Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
In part 1 of this presentation, physicist Eugene Bagashov began his
examination of some of the most enduring geological mysteries on the planet Mars.
Of course, geologists examining the surface of Mars project the familiar
earthly processes onto the Red Planet.
They imagine volcanic eruptions, flowing water, and impacts from space as the
primary forces shaping the Martian landscape.
But countless Martian features defy these explanations.
We've proposed that a different process, high-energy
electrical discharge may have produced some of the most dramatic features on Mars-
-a hypothesis with a growing body of experimental support.
In this conclusion, Eugene summarizes some of the most
compelling evidence for electrical scarring on Mars and elsewhere in the
solar system, including our own planet.
Continuing the line of geomorphological studies of Martian surface, it is worth
talking about two other relatively recent papers.
One of them, which was released in May of 2017, discusses the
similarities and differences of what is considered to be the fluvial patterns on
Earth, Mars and Titan.
The paper steadily acknowledges that the exact processes
that have carved the hypothetical riverbeds on Mars and Titan, are not known.
Having said that, the authors of the research proceed to study the
geometry and topology of these features and compare it for all three celestial
bodies, which also made me remember Dr. Paul Anderson's talk at the EU 2013 conference.
Anyway, the results that these researchers get is that simply put, Mars
and Titan have a lot of similarities in terms of the arrangement of hypothetical
riverbeds but it's quite different from how the actual rivers behave on Earth.
On average, rivers on Earth seem to branch quicker and to a larger angle
than the hypothetical fluvial patterns on Mars and Titan.
The authors suggest that it is the evidence of the impact of
plate tectonics that significantly alters the topography of Earth but is
currently absent, at least to the best of our knowledge, on Mars and Titan.
I think however, that it might simply be the evidence that the very character of the
erosion process that has formed these patterns on Earth is different from the
one on Mars and Titan.
The results of this paper seem to indicate that while
it is indeed water that shapes most of the riverbeds on Earth, it might have
been something else on Mars and Titan.
How about electricity?
That's not such a bad option giving everything else that we already know.
Now, the other paper I'd like to mention with regards to that story,
was published in June of 2018.
Essentially, it makes the same type of study as the previous one but there is
some curious detail to it.
I was a bit baffled by the lack of citation of the
previous paper in this one by the way, but that doesn't invalidate what I'd like to say.
So the authors of this particular paper are trying to again
compare the geometric characteristics of rivers on Earth and hypothetical rivers on Mars.
The conclusion they arrive at is consistent with the conclusions of
the previous paper which is, on Mars the average pattern of hypothetical riverbed
is more prolonged and demonstrates the smaller branching angles than on Earth.
But at the same time the authors mention a very interesting caveat that there are
areas on Earth which look very similar to Mars in that regard and the best
match is found in the American Southwest.
Well, in my opinion it only reinforces
the EU approach in this case as there are strong indications that exactly this
area of the North American continent represents the best example of electric
erosion of Earth's surface.
And it's very peculiar that, mathematically speaking, exactly these
regions fluvial patterns resemble Mars the most whereas in most other places on
our planet the signs of possible electrical erosion in the past have been
many times overridden by the actual rainfall, wind, vegetation etc.
Now just for the sake of completeness, I'll remind
you that in 2015, some researchers already announced the detection of salty
water flows on Mars but it was later debunked by other scientists who claimed
that these patterns are better fitted by the transport of dust grains, perhaps
accompanied by carbon dioxide ice sublimation.
It is of course possible that liquid might flow on Mars, but the
impact of this process on the topology of the planet seems to be minuscule at best.
Of course, this idea of past oceans and rivers on Mars is very popular now.
It is supposed that for example earlier, Mars has had a much denser atmosphere so
it could support large basins of liquid water but due to the lack of the
protective magnetic field, it was blown away by the solar wind and the water
evaporated away or froze into ice.
And I was always baffled by this idea
because here you have another planet that has also supposedly been there all
these billions of years and actually twice closer to the Sun, I mean Venus of course.
It also doesn't have any magnetic field and it's subjected to at least
four times more intense solar wind than Mars, yet its atmosphere is not only
feeling fine but it's actually roughly 100 times more dense than the atmosphere of Earth,
though in terms of composition it's exactly the same carbon dioxide,
just like on Mars.
I'm not even mentioning the related problems in Heliophysics
where supposedly the young Sun should have been dimmer than the
present-day star so it would be that much harder for it to heat Mars up
enough for it to sustain water on one hand and to remove its atmosphere on the other.
Something really doesn't add up here, in my opinion.
Continuing this line of thinking, I'd like to add a few more points.
One of them is the lack of carbonate minerals that has been a
long-standing mystery for planetary scientists.
Basically, it is supposed that carbonate minerals should have formed if the
atmosphere was thick and dense enough for any large amounts of liquid water to
exist on the surface of Mars.
But they are simply not there, which has been confirmed many times now.
Here I should note that there is indeed some evidence
for water on Mars, such as the detection of clay minerals for example.
However, recent research also indicates that these minerals might have
been formed under the influence of water vapor rather than ocean, lakes, or rivers
of liquid water.
I think there is another problem connected to that that I haven't
seen discussed anywhere else and that is the concentrations of hematite on Mars.
Hematite is one of the iron oxides, namely the iron (III) oxide, basically the
same thing as the common rust.
The discovery of hematite spherules,
so-called blueberries, by the rover Opportunity in 2004, was applauded by the
Astrophysical community as the evidence for the presence of water on Mars.
Now, I wouldn't dive into the alternative scenario of producing the same spherules
with electric discharges, which was shown by C.J. Ransom, as I'm sure most of the
viewers are well aware of that.
Rather, I wish to concentrate on this idea of hematite being the evidence for
water in the first place.
In particular, it is supposed that hematite on Mars was formed from the
other iron oxide, magnetite.
In this case, it's iron (II,III) oxide, by its additional oxidation in the presence of water.
There are also other possible mechanisms of forming hematite in the presence of
water from other minerals but it's not crucial to the point I'm trying to make.
So what I'd like you to see and consider for a moment is this map of the
concentration of hematite produced by the thermal emission spectrometer
experiment onboard of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
Here you can clearly see that, aside from the anomaly with a
very strong signal right in the middle, on average the concentrations of
hematite are significantly higher in the southern hemisphere; but what do we also
know about southern hemisphere?
We also know that it's mostly Highlands.
See for example the Mars elevation map from the MOLA instrument of the same spacecraft.
By comparing these two maps, one can clearly see that, indeed,
hematite is mostly found in high-altitude southern hemisphere.
Even Curiosity rover only found hematite as it climbed a bit upwards along the Mount Sharp.
Yes, there is also some anomalous lack of hematite in Tharsis region but
that's not exactly relevant to the point I'm making.
So if, according to planetary scientists, hematite on Mars formed due to the
presence of water and water tends to accumulate in lower altitude areas, why
is hematite mostly found in high-altitude areas?
That's almost a rhetorical question.
Instead of answering that, I wish to propose another
hypothetical scenario that would involve a planetary-scale electrochemical process.
In particular, as I've mentioned before, it is possible to acquire
hematite from other iron oxides by adding more oxygen to them.
So my hypothetical scenario would involve some
sort of planetary catastrophe such as the close encounter with another planet
or perhaps an extremely powerful solar plasma event during which the southern
hemisphere of Mars has assumed the strong positive charge and the northern
hemisphere the negative one.
In my opinion, it would simultaneously explain
the altitude differences in the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars, as
during the electrical carving, positively charged surface usually accumulates mass
whereas the negatively charged one loses it.
And at the same time, it would explain the additional large-scale oxidation
event in the southern hemisphere where a lot of the oxygen went to seeking the
areas with higher electric potential and turning iron and iron oxides into
hematite which we observe now.
Slowly approaching the end, I'd like to briefly
discuss some other phenomena that we observe on the Red Planet today,
in particular global dust storms.
We've had one just recently, in 2018, and it quite
famously ended the otherwise unexpectedly long operation of
Opportunity rover.
What I'd like to note is that storms like this one only
occurred near the perihelion and it's quite peculiar in my opinion.
This storm from 2018 began in June, only three
months before perihelion which happened in September.
The previous global storm began in June of 2007 which in that year was exactly
the time of perihelion of Mars.
The same thing occurred in 2001 with the global
storm beginning in June, roughly three months before the perihelion.
And all the other previous global storms seem to
follow this pattern.
Now, one possible mechanism for generation of these large
storms is the enhanced dust devil activity and it is known that it also
has a pronounced seasonal effect so that most dust devils are observed in the
half of the orbit of Mars when it's the closest to the Sun.
Another peculiar effect that occurs near the perihelion
is the enhancement of the atmosphere of Mars.
In my opinion, what follows from all that is that in a way Mars behaves like
a comet so that during perihelion the electrical activity on its surface
increases so there are more dust devils and dust storms, the planet starts to
develop a specific type of coma meaning the expansion of its atmosphere etc.
Perhaps one could even draw an analogy between cometary jets and dust devils.
That's one possibility to look at (it) at least.
This analogy is only reinforced by the fact that Mars has quite an
eccentric orbit, almost as eccentric as Mercury, but at the same time Mars is
farther from the Sun so that the actual distance between its perihelion and
aphelion is bigger than that for any other inner planet.
It's interesting that the enhanced electrical activity of the
Martian atmosphere near perihelion seems to also correlate with the mysterious
clearings of the solar panels of Martian rovers.
There is only one point remaining that I'd like to discuss here and that
is the mysterious detection of the strange cloud plumes at very high
altitudes near the terminator of Mars, in March and April of 2012.
During the publication of the article about it in 2015,
I myself did some calculations using the hypothesis that these plumes
represented water vapor that form from the solar wind and coronal mass ejection
protons and the oxygen from the Martian atmosphere and/or dust contained in it,
pretty much the electric-comet-type electrochemistry.
And my calculation yielded about a ton of water produced every day for the space
weather conditions observed at that time whereas for the formation of the same
type of plume only 200 kilograms would be enough.
A bit later, another paper appeared that also suggested CMEs
from the Sun being the reason for the observation of these plumes.
However, around the same time the other hypothesis appeared that was connecting
them to the passage of Mars through the orbit of a comet C/2007 H2 Skiff,
suggesting that the plumes might be the result of an interaction of Mars with
the dust from this comet.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily contradict the role
of CMEs in producing the plumes that were observed, perhaps the cometary dust
only enhanced their visibility.
There is also a hypothesis that the very same comet is responsible for periodic spikes
of methane concentration in the atmosphere of Mars but that is not
exactly the topic that I have a lot to say about.
For the sake of completeness, I should mention another interaction of
Mars with the Comet C2013 A1 - Siding Spring, but that was already covered in a
Space News episode.
In conclusion, I'd like to say that undoubtedly Mars is the
best studied planet, except Earth, and it might provide more and more evidence
that something is not quite right with the models of the formation of the solar
system and of the behavior of celestial bodies even in the present day.
So I encourage other electric universe enthusiasts to pay more attention to it
as there is really a lot of data that potentially might enhance the EU paradigm.
It is entirely possible that similar processes also occur on other
bodies, such as Pluto for example, but unfortunately we don't have enough data
on most of them so it's only reasonable to focus that much more attention on Mars.