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Pingualuit Crater, northern Quebec, Canada.Credit: NASA/Jesse Allen, Landsat/University of
Maryland Global Land Cover Facility.
Jul 07, 2008
The Canadian ShieldNortheastern Canada is fractured and scoured down to bedrock in many places with almost no vegetation growing. Thousands of lakes and rivers inhabit channels that appear to have been carved first and then adopted by them.
Whenever Spring returns to the Northern Hemisphere, the Maritime Provinces of Canada continue in frozen hibernation, melting slowly because the exposed bedrock does not warm up quickly in the sunlight.
Nearly the entire eastern half of Canada, including Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes, is composed of criss-cross fracture lines, deep rifts, loose piles of gravel and pebbles that extend for hundreds of kilometers, and parallel ridges with lakes between them that have no outlets. The landscape is said to date from the end of the last Ice Age some 15,000 years ago when glaciers moved across North America in sheets covering the continent. The inexorable weight of the ice ground down the surface topography and left gouges and grooves in the rock while it pushed the debris ahead of itself or carried it away in suspension, dropping the material far from its origin when the ice finally melted.
In a previous Picture of the Day article about the Manicouagan Impact Structure in Canada, the unique geography in the region was explained by the action of electric arcs machining down into the rock strata, leaving circular formations and sinuous rilles as evidence for their explosive passage through the layers. The lack of debris in the crater, vertical sidewalls, the shallow, flat bottom and glassified breccias were also considered to be evidence that supports an electric arc theory better than most theories of glacial erosion.
The term "shield" comes from the fact that the area looks like a Viking shield although it is more of a horseshoe-shape, overall, considering Hudson Bay and the outlet to the sea. Gold, copper and nickel mines are scattered throughout the Northwest Territories and Kimberlite pipes have also been exploited for diamonds, making the mineralogical composition similar in many ways to Siberia where another crater the same size as Manicouagan can be found.
Observations from the Canadian Shield seem to add additional support for electricity as a possible formative agent in North American geography and not just the movement of ice and volcanic eruptions. Asteroid impacts are proposed when features such as Manicouagan are discussed since there are no other alternatives for most geologists to consider. The catastrophic origin of some landforms is acknowledged in most circles but the electrical component is never given any thought since the arrival of a giant rock from space seems more preferable than the arrival of a giant lightning bolt from space. This attitude demonstrates a bias toward familiar ideas since we now know that small lightning bolts from space (sprites) arrive more often than small meteoroids from space.
If the lakes with no outlets have been in existence since the end of the last Ice Age and they presumably filled with melt water, why are their shores bedrock with thin soils and not much sediment on their bottoms? The ice should have left tons of sediments behind when it melted away. If the melting ice left giant piles of gravel across the flat plains when it melted, why not on the bottom of deep depressions that are now lakes? Did the ice not contain any debris over so large an area?
How does ice leave marks that cross over and under each other? The fault lines that cover the Canadian Shield are often at ninety degrees to one another and the resulting lakes are square-shaped cutouts in the stone. There are also some triangular lakes because the fractures meet at a forty-five degree angle. Did the ice sheets change direction as they pressed down on the land in their southward flow? Craters like Pingualuit are punched into the terrain at intervals, as well: once again, bowl-shaped, steep-walled, with no localized debris field and no deep sedimentary deposits on the bottom.
The focus of an ion beam large enough to cut out and take away sedimentary deposits weighing billions of tons is not easy to contemplate. The energy requirement is so great that there appears to be no way that it can be generated – what could launch a bolt of lightning that powerful? Indeed, what could launch hundreds or thousands of such bolts?
The surface of our planet bears witness to catastrophic events in the not so remote past, despite uniformitarian views that assume slow, steady effects. Craters are declared to be ancient and not recent. Mountain ranges and valleys are asserted to be older than the memory of man and not newly minted out of a destroyed and remade previous world, despite the mythology and folk tales that relate eyewitness accounts how and when it was minted.
However, if we look outward we can see that our planetary neighbors also bear the scars of forces that are difficult to explain. The moons that circle them are half-melted balls of slag peppered with hexagonal craters and scarps 10 kilometers high that cut through other terrain like a hot knife.
There are millions of asteroids of varying sizes and the ones that have been observed closely bear similar markings. From planetoids like Ceres down to beads the size of a pinhead, craters and cracks are found in glassified blobs that appear to have been put through a blast furnace. The same glassified spherules with the same appearance as the ones collected from the Moon, for example, are scattered all over the Earth. The shocked spherules of crystal that are found inside meteorites are of similar appearance.
Is there a way to explain so many observational similarities in so many environments at so many scales? That is one crucial issue that the Electric Universe hypothesis continues to explore.
By Stephen Smith
__________________________________________________________________________Please visit our new "Thunderblog" page
Through the initiative of managing editor Dave Smith, we’ve begun the launch of a new
page called Thunderblog. Timely presentations of fact and opinion, with emphasis on
new discoveries and the explanatory power of the Electric Universe."The Electric Sky and The Electric Universe available now!
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