Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
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In the conclusion of this three-part presentation,
Andrew Hall continues his meticulous analysis of compelling evidence
for electrical scarring throughout the American Southwest.
In parts 1 & 2 Hall explored the complex electrical discharge process
called sputtering discharge
and how this process might have shaped the breathtaking features on the Colorado Plateau.
As we've also documented on this series
it is well known that powerful electric fields can produce ionic winds
which can rapidly create erosional features.
Did such powerful winds once accompany cosmic lightning bolts that struck the earth
indelibly shaping our planet's surface?
In Part 1 of Sputtering Canyons we discussed Arches National Monument
and evidence it was formed by a complex sputtering discharge process.
That process involved thermal spiking, barrier discharge in a layer of wet sandstone.
In Part 2, we looked at Monument Valley
and how charge and charge depletion disperses through rock
by the combined mechanisms of current drift and diffusion.
We looked at evidence of diffusion patterns in the landscape
and evidence of mechanical shear caused by sputtering discharge.
In Part 3, we'll look at some secondary effects
from electrical deposition and sputtering on the Colorado Plateau.
These features involve processes besides sputtering discharge and lightning bolts.
These features also involve the winds of the storm.
In the primordial plasma typhoon that layered the dome in the Colorado Plateau,
winds were mobilized by the Earth's electric field.
Ionic species of opposite charge were pushed in opposite directions.
Positive and negative species segregated into streams of unipolar winds
that circled the Earth in bands moving in alternate directions.
The electric field gradient was from pole to pole,
or at least where the poles are now.
So the wind circled north to south and south to north.
The effect was the same as the counter-rotating bands of wind on Jupiter.
Where they met was the anodic hot spot
where super volcanoes belched ash and flame,
and the bowels of the Earth spilled forth molten rock.
Between the super volcanic maw of Yellowstone
and the strato-volcanic cones on the Mogollon Rim
sits the Colorado Plateau, where these winds mixed in a plasma cyclone.
The meeting of the unipolar winds was the Earth-sized equivalent
of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter
-- a sustained and violent storm
charged with electricity and bent by magnetic fields -
a storm beyond any biblical description.
Like Jupiter, the winds screamed at several hundred miles per hour.
Mach effects, like standing shockwaves and supersonic shear,
created extreme pressure, density, and temperature differentials.
Vast updrafts and downdrafts developed, tornadoes spun up to 50 and 100 miles across,
all of it carrying electric current.
Where shock waves form, electric current flows.
This is a known phenomenon.
The whole idea of an EMP weapon,
an electromagnetic pulse that can knock out transformers and electronic systems
destroying the grid and communications, is based on this fact.
Explode a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere and it will send out a shock wave.
The shock wave carries the electromagnetic pulse
that spikes current suddenly and wipes out electronics and power grids.
There is no battery in the nuclear bomb that creates the EMP.
The EMP forms naturally in the shockwave.
There are several effects that cause this.
First, the shockwave is a sharp discontinuity in density,
and where density is higher, of course, there is more matter
so a higher concentration of ambient ions collect there,
naturally raising charge density in the shockwave.
The temperature is higher too, so that causes ionization in the shock wave.
And there is higher pressure, so particle collisions are more frequent,
again ionizing the shockwave.
And most important of all, the bomb itself sends radiation with the shock wave.
So all these effects add up to a large electric current in the shock wave,
and it is self-amplifying.
As ionization frees electrons to roam
they knock away more electrons in a runaway chain reaction
driven by the kinetic energy in the shock wave.
The process is related to the diffusion of charge discussed in Part 2,
but in this case the current diffusion is contained by the shock wave.
The shock wave and electric pulse are coherent with each other.
Any place a supersonic wind hits an object or is forced to change vector,
or where it shears against winds moving at a different velocity, a shock wave forms.
A projection, like a mountain, would create a standing shock wave that created the wind
and generated current.
In a plasma atmosphere that current would grow very large.
Another feature of shock waves is they reflect.
Like any wave, a light wave, an ocean wave;
when it hits something, some of its energy echoes.
When it does, it echoes in harmonic relationship to the wave that made it.
Shock waves can reflect off of each other,
or align with each other and vibrate in harmonic resonance.
Every lightning bolt, every belch from the volcanic vent
sent new shock waves to reverberate through the air and echo from whatever they hit.
Every sheet of current in them altered the electric field around it,
and the atmosphere vibrated with charged waves,
stiffened and resonating with feedback from the energy of the storm itself.
Some traveled at the speed of sound;
while standing waves, reflected from stationary objects exposed to the wind,
stayed in one place.
They crossed, interfered and canceled each other.
In the chaotic turbulence of the supersonic electric storm,
shock waves literally patterned the atmosphere.
Because the shock waves carry current, and magnetic fields result
the right-hand rule forces waves into a cross-flow pattern with 90-degree angles.
Consider how ocean waves can form a coherent pattern in a cross-current sea,
as shown in this photo from Ile de Re lighthouse off the coast of France.
Shock waves formed a similar effect, only carrying electric current.
As the layers of the dome built the Colorado Plateau,
they scarred the land with these patterns.
This shock wave fracture pattern is almost universally found in the rim rock
and cap rock of sputtered canyon walls, buttes and pinnacles.
The fracturing takes the form of parallel joints or checkerboard blocks.
The blocks are sometimes deeply cut and they look like broken teeth.
In other cases, they are straight, evenly-spaced, parallel fissures.
Razor thin shock waves created the fractures in the cap and rim rock
as the dome was deposited, while it was still hot and plastic.
Thermal contraction during cooling and the tearing away of material during sputtering,
broke the rocks along the shock-induced fracture lines.
The same effect is seen in completely different geologic formations,
the windblown buttresses on mountain flanks.
These images are from Comb Ridge,
which is the southern rim of the Monument Valley dome,
and San Rafael Reef which is the southern rim of the San Rafael swell.
Both are dunes of triangular buttresses formed by the supersonic winds
sucked into the storm that formed the domes.
The shockwaves from the supersonic winds that formed the dunes
impressed themselves into the rocks.
The shock wave currents shatter into harmonic reflections in ever-smaller patterns.
In formations where extremely high energy was available,
such as the hardened plates of flat iron buttresses on the San Rafael Reef,
the shockwaves continued to shatter, reflect and reverberate down to the smallest scale.
This rock photographed from a flat iron buttress in Utah by Robert Hawthorne,
during a field trip following the 2017 conference,
shows parallel cuts in rock only a half inch apart.
This rock photographed by the author is
from another buttress in Utah during the 2016 field trip.
It shows the squiggled fractures of a dissipating shock-induced current
along the back edge of the buttress.
These rilles only penetrate a fraction of an inch into the rock
and really defy any other explanation, unless rock eating worms cut these paths.
Another feature related to shock-induced currents in linear, parallel formations,
is something we'll call inverse dikes.
A dike is a vertical wall of rock.
It can be freestanding, or it can be embedded in a parent rock,
like a quartz vein in granite.
Quartz veins are caused by very high-current shock waves.
These dikes are made of Minette
which is very high in potassium ratio, making the rock highly alkaline or anionic,
which means its electrons were sucked out.
They were made by shock wave currents --
electro-sonic waves that scored across the land and fused the parent sands
into walls of electro- chemically altered rock.
These emanate from Comb Ridge on the south side of Monument Valley,
and they are coherent with the triangular flat-iron buttresses of the comb,
which were formed by the same shock waves.
Inverse dikes are similar wall-like features that were formed by currents
that depleted the rock, shielding it from sputter.
These upended pancake walls at Arches National Monument, Utah
were left standing as the lanes between them were sputtered away,
in the same fashion that preferential sputtering
left mesas and pinnacles in the shadow of lightning strikes.
Only for these, the diffusion of charge depletion
was shaped by the electro- sonic shockwaves.
You can see they are layered, like the deposition layers of the mesas themselves.
Dikes don't have deposition layers;
they actually cut through deposition layers.
These are not dikes; they're inverse dikes and they do have deposition layers
because they were part of the dome before it sputtered away.
Another phenomenon related to the whole sputtering process is gaseous explosions.
It primarily occurs during dome deposition,
when hot sand rains down, accelerated by the electric field on the eye-wall of the storm,
to be pressed into a layer on the dome.
After deposition, while the rock is still hot and plastic,
still popping and sizzling with excess charge,
volatile mixtures accumulate in pockets.
The pockets migrate through weak joints, dikes and veins in the rock,
to explode near the surface, leaving holes from bubble bursts.
Now remember, the veins and joints are current-carrying shock-induced features,
so they dissipate heat and current as they cool.
It's very similar to the heat spiking bubbles that created Arches National Monument,
but this occurs during dome deposition, not during sputter.
The gases are aided, or caused, by a residual current in the rock
escaping after it deposited.
It can leave perfect bubble imprints in dense, hardened rock.
Look carefully at the bubble imprint lower left of the arch.
In this picture it has a Y-shaped ridge
that is the precise symmetric pattern molded into the rock
that three bubbles connected would present
because they have to equalize pressure across their membranes.
This is not water erosion, this is bubble explosion.
They also explode outward in large jets
off-gassing the hot fresh mountain as it settled and cooled,
leaving yawning throats like this one.
The light at another time of day on this same 'yawning throat'
in the San Rafael Reef, Utah
shows the band of a white crystalline dike that the gas has migrated through.
The 'tonsils' in this 'throat' are a blade of the rock dike.
And this slot canyon also in the San Rafael Reef
was cut by a discharge of current and off-gassing.
The discharge here was powerful enough to cut the narrow canyon,
implying it was an arc mode discharge.
The throat of the discharge is a hole in the back of the canyon about 3-feet in diameter.
It's choked with an effluvia
that followed the discharge and solidified as it dripped from the throat.
There's a vertical dike in the rock aligned with the hole
which can be seen as a white streak in the vee-notch above the hole in this image.
The throat is completely choked with the effluvia.
The effluvia is black and textured much like Minette
which is found in lightning generated features elsewhere in this region.
A runnel of the black effluvia drips from the throat
and the walls near the throat are splattered with a white substance.
Taste-testing the white substance indicated an alkaline bitterness.
Being in a National Park though we could not take samples.
Off-gassing bubbles can be quite elaborate in volatile flows of foaming minerals.
Here's a carbonate rock that fizzed like seltzer before it suddenly phase-changed to solid
leaving exquisite bubble molds.
Such sudden phase change implies an instantaneous electro-chemical process
due to electrical discharge and recombination.
This rock didn't just cool off and form these bubble molds.
It instantly solidified due to electro-chemical processes.
This image shows why off-gassing bubbles are part of deposition, not sputtering.
The bubbles are in the untouched surface rock above
while the scalloped break in the rock, which was caused by sputtering, has no holes.
Therefore the holes were already there when the canyon was sputtered,
and are only a near-surface feature caused by the off-gassing.
While theory and conclusions presented here are the sole opinion of the author,
appreciation of the researchers who spent hot, grimy hours exploring Canyonlands
to obtain these photos and data is due.
Researchers Larry White, Bruce Leybourne, David Orr and Steve Cash
and my dog Ginger endured extreme heat, dangerous roads,
treacherous heights and fine sand in their food,
examining the wonders of Canyonlands, Utah for this article.
To them, thank you very much.