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Ocean floor topography. Credit: NASA/SEASAT

Jan 28, 2008
The Worzel Deep Sea Ash

Sediment samples indicate that there is a layer of nickel-rich ash covering the bottom of all the world’s oceans. Could cosmic plasma discharges be responsible?

The bottom of the ocean is assumed to be a dark, cold and relatively stable environment. Barring the effects of occasional earthquakes, little activity occurs and it remains in a kind of stasis, with a constant “rain” of organic detritus and inorganic minerals falling through its depths. How, then, can we explain the discovery of high nickel concentrations in the abyssal clays? Nickel is not considered a component of seawater since its concentrations are so low, and it is rare even on land.

In 1949, Professor Hans Pettersson led the first Swedish deep-sea expedition on board The Albatross. Equipped with instruments equivalent to any university’s laboratory, Pettersson and his crew extracted long cores of ocean sediments and examined their contents. What they found contradicted the theoretical assumptions of meteoric nickel drifting to Earth.

Since nickel is a component of most terrestrial meteorites, the amount being deposited on Earth can be determined by counting the meteors flaring in the night sky and estimating the mass of each object as it burns up in the atmosphere. Scientists of Pettersson’s day computed the average nickel content to be around two percent per meteor. However, when compared with the Professor’s core samples, the estimate turned out to be a thousand times too low. He wrote:

“Recent figures, published in Watson's excellent book, Between the Planets, show that down to the faintest meteors so far studied, over ten thousand million per day enter the atmosphere, and even this figure must be taken as a minimum for the total number…None of them reaches the Earth's surface. Instead they are converted into meteoric dust…about five metric tons or 5000 kilograms per day.”

Pettersson’s samples indicated a value closer to 10,000 metric tons per day, a figure that he considered “most enigmatic” because it implied that sometime in the past the Earth encountered a short-duration torrent of meteors. In fact, several far-ranging masses of nickel-iron may have bombarded our planet.

Since the oceans were (and are) thought to be hundreds of millions of years old, the accumulation of meteoric ash must be considered over long time periods. According to Pettersson, since the fall of space debris presumably took place in days rather than millennia, he considered that his estimate of a thousand-time increase should rather be an “astronomical figure”. His conclusion was based on determining the age of the oceans – a factor that, almost 60 years later, has not yet been established.

In 1958, Lamar Worzel of Columbia University set sail on The Verma to investigate the seafloor. He discovered that the meteoric dust layer, or ash, was evenly distributed over the entire ocean bottom. The glassified substance was spread in a layer of “remarkable uniformity” and could not have been from a volcanic eruption – except the eruption of volcanoes all over the world in a simultaneous paroxysm. The other possibility was that the ash blanket came from outer space – perhaps the collision of a large comet with Earth.

Spectrographic analysis of The Verma Expedition deep sea cores:

        SiO2  CaO   FeO   Al203 Na2O  TiO2  MgO   Total

Clay above  59%   0.96% 3.2%  15.8% 4.3%  0.42% 2.25% 85.91%

Worzel Ash  75%   0.88% 0.66% 13.9% 3.9%  0.20% 0.03% 94.64%

Clay below  40%   3.2%  5.2%  15.8% 4.4%  3.52% .52%  72.78%

Modern theories of astrophysics portray comets as accreted material from the very beginning of our solar system. They are described as “dirty snowballs” and are said to number in the trillions, occupying a halo of “leftovers” called the Oort Cloud. However, recent information from the Stardust spacecraft reveals that the makeup of Comet Wild 2 is similar to that of rocky planets and asteroids.

In previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day articles about comets, we predicted that they are not the icy slush and primordial elements that conventional science describes but are recent denizens of the solar system. As we have further suggested, comets could be debris that was hoisted into space by the electrostatic force of interplanetary plasma discharges.

Such a violent catastrophe might also have stripped millions of tons of rock from the surface of another planet, such as Mars. The electrical activity could then have projected a stream of ionized dust along the axes of gigantic Birkeland currents toward the closest node in the circuit, whereupon it would have been deposited in a process akin to cathode sputtering. That second node in the circuit was the Earth, according to Electric Universe theorists.

In conclusion, it may be that Pettersson, Worzel and the Stardust mission team are describing pieces of an event that changed the very nature of our planet and the solar system. That event was the close encounter of Earth with another charged planetary body or bodies. The resulting exchanges of electrical energy excavated craters, scorched entire hemispheres, cut miles-deep canyons and transferred megatons of material from one body to another. The Worzel ash layer is probably a remnant of that transfer.

By Stephen Smith
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