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Scaled-up analogs of all these features are found across the Solar System,
from the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Mercury to other satellites and the asteroids.
Some asteroids exhibit craters that are surely too large to have been produced
by an impact without shattering the entire body. Mathilde shows five huge
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craters ranging from 3/4 to 11/4 times its mean radius. Vesta, 530 kilometers
in diameter, has a gigantic circular crater 460 kilometers across with a
13-kilometer-high central peak, yet the rest of its surface appears to be
intact. Since impacts are the "in" fashion at the moment, elaborate mechanisms
are contrived to find explanations that will fit. But such anomalies as the
stratified central peak of the large, buried Sudbury crater in Canada, thorium
enrichment of the crater rim at Wolfe Creek in Western
Australia (sufficiently powerful discharges can initiate transmutation of
elements), and the "shatter cone"
structure of the rim of the 70-kilometer-wide Vredefort Dome in South Africa
seem more readily compatible with an electrical interpretation.
Cathode discharges wander across the surface, typically between higher points
where field intensity is more concentrated, and blast linear, snaking
features. Chains of circular pits and craters are common, sometimes following
the rim of a larger crater just formed. Explosive discharges channeled
underground can be extremely effective excavating agents. Again, the Moon,
Mars, and other bodies are scarred with rilles and grooves tracing their own
course without regard for the structure or slope of the preexisting terrain.
The record is held by Venus with a gouge winding 6,800 kilometers over hill
and dale, and at a steady 2 kilometers wide. It's described officially as a
"collapsed lava tube." At the other extreme we find
rilles on the 20-kilometer rock Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. Presumably
this would have to be ascribed to inner geological activity.
Something removed two million cubic kilometers of material from Mars to create
the stupendous Valles
Marineris canyon, running a quarter of the way around the planet. This could
perhaps help explain the rock-strewn appearance of large areas of the surface,
discoveries of Martian meteorites on Earth, and maybe the origin of many
asteroids, meteorites, and other bodies. Interestingly, ancient myths and
legends worldwide tell of a thunderbolt striking the Mars god and leaving a
scar in his cheek, brow, or thigh the implication being that the planets at
that time came sufficiently close for the event to be visible.
From high above, the tracery of ridges and gorges around the Grand Canyon is
strikingly (pun accidental; you can't avoid them when getting into this
subject) evocative of "Lichtenberg figures"
frequently etched into the ground after a powerful lightning discharge.
Jovian Thunderbolts
Io, the innermost Galilean moon of Jupiter, is very likely in the process of
undergoing arc machining right now, under the eyes of NASA space probes.
Except that the ejection of hot-matter plumes 800
kilometers into space with hot-spot temperatures second only to the surface of
the Sun, fallout patterns of perfect concentric circles, and an apparently
inexhaustible supply of volatile materials are all attributed to volcanoes.
The power to drive this is said to be tidal heating as Io rises and falls 100
meters through
Jupiter's gravity field in its mildly eccentric orbit. Plumes have been
followed migrating across the surface and leaving chains of small circular
craters one plume is measured as having wandered 85 kilometers between 1979
and 1996. This is explained by some spokespeople as due to the vaporizing of
"snowfields" of sulfur dioxide or sulfur by lava flows, and by others as
"mantle plumes" of hot rising masses deep in the interior. Why the plumes
should display a filamentary structure the hallmark of plasmas conducting
current and how they come to exist without any connection to visible volcanic
calderas remain unaccounted for. Proponents of an electrical model have no
difficulty recognizing all of these features as indicative of an arc discharge
in action between Io and Jupiter.
Io has been called "the great pizza in the sky" because of its orange, yellow,
and red blotchy appearance, which is due to vast quantities of sulfur
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compounds covering the surface. Exotic chemical processes in the interior have
been concocted to explain this abundance, all premised on the assumption of
volcanoes. But if the jets mark the points of impinging cathode discharges, a
more likely explanation would be that sulfur atoms are being produced by the
combining of two oxygen atoms in the powerful field of the arc. Water ice,
which occurs on all the other Galilean satellites of Jupiter, would provide a
ready source of oxygen. The icy surface of Europa is covered by a network of
furrows and grooves that are supposedly "cracks." Larger ones show regions of
reddish coloring along the edges, and readings from the Galileo probe indicate
a significant presence of sulfuric acid. A NASA researcher described the
findings as demonstrating Europa to be "a really bizarre place."3Not really.
Nature's Point-Defense System?
Conventional geological principles are of little use in interpreting these
electric machining factories in space. Time will tell, perhaps, how far they
apply on Earth itself. Often, when contemplating shattered landscapes or
rugged mountain vistas such as those around where I used to live in the
Californian Sierra, I have difficulty reconciling what my eyes are telling me
of fresh, sharp features and recent stupendous violence with serene accounts
of slow uplifting and the gradual workings of erosion and deposition.
It could be that nature provides us with our own terminal defense system
against rogue objects striking
the Earth. (After riding the ozone depletion and global warming bandwagons,
this seems to be NASA's latest early 2005 for scaring the public and Congress
into keeping the funding flowing.) An object of alien potential penetrating
Earth's plasma sheath, if not deflected by electrical forces, would have a
strong probability of being disrupted by the energy release of an arc
discharge before impact. Meteoritic iron has been found scattered over
hundreds of kilometers around the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona but very
little below the crater floor itself, raising the possibility that it could
well be merely an electrical scar.
The same might be said for the many strange effects attending the Siberian
Tunguska event in 1908, where a massive object appears to have disintegrated
explosively several kilometers above the surface.
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