A Pattern of Forces
Oct
29, 2009
Areas of Mars larger than Texas
are wrenched and twisted, with deep
canyons and sharp fissures, yet they
are scoured clean of rocks and dust.
In
previous Thunderbolts
Picture of the Day articles about
the
geology of Mars, powerful
electric arcs were
theorized to have once impacted the
surface, creating many of the
features observed by orbiting
cameras. Sinuous rilles,
flat-floored craters, "railroad
track" patterns in canyons,
intersecting gullies with no debris
inside them,
giant mesas, and
steep-sided ravines are
all evidence for the activity of
electricity on a massive scale.
The
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) carrying
the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC)
entered orbit around the Red Planet
in 1997. Among its first discoveries
were
outcrops of layered rock
extending for hundreds of kilometers
through the Schiaparelli Basin. The
same formations were seen running up
the walls of
Valles Marineris.
Imaging analysts from NASA’s
Johnson Space Center
announced the discovery
of mounds on Mars that they have
suggested might be the remains of
hydrothermal vents. They have a
similar appearance to
some structures found in the
Australian Outback, so
researchers think they could have
similar origins.
Both the layering of the rock
strata and the shape of the mounds
are seen by planetary scientists as
having been caused by erosion in the
same way that geography on Earth is
eroded. Since Earth is seen today to
be eroded by wind and water, they
surmise that such processes occurred
on Mars.
Modern science has retained the
long-hoped-for desire that Mars
could be the cradle of different
life forms that arose and evolved in
a separate ecology. As the overall
theory states, the planet must have
gone through a stage when there were
oceans of liquid water on the
surface. This implies that Mars once
might have retained an atmosphere
dense enough in oxygen for life to
respire in the open.
However, there is disagreement in
the scientific community about
whether such volumes of water could
ever have existed on Mars. In the
March 5, 2007 edition of Scientific
American, it was reported that most
of what has been interpreted as
water-based erosion on Mars could
have come from “dry avalanches” of
dirt. The authors expressed serious
doubts about whether observations
have demonstrated any effects caused
by liquid water.
Allan Treiman, a geologist from
Houston's Lunar and Planetary
Institute wrote: "The idea of it
being liquid water was a very
reasonable hypothesis to start with.
From my standpoint liquid water
hasn't been proved at all."
The large-scale structure of Mars
with its continent-wide canyon,
gigantic volcanoes,
thousand-kilometer-wide craters,
fractures, plateaus and blasted
wastelands of crushed stone was most
likely created a short time ago.
Vast clouds of plasma and their
associated lightning discharges
probably contributed the energy
necessary for the terrain to be
sculpted so quickly.
As electric current passes
through a solid body it can erode
material from it, or deposit
material on its surface where an arc
makes contact. The pits or craters
left by electric arcs are usually
elongated circles because the arcs
strike at right angles to the
surface while they move. Material in
the bottom of a crater will probably
be electrically heated, burned, and
melted.
If the surface is positively
charged, an arc will tend to stick
in one place, resulting in increased
melting, while the electrical forces
lift the surface to form a
“lightning blister,” or fulgamite.
Fulgamites appear as “domes” on
Venus and as
pedestal craters on Mars.
An even larger scale example is
Olympus Mons.
If the surface is negatively
charged, electric arcs will tend to
move rapidly across the surface
after striking and carving out a
crater. Small craters on the rims of
larger ones are signs of this
effect. Sometimes, as electric arcs
travel, they will cut
chains of craters. If the
craters overlap, the result will be
a steep-sided trench with scalloped
edges.
When electric currents pass through a plasma they
are
twisted into a helical pattern
as the forces attempt to balance themselves within the magnetic turbulence that
is created by the interaction. Mars has a weak
magnetosphere,
.00125 that of Earth, and it is almost directly exposed to intense positive
charges coming from the Sun.As the Electric Universe theory argues, at
some point in the past the intensity
of those forces increased and
traveled through the planet from
pole-to-pole in a powerful electric
circuit. That formidable event
excavated billions of tons of
material from the north polar
region, while at the same time
layering a similar volume of
material on the south pole.
During the discharges, Birkeland currents cut deep
canyons at the
north
and
south poles,
while simultaneously drawing surface debris into curvilinear ridges that run
parallel to them. The result was the “fossils” at both poles of a planetary
electric vortex that engulfed Mars, as well as the thousands of slot canyons and
scalloped pits covering Utopia Planitia.
Stephen Smith
