Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe
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In Part 1 of this presentation, Thunderbolts contributor Andrew Hall
explored the role of electrical discharges in earthly volcanism.
Hall compared the physical characteristics of volcanic fields,
called the Maars of Pinacate, with strikingly similar features on the moon
and found in both evidence for high-energy electrical discharges.
In this episode, Hall considers the evidence to be found in earthly volcanism
for the electrical circuitry connecting the Earth and the Sun.
[Andrew Hall] In Part 1 of the Maars of Pinacate [Thunderblog,]
we looked at rim craters and their resemblance to craters on the moon.
In Part 2, we'll ask the question:
If lightning can occur in the sky why not in the ground?
A capacitor stores electrical charge up to a point and then lets go,
like a dam breaking.
It's called dielectric breakdown, and sparks are the result.
Sparks are the flood of current through the dam.
Lightning is one example of a spark we've all seen,
but there are several types of electrical discharge to consider.
Each type represents a flow of current, electrons and/or ions in an electric field.
What primarily differentiates the type of discharge
are polarity and surface features of the electrodes,
the voltage and current density, and the medium the current travels through.
Our atmosphere carries an electric field.
The atmospheric field varies widely - from night-to-day and summer-to-winter:
between 100 volts per meter vertically in clear weather,
to orders of magnitude stronger during thunderstorms.
Normally the atmosphere carries a minor fair weather current
of one picoamp per square meter.
This tiny current is thought to be a return current caused by lightning around the world,
diffused throughout the atmosphere.
We don't notice what's happening electrically in our atmosphere normally
because we live on the Earth’s surface in an equipotential layer.
We don't notice, that is, until a thunderstorm arrives.
Lightning from a thunderstorm has no ‘electrode’ in the sky.
It comes from accumulations of charge in the clouds:
pools of electrons or ions, like the accumulated charge on a capacitor plate.
Temperature and pressure moved by shearing winds take the place of plates
in segregating regions of charge.
A study using interferometer and Doppler Radar
to correlate lightning with updraft and downdraft winds,
showed that lightning avoids the updraft core,
and forms in regions of weaker winds around the updraft.
As a storm intensifies and the updraft speeds up,
lightning frequency dramatically intensifies around the updraft.
James Dye, researcher on the study
from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado,
said the findings were a surprise.
The massive accumulation of charge in thunderstorms is believed by consensus science
to result from static build-up caused by ice formation
and collisions in the fast updraft region,
so they expected to see lightning there.
Instead they found the lightning surrounds this updraft.
Consensus science always requires collisions of some sort to explain electrical phenomena.
Physical processes such as induction,
don't seem to be included in their scientific toolkit.
However, fast updraft winds are likely motivated
by electric current in the storm in the first place.
So, it is not surprising in an electric atmosphere that positive ions
in a powerful updraft would collect negative charge around the updraft column,
which is where they found lightning to initiate.
The study indicates updraft winds won’t produce much lightning
until they reach 10 to 20 mph.
Then strike frequency escalates with updraft speed.
From 20 to 50 mph wind speeds,
the lightning frequency might be 5 to 20 strikes per minute,
but above 90 mph the flash rate can exceed one strike per second.
In a consensus scientist’s minds this can only mean one thing:
the ice is colliding faster!
But back in the real world, the updraft should be recognized as a current,
with faster winds producing higher charge density.
In any case, the charged layers in the cloud, and the thin, flashing filament
we see in common cloud-to-ground lightning, is only part of the event.
There is also a buildup of positive charge on the ground.
The ground charge forms as a pool of positive ions over the surface of the land
and its features, accumulating in the highest concentration at high points.
The positive ions form when electrons are stripped away from air
and surface features by the electric field.
The lightning bolt initiates when the negative charge
invades the air below with filaments of charge called leaders.
They zig-zag downward in stepped segments,
while the ground charge reaches up in a filament of positive ions called a streamer.
When leader and streamer meet, the channel is complete
and dumps the negative cloud charge to ground.
The ionic ground charge follows, ions being heavy and therefore slower than electrons,
rushing up the channel at 60,000 miles per second in what is called a return stroke.
It's the return stroke we see emitting light from particle collisions in the channel.
Return strokes often repeat as new charge pools and discharges,
producing multiple flashes until charges equalize.
It all happens very fast.
You can't see these charges moving around and pooling, but you can feel it.
It's called wind.
Another type of lightning is positive lightning
from a buildup of layers of positive ions in the tops of thunderclouds,
which create arcs more powerful by a factor of 100
than the common lightning between ground and the negatively charged cloud bottom.
Positive lightning also travels farther.
A typical lightning bolt is about 3 miles long.
A storm in Oklahoma produced a record lightning bolt
that travelled 200 miles across a blue sky.
The longest-lasting lightning was recorded in France at 7.7 seconds.
Typically, lightning will pulse several times,
but the total duration is less than two-tenths of a second.
These record setters show that lightning can scale by orders of magnitude.
In fact, we know no limit to how large it can scale.
So, what does all this have to do with volcanoes?
Lightning is seen not only in thunderstorms
but in snow storms, hurricanes, intense forest fires, surface nuclear detonations
and, you guessed it, volcanic eruptions.
There are two regions to consider in electric volcanoes.
Above and below the ground.
Above, they are integral to the Earth-Sky circuit.
A volcanic plume is a dusty plasma: pyroclastic ash mixed with ionized gases.
How such a plume might increase the charge density between Earth and sky is unknown,
but powerful volcanic lightning is a known occurrence.
Volcanic eruptions throw hot, pyroclastic material into the sky.
The volume of scorching hot cloud that erupts upward
is not filled by the erupting gases alone.
Ground wind necessarily flows inward to fill the cloud from below.
This is a depiction of how a nuclear airburst detonation is designed to destroy a city.
The sudden expansion of gases created by the blast rise up, leaving a rarefied region.
Inward flowing ground winds reach the speed of an F-5 tornado,
300 mph, filling the vacuum created beneath the rising fireball,
and leveling anything in its path.
A very large volcanic plume can have the same effect,
drawing winds inward at ground level.
This seems the more likely explanation for the lopsided rim
and even circular aureole of Cerro Colorado.
It may also explain why maar craters in general
have characteristically small amounts of ‘ejecta’ concentrated around their rims.
But beyond the kinetic effects of the plume,
the rising column of ionic material
will act in the same fashion as the updraft in a thunderstorm,
generating lightning around the column.
At the mouth of the erupting vent one can imagine the current flow
drawing ionic charge to it from the surrounding land.
This may be why rim craters occur where they do,
at the boundary of the rising plume.
Consensus science has concluded there are two forms of volcanic lightning.
Researchers led by Corrado Cimarelli,
a volcanologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany,
studied Sakurajima volcano in Japan and concluded ash particles are responsible
for building static electricity that discharges near ground level,
as they reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
A separate study, also published in Geophysical Research Letters
of the April 2015 eruption of Calbuco volcano in Chile,
discovered lightning striking 60 miles from the eruption, from 12 miles above Earth.
The scientists concluded that thinning ash clouds formed ice
that rubbed together to produce lightning like they say a thundercloud does.
The consensus narrative always needs a collision and static buildup of charge.
Why this is so, is hard to understand.
No doubt rubbing and static charges do occur,
but there is already an atmosphere with an electric field to work with,
moving electric charge and oodles of ionization in these events,
whether volcanic or thunderstorm.
They occur in the dielectric atmospheric layer
between ground and the charged plasma of the ionosphere.
By assuming electrical discharges only occur due to localized static charge,
is to miss the big picture, that Earth is just one device in a circuit.
Whether discharge comes only from the plume, or also within the ground,
is the second part of the electric volcano story.
We don't know much about the currents within Earth’s inner regions.
We know the crust carries current.
Ground current is why we ‘ground’ electrical devices,
so a voltage potential can't build between the ground and the device and generate spark,
or worse, a dead person whose last act on earth was to touch the device.
Ground Induced Current, or GIC, is current in soil, rock and water,
as well as metal fences, pipelines, and wire.
It’s induced by the atmospheric current because the two are coupled.
Solar activity is a forcing influence on atmosphere current,
increasing the dangers of GIC during solar storms.
The Carrington event of 1859 was a solar flare that, among other things,
produced especially energetic aurora's and induced current in telegraph wires.
Many lines burned-up, telegraph operators were shocked and showered with sparks.
Some reported the telegraph had so much current,
they continued working without a power source after the generators were disconnected.
GIC may not be the only source of electrical current on and under the ground.
After all the rush of lava and gases through vents in Earth’s crust
would seem to require a lot of things rubbing and colliding.
It seems necessary that this would build static charge
and cause discharges deep within the Earth, even by consensus reasoning.
Even more likely, it’s electrical discharges deep within the Earth that heats the magma,
vaporizes rock and causes eruptions in the first place.
It's entirely unknown what the voltage drop is
across the layers of crust and mantle to the center of the planet,
but given those huge auroral currents at the poles
and the puffed-up magnetosphere around Earth,
one should assume it is rather large.
Pinacate and other volcanic fields display features
that the Electric Universe Theory has ascribed to electrical phenomena
on other planets and moons in the solar system.
Since they appear on this planet too,
they need to be interpreted in the context of an Electric Earth.
One look at the Delta-Wye configuration
at the bottom of this maar in the image below, and the question
- Is the Earth Electric?
- is perhaps answered.
In three-phase electrical transmission, Delta-Wye connections
are used to connect an ungrounded system, such as an overhead transmission line,
to a grounded system, such as a transformer.
The Delta configuration is the ungrounded connection of three phases of current,
whereas the Wye connects the three phases to ground at the center of the Wye.
A geo botanical feature at the bottom of a volcanic crater
imitating electrical circuitry may be an astonishing coincidence.
Or not.
It may be a physical expression of how sky and ground currents ’couple’,
the same way we couple a transformer to a power line.
Lest we forget the Moon and the physics of electrical scarring,
we can look there for hints at how subtle electrical scarring can be
and since this information comes from NASA, it’s all the more astonishing.
Deep craters at the polar regions of the moon never see sunlight.
Within these eternally dark and frozen craters
cosmic rays are bombarding the surface, creating a double layer of opposite charge,
because it is theorized, electrons penetrate to the subsurface,
while positive ions hit and collect at the surface
– it’s always the collision thing.
The double-layer discharges tiny sparks that vaporize dust
and launch them up to float the thin atmosphere above the surface.
This dust atmosphere was first noticed by the Apollo crews
and remained a mystery for decades.
There is more evidence of electrical influences in the Pinacate volcanic field
and the surrounding Altar Desert than rim craters on the maars.
Some maars that don't have rim craters appear as doublets
or multiple craters with consistent floor depths.
These too are features similar to the usual shapes seen on the Moon and Mars.
Tuff rings are the volcanic rims surrounding a maar crater.
Tuff ring forms as hot ejected tephra falls back to Earth
and lithifies into a ring of welded tuff.
They are typically low relief, with a gentle slope of less than 10 degrees on the outside.
Several tuff rings in Pinacate are exposed,
but the crater that formed them is buried.
These next four images show, in order,
lunar like features of tuff rings in the Pinacate.
The first is a concentric tuff ring inside a tuff ring,
with rim features at three o'clock.
The next is a concentric tuff ring inside a tuff ring,
with rim features at nine o'clock.
Third is a tuff ring with the rim crater at five o'clock
and an east-to-west crater chain at 12 o’clock.
And the final picture is a polygonal tuff ring doublet.
Chains of raised tuff, craters and cinder cones can also be found throughout the Pinacate.
The following pictures show chains of various features,
including tuff rings and cinder cones.
And then there are unusual erosion patterns that seem to begin and end without reason.
These are stark patterns of apparent erosion across playa that are dead flat;
there is not one-foot elevation change.
They appear to be lined with black rock
and then the Pinacate is covered with fractal patterns
and lightning bolt rilles of feathery ash and tuff deposits.
Fractal patterns appear everywhere across the Pinacate
from lightning bolt rilles to feathery ash and tuff deposits.
We’ll look at the electrical nature of volcanic fields more in future articles.
Thank you.
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