-Caveat Lector-
Euphorian wrote:
>
> The surface is pock-marked with craters, but the most outstanding features are long
> rift valleys stretching across the entire surface. Canyons much like the ones on Mars
> appear in the pictures. The canyon floors appear as though they have been
> smoothed by a fluid. The fluid could not have been water because water acts like
> steel at these temperatures. The flow marks might have been made by ammonia,
> methane or even carbon monoxide.
"How many major premises in geology are wrong? The electrical model
provides a far simpler solution never considered before in sedimentation."
MARS and the GRAND CANYON
by Wal Thornhill
THE GRAND CANYON
Most people would think that experts agree on an explanation for
the formation of such a grandiose site as the Grand Canyon.
Surprisingly that isn't so. It is an enigma. The latest attempt to
figure it out occurred as late as June last year at the Grand
Canyon Symposium 2000. The Colorado River is held generally
responsible for carving the Canyon. However, even before the Glen
Canyon dam stemmed its awesome desert floods, the river seems
hopelessly inadequate to have formed such a geological spectacle.
The Colorado River flows west from the Rockies and encounters a
raised plateau known as the Kaibab Upwarp. Instead of turning away
from that barrier it continues through the plateau. How could it
do that? The river is much younger than the Kaibab Upwarp so it
could not have progressively cut the Canyon even if the land rose
very slowly. "In any case, most of the material that was removed
from the Canyon seems to be missing, according to a report from
the symposium, leaving little evidential support for the original
theory that a simple progression of water erosion formed the
Canyon we see today. "Since the 1930's and 1940's, geologists have
searched for other explanations -- that the Canyon once drained to
the south-east (reversing the route of the present-day Little
Colorado, then joining the Rio Grande and into the Gulf of
Mexico." When problems arose with that explanation too, it was
proposed that it once flowed NE along one of the present-day side
tributaries such as Cataract Creek.
See: http://www.kaibab.org/geology/gc_geol.htm#how and The New
York Times, June 6 2000, "Making Sense of Grand Canyon's Puzzles"
by Sandra Blakeslee]
Now let us consider a 21st century solution to the question of how
the Grand Canyon was formed, based not only on Earthly evidence,
but also on data returned by space probes and produced by more
than a century of experimental and theoretical work in plasma
laboratories.
The Grand Canyon has often been compared in form, if not size, to
the gigantic canyons of Valles Marineris on Mars. Because of these
similarities it was initially thought that Valles Marineris was
caused by massive water erosion at some earlier, supposedly
wetter, epoch in Martian history. That idea has been abandoned
because the evidence for water erosion and ponding in Valles
Marineris is missing.
The presently favored explanation of Valles Marineris is that the
surface of Mars has opened up with a giant tectonic rift, rather
like the East African rift valley. Rifting is usually accompanied
by vulcanism caused by increased heat flow from the interior. Yet
major volcanic features are lacking in Valles Marineris.
There are also many deep yet short tributary canyons to both of
these Canyons, which require a different explanation. The favored
one is undercutting by groundwater erosion. Both on both the Earth
and Mars the canyons seem to have been cut cleanly into a raised
flat surface. There is very little collateral damage to that
surface. Is it likely that two different causes could end up
creating landforms on two planets that look so similar?
At the heart of geology and planetary studies is a reasoning
process called abduction. It is a form of logic whose major
premise is certain and minor premise is probable. Then let us
consider the question of flowing-liquid erosion. The major premise
is "all sinuous channels are formed by a flowing liquid" and the
minor premise is "Nirgal Vallis on Mars is a sinuous channel." The
deduction follows that "Nirgal Vallis was formed by a flowing
liquid."
However such reasoning can be hopelessly misleading if the major
premise is not certain. Mars is a desert planet with no
possibility of flowing liquids today nor, it seems, for a long
time past. But the huge channels look as if they were carved
yesterday. That should be sufficient to doubt the major premise.
However lazy logic forces us simply to conclude that there must
have been large quantities of liquid water on Mars in the past.
That is the present consensus. So typically the missing water has
been conveniently consigned out of sight, beneath the Martian
surface. The same thing was said of the channels on the Moon
before the Apollo missions proved otherwise. Once again this
_incurious_ approach has led to huge expenditure on new spacecraft
to detect sub-surface ice on Mars.
What if the major premise is completely wrong? What if none of the
sinuous channels (usually called 'rilles') on Mars, Venus and our
Moon, were originally formed by flowing liquids? This is a key
question to be answered before we can address the more complex
canyons on Mars and here on Earth. Rilles have the same form on
all of these bodies, yet no one today seriously suggests that we
look for water on the furnace-hot surface of Venus or on the
airless Moon. Instead, hot fluid lava has been called upon as the
flowing liquid on these bodies. The problem is that the lava had
to remain liquid over hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of
miles. So a roof of rock was added, to form lava tubes. But some
of those roofs needed to be miles wide! Some rilles on the Moon
and on Venus are wider than the longest lava tubes on Earth. And
the rock roofs had to collapse later to expose the channels. There
is no rubble from collapsed roofs in any of the rilles. The rilles
are cleanly chiselled into the surface. The lava is supposed to
have flowed billions of years ago on the Moon, and only millions
of years ago on Venus.
A good example of a lunar rille, photographed in great detail by
the Apollo astronauts, is Schr�ter's Valley. The channel looks
brand new. Once again, the liquid that is supposed to have cut the
channel is missing - there is no lava outflow. And lava cannot
seep into the ground and be hidden as water can. Something is
wrong with this picture. The major premise must be wrong.
There are many more mysterious features of these channels. Their
wider "outflow" end is higher than the narrow "source" end, as if
whatever formed them was not responding to gravity. In flagrant
breach of that law, some run both uphill and down with no sign of
the damage that might be expected if the topographical changes
were due to later vertical movement of the terrain. Others cut
through mountain ridges as if they were not an obstacle.
Unlike rivers, rilles often run in parallel. Some have circular
craters along their length, others seem to be formed from a
continuous series of pits. Most terminate on a crater. Because of
the many craters found in and around them, dating the rilles by
crater counting makes them appear older than the surface they cut
into.
The channels of these rilles are often much more sinuous for their
width or the slope of the surface, than would be expected if they
had been carved by a liquid. Some have a smaller, more sinuous
channel in the floor of the larger channel. Some have flat floors
and steep walls. Others have a deep V-shaped cross-section.
Tributaries, if any, are often short, end in a circular alcove,
and join the main channel at near right angles. To explain these
(on worlds with water), recourse is usually made to underground
water flows that remove soil and cause collapse and progressive
headward erosion of the channel. Many channel floors show
transverse markings or small ridges. On Mars they have been
described as sand dunes. Many channels have material heaped up on
each side to form levees. There are neither catchment areas nor
systems of feeder streams sufficient to carve the often-gigantic
main channels or tributary streams. The source and sink of the
water remains invisible. And the question remains: where did the
eroded soil go?
A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SOLUTION
"The real actors on the stage of the universe are very few, if
their adventures are many. The most 'ancient treasure' -in
Aristotle's words- that was left to us by our predecessors of the
High and Far-off Times was the idea that the gods are really
stars, and that there are no others. The forces reside in the
starry heavens, and all the stories, characters and adventures
narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among the
stars, who are planets." Giorgio Di Santillana and Hertha von
Dechend in _Hamlet's Mill_.
"The thundergod is regarded as the most powerful of all the gods
of heaven and earth, since the effects of his anger are so
terrible and so evident." Christopher Blinkenberg in _The
Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore_. See
http://www.users.qwest.net/~mcochrane/Thundergods/thundergods.html
The answer to the riddle of rilles has been available for 30
years! It was provided by an engineer, the late Ralph Juergens, of
Flagstaff, Arizona. In a brilliant series of papers that would not
be published in a mainstream scientific journal, he showed that
flowing liquids are not adequate or even necessary to explain
river-like channels on planets and their moons. He showed how the
strange features of those channels could be simply scaled down and
matched against the kind of damage caused by powerful lightning
strikes on Earth. So even if Mars had surface moisture in the past
its vast channels were not carved by rushing water.
At Baker, Florida, in 1949, lightning struck a baseball field. It
furrowed the infield for 40 feet during a baseball game, killing 3
of the players and injuring 50 people. The more sinuous path taken
by the lightning forms a smaller trench in the bottom of the main
furrow. [National Geographic, June 1950, p. 827.] When we look at
the pattern of a lightning scar on Earth we see the features of
sinuous rilles in miniature. Electrical phenomena exhibit the same
forms from the scale of centimeters to the scale of thousands of
kilometers. In fact, it has been shown in high-energy electrical
experiments that the same patterns of behavior can be scaled up
yet another 100 million times. Because of this, the forms of scars
on insulators and semiconductors and/or the surface erosion of
spark-machined objects, seen under a microscope, can be used as
analogs of electrical scarring of planetary surfaces. Plasma
cosmology can do inexpensive controlled experiments on Earth to
answer puzzles that have plagued planetologists for decades.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Valles Marineris is an electrical arc
scar. It bears the hallmarks, writ large on a planet's face.
Juergens identified it as such 30 years ago from the early Viking
Orbiter spacecraft images. "... to me this entire region resembles
nothing so much as an area zapped by a powerful electric arc
advancing unsteadily across the surface, occasionally splitting in
two, and now and then-weakening, so that its traces narrow and
even degrade into lines of disconnected craters. ...I can only
wonder: Is it possible that Mars was bled of several million cubic
kilometers of soil and rock in a single encounter with another
planetary body? Might the Canyonlands of Mars have been created in
an event perhaps hinted at by Homer when he wrote: "Athena [Venus)
drove the spear straight into his [Ares' (Mars')] belly where the
kilt was girded: the point ran in and tore the flesh... [and] Ares
roared like a trumpet..."
Juergens' explanation requires a dynamic recent history of the
solar system, entirely different from the one we have been taught
to believe. It highlights an electrical dimension to astrophysics
which is nowhere to be found in their textbooks. So it is little
wonder that geologists are clueless when confronted with
electrical erosion. When planets come close, gargantuan
interplanetary lightning results. It is perfectly capable of
stripping rock and gases from a planet against the puny force of
gravity. It does so leaving characteristic scars. It can explain
why some two million cubic kilometers of material is missing from
Valles Marineris along with 90% of the atmosphere Mars was
expected to have.
A subsurface arc through an electrically coherent stratum can
explain the peculiar morphology of Valles Marineris. The
parallelism of the canyons is due to the long-range magnetic
attraction of current filaments and their short-range strong
electrostatic repulsion. Particularly significant are the small
parallel rilles composed essentially of chains of craters.
A traveling underground explosion follows the lightning streamer
and cleanly forms the V-shaped tributary canyons. There is no
collapse debris associated with undercutting water flow.
Similarly, the "V" cross-section is usual for craters formed by
underground nuclear explosions. The circular ends of the
tributaries, where the explosion began, are precisely of that
shape. In comparison, headward erosion by ground water sapping
gives a U-shaped cross-section and does not necessarily end in a
circular alcove. Note that some of the tributary canyons on the
south rim of Valles Marineris cut across one another at near right
angles. This might be due to repeated discharges from the same
area chasing the main stroke as it travelled along Ius Chasma. No
form of water erosion can produce crosscutting channels like that.
The fluted appearance of the main canyon walls is probably due to
the same travelling explosive action.
The walls of Valles Marineris show evidence of widespread
sedimentary layering on Mars. But such enormous quantities of
sediment must have eroded from somewhere and the fact that any
ancient highlands are preserved on Mars is difficult to reconcile
with such a source. A second major difficulty is that Valles
Marineris is near the top of a bulge 10 km above datum. How are
sediments deposited at that altitude? It would require the region
first be a deep basin to collect a thick stack of sediments
(assuming there was copious fast-running surface water), then be
uplifted an incredible 20 km by a mantle plume and voluminous lava
intrusions, but with little surface volcanism.
How many major premises in geology are wrong? The electrical model
provides a far simpler solution never considered before in
sedimentation. The material removed electrically from one body in
a cosmic discharge is transferred in large part to the other body.
That creates widespread surface layering. The airless Moon shows
evidence too of extensive layering and it is covered in electrical
scars.
The arguments for the electrical sculpting of Valles Marineris on
Mars apply equally to the Grand Canyon on Earth. These major
features on two very different planets look so similar for the
simple reason that the same forces created them. Water was not
involved in the process. Let us note the similarities. The Grand
Canyon is on a high plateau. The tributaries are deeply incised,
short, and tend to end in rounded alcoves. The tributary canyons
of Ius Chasma are strikingly similar to those of the Grand Canyon.
The material excavated from the Grand Canyon seems to be missing.
On a watery Earth, the Colorado river simply took advantage of the
sinuous channel carved by the subsurface cosmic lightning. The
edges of the Grand Canyon are sharp and do not show much erosion
into the mile deep valleys. That argues for very recent formation.
Geologists cannot decipher the history of the Grand Canyon because
their training never envisaged electrical erosion as a result of
interplanetary thunderbolts. Nor did it teach that thick strata
and anomalous deposits can be dumped from space in hours.
Interplanetary electrical forces can raise mountains, twist and
overturn strata, dump oceans onto land, preserve shattered flora
and fauna in the rocks - all in a geological instant.
Since the days of Lyell, early in the nineteenth century,
geologists have managed to lull us all into insensibility with
vast time spans and piecemeal explanations for each morphological
feature of the landscape. The question that should be asked is
whether the slow causes they invoke are sufficient to the task
they are asked to perform. Fossils do not form under normal
circumstances. The sharp outlines of mountains and the tortured
strata within them look like still frames from a dramatic action
movie. And when it comes to assigning ages, cosmic thunderbolts
cause radioactivity, change radioactive decay rates, and add and
subtract radioactive elements. So the assumptions underpinning the
rickety edifice of geological dating will need re-examination
without prejudice. Geologists are between a rock and a hard place
because the main claim of geology to being a "hard" science has
come from its bold claims to chart the history of the Earth. But
it is clear that the chart they have been handed by cosmogonists
and the clock bequeathed by the physicists are equally flawed.
It is interesting to find that NASA and the SETI Institute have
set up a base camp on Devon Island, Nunavut Territory, in the
Canadian high arctic, for the scientific study of the Haughton
impact crater and its surroundings. The joint study is known as
the Haughton Mars project because the unexplored island is
considered a Mars analog. Mars analogs are sites on the Earth
where geologic features approximate those encountered on Mars.
Devon Island has channels described as glacial meltwater networks.
Several types of valleys resemble those seen on Mars. The
resemblance appears to be more than superficial, as the
similarities are often specific and unique. They have been
compared to the tributary canyons of Valles Marineris and are
claimed as perhaps the clearest evidence for episodes of sustained
fluid erosion on Mars by water. However they present many unusual
characteristics that cannot be explained by water erosion:
1) the valleys are spaced apart with large undissected areas
between valleys,
2) the valleys display open, branching patterns with
large undissected areas between branches,
3) branches often have ill-defined sources but mature in width
and depth over short distances relative to the size of the
network,
4) branches maintain relatively constant width and depth over
long distances,
5) branches split and rejoin to form steep-walled islands,
6) branches have V-shaped cross-sections which transition to
larger U-shaped troughs with steep walls and flat floors,
7) channels on valley floors are absent or poorly expressed.
Their scale also varies over an order of magnitude.
Here we have a different explanation from geologists for
essentially the same morphological feature. The Devon valley
networks are merely interpreted to be glacial meltwater channel
networks formerly lying under an ice sheet. Some valleys do have a
little ice in them today. However, the arguments for their
formation by the action of ice make little sense. It suggests that
glacial melting on a cold desert planet formed some Martian valley
networks, which is hardly helpful. The strong similarities between
the Devon valley networks and the tributaries of Valles Marineris,
like that of the Grand Canyon to Valles Marineris, is simply
because they were formed by the same process - a cosmic electric
discharge. All of the unusual features listed above are expected
in the plasma phenomenon of cathode erosion.
Even the nearby Haughton crater is to be expected, for the same
reason that rilles on other planets and moons are associated with
craters and often have more craters than the surrounding
landscape. The Haughton crater is simply the scar of a cosmic
thunderbolt, like practically every other circular crater in the
solar system. So NASA is correct in their choice of analog, but
wrong in their attribution of causes. "In light of more than a
century's research in the field of plasma cosmology and the 20th
century discoveries of the space age, we can confidently propose
the celestial thunderbolt as a common cause of the formation of
canyons and rilles on rocky planets and moons."
See: www.arctic-mars.org/docs/03c.LPSC.pdf There is a
geological perspective on planetary scars available at:
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/DAAC_DOCS/geomorphology/GEO_10/GEO_CHAPTER_10_TABLE.HT
ML
where the difficulties facing geologists are
often expressed. With the perspective offered here you may begin
to form your own opinion.
~Wal Thornhill
visit the electric universe at
www.holoscience.com
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http://www.science-frontiers.com
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