Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
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The American Southwest is an ideal testing ground
for the hypotheses of Electric Universe geology.
Geological textbooks tell us that the hallmark breathtaking features
of these desert regions formed through slow erosional processes over eons of time.
But laboratory experiments with electrical discharges have opened new theoretical pathways
that enquirers in increasing numbers around the world are following.
A remarkable contributor to the burgeoning field of EU geology
is Thunderbolts colleague Andrew Hall whose articles and video presentations
have explored new electrical interpretations of desert geology.
In part one of his three-part presentation,
Hall presents his detailed analysis of the stunning features in Canyonlands,
a dramatic desert landscape in Utah
beginning with the discussion of the amazing formations called the Arches.
In summer of 2016 following EU conference in Phoenix, Arizona,
EU geology researchers visited Arches National Monument
in the deep reaches of Canyonlands, Utah
where the Green and Colorado rivers channel through the Colorado Plateau.
Arches National Monument is an astonishing place for anyone interested in EU geology.
By conventional reckoning, the high desert plateau
was carved into fantastical arches and hoodoos
after millions of years of subtle water and wind erosion.
To the EU researchers, however, it was evident the land was zapped,
carved and seared by electrical storms that could have happened last year,
so fresh looked the marks of evidence.
The Arches' formation tells a story which explains one of the key phenomena
that shaped the face of the planet.
The phenomenon is called sputtering discharge.
So let's take a look at what that is.
Sputtering discharge, as used in manufacturing,
is a dark to glow-mode current in plasma
used to deposit thin films of material onto a substrate surface.
It's analogous to electroplating, or galvanic reaction in a fluid.
An electric field accelerates positive ions in plasma to collide with a source material,
which breaks molecular bonds, eroding the source material.
This is what the term "sputter" refers to --
the breaking away of particles in the source material
which then drift in an electric field to coat the substrate.
The source material is the cathode, and the substrate is the anode in the circuit.
The material exchange is performed by electricity.
Manufacturers often use magnetrons to shape and control the current
and improve material transport efficiency with external magnetic fields.
The point to be made, however, is that high voltage, low current in a plasma
will erode or etch away a cathodic surface
and plate itself in layers on the anodic surface.
This is a process that shaped Canyonlands.
To fully understand these canyons, however, first we must understand domes,
because the canyons are carved from a dome.
The entire Colorado Plateau is a dome --
or rather, a series of domes overlaying each other.
The domes are composed of sedimentary layers of limestone and sandstone.
The layers are stacked for the most part evenly and flat, like a layer cake.
This basic layer cake structure is capped
with the Rocky Mountains on the East and carved into canyons on the West,
while it's shot through with the Lichtenberg-patterned,
vertically cut gorges of the Colorado and Green Rivers.
The dome structure of the plateau and the canyons carved through it
is primarily the result of a natural sputtering discharge process
created during intense electrical storms.
Of course, in this case, we're speaking about storms created in a past environment
when Earth's electric field was amplified to the point
the entire atmosphere was ionized.
Imagine the atmosphere stirred into a maelstrom lit with streamers of glowing plasma.
Where lightning crackled, not only in the sky, but across the land,
and mountain tops glowed with coronal fire under swirling clouds of dusty plasma.
It would have been surreal.
A place where streams of wind became electric currents.
Where high and low-pressure zones acted like battery terminals,
and mountain tops became electrodes drawing machine-gun lightning from the sky.
Anything standing in the wind would have hissed and snapped with coronal fire.
Dust in the air would have acted strange, too,
as the energy of free electrons collided and overpowered weaker atomic bonds,
ionizing matter, causing it to act like a ferro-fluid under the influence of a magnet.
Ionic species segregated, forming unipolar winds
that tore past each other in opposite directions,
creating shear zones of intense electrical discharge
and vortex winds of supersonic speed.
The inside of Earth would have been in turmoil as well.
Hot magmas spewing from volcanic vents. Aquifers boiling.
Explosive eruptions of steam from deep underground, pocking the landscape with holes.
Even arcs would erupt -- lightning from the ground --
caused by buried pockets of charge where minerals and water ionized.
The winds, dust-laden and electric, deposited the Colorado Plateau,
plating a cake across the western half of North America
in the same way semiconductor manufacturers layer circuitry onto silica wafers.
The stratified layers are interspersed with magma flows,
petrified forests, inland seas, and dinosaur boneyards of different ages
that indicate it formed in a series of events that likely recurred over millions of years.
To create the Canyonlands, the voltage potential had to reverse
and eat away at landscape newly laid down by the storm.
Under the electric field of an electrical storm,
the surface of the earth becomes positively-charged.
It becomes the anode in the circuit where lightning strikes from the negative cloud base
and where rain falls.
In primordial ionic storms like those that formed the plateau,
rain did not fall, but silica did,
as dust in the air fell and adhered in layers to the dome.
Inland seas, or layers washed over by tsunami generated by the storm itself,
became covered over with more layers of dry overburden as the storm progressed.
This left a moist layer, like icing in the center of the layer cake.
This icing layer then ionized under intense bombardment
from sputtering discharge in the eye of the storm
and created what is known as barrier discharge in the moist layer beneath the ground.
Which brings us back to Arches National Monument,
proof that the canyons were carved by sputtering discharge,
aided by barrier discharge, in a moist layer of the big cake.
This image tells most of the story.
A band of rock that looks tortured and fluid,
as if it were boiled mud when it solidified,
sandwiched between smooth, more- or-less even layers of stone.
The canyon floor is flat, which is surprising
if one accepts the consensus view that canyons were made by water erosion.
Water erosion leaves deep channels and vee-cut valleys,
not flat floors.
This closer image shows the fluidity of the layers.
At the top, the overburden rock barely sinks into the sagging layer
beneath it that turned plastic because it was still solid.
The plastic layer beneath sagged
but didn't compress, and maintained a consistent thickness.
Below that on the bottom,
the 'boiled mud' layer fluidized completely and squeezed like toothpaste.
What turned this bottom layer fluid and caused to sag beneath a solid overburden
was electrical current. A barrier discharge current,
where no gaseous atmosphere was present to ionize into plasma,
but instead, the moisture and minerals in the layer ionized,
generating a subsurface current.
The moist layer ionized and charged species pooled
into a plasma-like mud the electric field wanted to lift away.
The electric currents boiled the moist layer,
and it began to foam and arc into the drier and electrically resistant overburden.
When sputtering removed the surrounding overburden,
pressure released and vapors expanded, making gas bubbles that raised the arches.
Hardened pinnacles formed where mud boiled up in convective blossoms of hot ionization.
One can see how the moist layer boiled and heaved,
while currents arched and thrust upward, trying to break through the overburden rock.
But in this area, it was unsuccessful. The traces of barrier discharge remain in the rock.
The empty, flat canyon floor, where the overburden and moist layer were carried away
is where the discharge broke through to complete the circuit.
Arches is a display of etching, or Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) stopped in process.
The wet layer was boiling off due to the current in it
and lifting away with the overburden when the process stopped
leaving these arches and hoodoos.
It likely stopped when the sputtering glow current suddenly jumped to arc mode,
and lightning struck, dissipating the charge built-up in the wet, 'boiled-mud' layer.
Sputtering discharge is typically used in manufacturing
to remove only micro-meters of material.
The ion bombardment on the surface of cathode material
only shallowly penetrates to break atomic, or molecular bonds and release particles.
So how could such a process remove hundreds of feet of solid sandstone?
Well, one reason is the strength of the electric field at work on the charged species.
In the primordial storm we are discussing,
the electric field would have been billions, perhaps trillions of volts.
The electromotive force of such a field
applied to any large pool of charged species could lift a mountain
and the other reason is diffusion of charge
through a thousand feet of dry, sandstone overburden, to ionize the wet layer.
The section of the dome overlaying the wet layer acted as a solid-state semiconductor,
coherent with the intense electric field.
Charge diffused through the silica layers
in a manner to be discussed in more detail in Part Two of this article.
But solid state electronics are the way to evaluate
how charge diffused through the landscape.
The wet, ionized layer then underwent a process called heat spike sputtering.
Heat spike sputtering occurs when diffusing ionization causes secondary reactions.
The secondary reactions occur in the wet layer,
which is highly conductive and volatile.
Currents heated the material
and that caused thermal liquefaction, melting, and steam micro-explosions.
In Canyonlands, when the wet layer ionized, it induced currents
which heat-spiked, discharging from the wet layer to the layer above.
The arches and bubble-like pinnacles in Arches National Monument
were created by heat-spike sputtering and bubbles of micro-explosions
as the 'boiled mud' layer ionized, vaporized, and discharged into the overburden.
This short film produced by diveflyfish on YouTube
helps visualize the process of diffusion through rock
and the process of barrier discharge that caused the 'boiled-mud' layer to boil,
and in it, Jim Hamman, the creator of diveflyfish and an EU contributor,
employs a high voltage Tesla circuit to generate current through a granite block.
There are two things to note as you watch the film.
First, note how the flow of electricity diffuses through the entire granite block.
Instead of channeling directly below the electrode in a narrow stream like an arc,
it flows out the full footprint of the crystalline granite block.
The external electric field of the circuit is diffusing charge through the granite
as it would in a solid-state body.
In the tense electric field surrounding the eye of the hyper-storm that etched the canyons,
currents also diffused through the dome matrix in this way,
ultimately ripping out mountains of earth in the blink of an eye
as currents boiled and liquified the wet matrix below,
similar to the plasma tornadoes that are swirling in the gaps
between the electrodes and granite in the film.
Second, note the plasma tornadoes that bridge the gap between the block and electrode.
They are not in bright arc mode but are filaments in glow mode.
The plasma tornado currents are in the air gap where the air has ionized to plasma.
In the Arches, there was no air gap between the ionizing wet layer and the overburden,
so the discharge was a barrier discharge coming from the 'boiled mud'.
The currents flowed around the boiling, bubbling, foaming heat-spikes
to fuse and harden the less conductive overburden in its pattern of arches and pinnacles.
Jim's experiment demonstrates how current diffuses through granite
which demonstrates how ground currents can diffuse in natural rock.
Watch towards the end of the clip, arcing begins in hot spots to eat through the granite
collecting the current into single arcing paths
and starving the diffusion currents around them.
There are many other evidences of sputtering discharge in the Utah Canyonlands.
In Part Two of Sputtering Canyons, we'll examine some more.
Thank you!