a small area on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau.
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The 323 reindeer, including 70 young, were found on Friday by a gamekeeper on the Hardangervidda plateau, a national park where Europe’s largest herd of some 10,000 wild reindeer roam freely.
One of the agency’s inspectors discovered the dead animals over the weekend after a storm passed through.
Officials surmised that an extremely high discharge of electricity from the storm on Friday afternoon – and the interaction of the lightning with the earth and water – had electrocuted the animals.
Norway’s Environment Agency says reindeer usually huddle together during bad weather, which could explain why so many were killed. Although the animals don’t appear to have died of illness, there was an outbreak of chronic wasting disease in a reindeer herd in northern Norway earlier this year that killed at least one animal. “We have not heard about such numbers before”, he said.
“That’s why it’s possible for the lightning to kill so many”, he said.
Knutsen said the agency is now discussing what to do with the dead animals. As of Monday, the reindeer were still on site.
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Some experts are saying they believe this to be the largest number of animals killed by lightning ever recorded. In 2005, 61 cows were killed by lightning in Australia and in 1971, 91 people were killed when a Peruvian plane was struck by lightning and crashed over the Amazon.
