* Mo said:
If Mars cycled towards Earth then the closest approach would likely be a very electrical event. This is when the oceans were carved out by Birkeland currents. The resulting mushy sediments would spread out in even layers, sorted into finer and coarser particles. When Mars neared Earth a tornado developed between the two planets. Much material with water transferred between the planets.
* As I understand Cardona's interpretation of the mythological record, the Saturn Age was one of ideal conditions on Earth. Initially, Saturn was the only body seen in the sky and it was reddish colored at the north pole and it wasn't very bright. About 11,000 years ago Saturn flared up like a nova, but it was not a catastrophic event on Earth. He said there were similar periodic flare-ups in earlier pre-history. Sometime after that, Saturn eventually turned more yellowish and then Mars was visible. When Saturn was reddish, Mars was not visible, because of being the same color. Later Venus appeared, first as a comet that circled Saturn, seeming to form a cloudlike ring around Saturn, which gave Venus the reputation as a comet, a dragon and maybe an ouroboros. Venus eventually settled on the polar axis appearing in the center of the face of Saturn. Venus may have displaced Mars, causing Mars to move to an unstable location on the axis, which caused it to move toward Earth for a period of time and then back toward Venus and back and forth like that.
* I haven't heard Cardona or anyone suggest that major EDM events occurred between Mars and Earth during those closer approaches of Mars, such as megalightning. I think the only major catastrophic effects Mars had on Earth at that time may have been via the polar vortex, as you suggest. That plasma vortex actually went all the way to Venus and Saturn, I think. So it was always at the north pole, but it makes sense that close approaches of Mars could have caused it to stray beyond its normal location. In Thoth magazine online, I think Cardona had said that the vortex churned up the soil and rock in the pole area half a mile deep or so. And when it would occasionally stray it churned a wider area and would catch animals and trees and churn them up with the soil and rock, thus producing the hills and islands of muck and splintered trees and bones, such as mammoth bones etc. I haven't heard of human bones, tools, or artifacts being found among the muck, so it seems that humans kept their distance from the vortex generally.
* I just realized that the Saturn Age was said to involve no rains from the sky, but only mists from the ground. So maybe there was very little erosion then. If so, then the lack of erosion over long periods of time may not be a problem in the stratigraphic record, contrary to what I had thought earlier.
* I don't know how plasma vortexes might work, but I haven't heard Cardona or others suggest that water and or other matter was transferred between Mars and Earth during close approaches. The only transfer they've suggested, that I know of, is the removal of a lot of water from the Earth into the vortex, until the end of the Saturn Age, when the vortex collapsed and much of the water fell back to Earth, mostly at the north pole, which resulted in the Great Flood coming from the north. And it was about that time when the Earth's uppermost rock strata were laid down, via flood and or electrical deposition.
* Cardona has suggested that tidal forces from Saturn, Venus and Mars from the north and maybe Jupiter from the south, I think, may have made Earth egg-shaped, which may have had something to do with producing a supercontinent on one side of the Earth.