Anyone who has dine much welding know striking and maintaining the arc is the tricky part until you get a feel for it but bad luck seems to have a way of accomplishing hard things.
I imagine the real reason natural AC arcs self extinguish so fast is that they can't advance the electrode at the speed it is being burned away.
When we want to put the fire out on an AC contact, we will bridge that gap with a resistor/capacitor network. I understand that makes the "zero crossing" a little longer by slowing down the rise, giving the arc a chance to go out.
I know the voltages involved are far beyond the circuit voltage if you have an inductive load.
