Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
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In recent months, according to a number of scientific reports, the dusty
winds and sand dune formations on the planet Mars have grown even more mysterious.
For decades, the Martian winds have puzzled planetary scientists on Earth.
The atmosphere on Mars is of course incredibly rarefied.
It's only 0.6% as dense as Earth's, and yet on Mars,
incredible dust storms vastly more powerful than anything ever witnessed on
Earth, sometimes engulf the entire planet.
These dust storms are sometimes composed of vast congregations of so-called dust
devils, or dust tornados reaching as tall as Mount Everest.
All over the Red Planet, countless strange wind-driven features
also present huge mysteries.
These include so-called sand dunes which are very different from earthly sand
dunes in important ways.
In some instances, the dune features appear to be
permanently frozen in to the terrain.
In August of 2003, the New Scientist article "All Eyes on Mars" remarked on this and
several other Martian geological oddities.
It states, "Mars is proving more enigmatic than ever at the moment.
The latest images of the Martian surface taken by NASA's orbiting Mars Global
Surveyor have revealed profoundly mysterious landforms that have left
geologists scratching their heads.
The features include a combination of surprisingly stable dunes, canyons
without craters and rapidly eroding ice caps.
All point to amazingly fast processes taking place on the surface.
Mars has changed considerably in the past few thousand years -- in some places,
even the past two years. Yet nobody knows why.
Unraveling the mystery will require a radical leap in theoretical thinking,
says Michael Malin, the geologist in charge of the MGS camera."
However, 16 years after these remarks were published, the required
"radical leap in theoretical thinking" has yet to occur.
Planetary scientists today remain confined to the theoretical
toolkit which only recognizes the geological processes of wind and water
erosion, plate tectonics, periodic impacts from space, and volcanism, as the basic
forces shaping planetary surfaces.
But as we shall see, standard geology fails to explain either the processes occurring
on the Red Planet today nor the ones that devastated its surface in the past.
This point is made emphatically if we examine just one type of geological
feature on Mars, the sand dune.
Earlier this year, NASA's Odyssey orbiter stunned planetary
scientists when it captured images of a "dune field" with a roughly hexagonal shape.
The dunes are found on the floor of the crater Terra
Cimmeria which appear in a heavily cratered southern highland region of Mars.
Perhaps tellingly, another dune field, also at least partly hexagonal, can
be seen in a nearby crater.
As planetary scientists have noted, the dunes and
"ripples" that appear on Mars's high southern latitudes, are thought to
be stable and so they suggest the dunes could essentially be fossils of ancient Martian winds.
But as an EarthSky report on the puzzling dunes asks, "What about
the hexagonal shape? Are we surprised? Yes and no. Hexagons can be found in other
places in nature. Another striking example is the jet strean formation at
Saturn's North Pole, which is a massive, near-perfect hexagon centered at the
pole itself. It's absolutely astonishing."
As those who have followed the Electric Universe theory are well aware, the
hexagonal shape of any feature seen in nature may give an essential clue to its formation.
Hexagonal craters are seen on rocky bodies throughout the solar system;
including Mars, Mercury, the dwarf planet Ceres, and the asteroid Vesta.
One hypothesis planetary scientists have proposed
is that in each and every instance meteoritic impacts have struck fault
lines which have collapsed over time eventually producing the hexagonal form.
But of course, this strange reasoning would not account for the hexagonal dune field.
However, as we have repeatedly noted, the hexagonal form is seen rather
routinely in craters produced by electrical discharge machining in the laboratory.
On the aforementioned hexagon at Saturn's North Pole, the mystery for
planetary scientists has only deepened over time.
For several years, scientists on earth had pointed to the appearance
of hexagons in simple fluid dynamic experiments as the ideal analogue
explaining the Saturnian hexagons formation.
But as we reported last year, scientists studying data from NASA's
Cassini spacecraft were amazed to discover that the hexagon reaches
hundreds of kilometers higher in Saturn's atmosphere than was previously thought.
This is problematic because, as noted in a Sciencealert report, "...since
wind conditions change dramatically with altitude, the fact that the hexagon shape
persists so much higher than the cloud tops is a baffling conundrum."
And yet the Electric Universe theory has always proposed that the hexagon formation is
ultimately produced by an external electric current entering at the pole.
In fact, it was this reasoning that led physicist Wal Thornhill to predict in
2005, that Saturn's North Pole would have a "hot spot" which would match the
one already discovered at the planet's South Pole.
When this prediction was confirmed in 2008, it was to the
astonishment of planetary scientists, since the pole had been deprived of
sunlight for over 12 years.
For decades, the chief principals of The Thunderbolts Project have proposed that experiments
with electrical discharge provide the greatest potential for understanding
both past and current geological phenomena in our solar system.
As we have noted many times, in addition to producing varieties of "weird
craters" seen on rocky bodies, electrical discharge in the laboratory also
routinely creates both dust levitation and plumes of ejected material,
as seen in this experiment by Jacob Gable.
And ionic winds which can organize dust into dune-like patterns, as seen in
this experiment by Billy Yelverton.
These experiments could also provide insight into what actually drives the incredible,
towering dust devils, and planet- encompassing dust storms on Mars today.
Planetary scientists do indeed recognize that tremendous electric fields are
associated with the giant dust devils.
Although they believe that the electric fields are generated by grains of sand
and dust rubbing together.
However, this begs the question, with such low atmospheric pressure and so little
force in the Martian wind, how does one account for the dust particles leaving the surface?
Physicist Wal Thornhill suggests a fundamental confusion of
cause and effect among planetary scientists.
He writes, "...in an electrified universe charge is already separated on
the macroscopic scale and the movement of air in a dust devil is an effect of
charge recombination, not a cause of charge separation."
The hexagonal dune field on the planet Mars may have been
indeed formed in the past by the same type of electrical discharge that
ravaged much of the Martian surface.
As Wal Thornhill explains, "No amount of theorizing based on slow evolutionary
geological principles will explain how the giant canyons on Mars are so young
that they have no craters in their walls.
The very formation mechanism of Valles Marineris is a mystery to geologists.
However, if we make use of the forensic evidence from the past, the formation of
Valles Marineris was witnessed by modern humans in late prehistory. We don't need
to theorize. Mars, the God of war, was memorialized as the heroic figure in a
celestial battle fought with thunderbolts. Mars was struck and a
visible scar remained. For the scar of Valles Marineris to be seen by the naked
eye requires that Mars was about 100 times
closer to the Earth than it is on its closest approach today!"
Indeed in our next episode, we will explore why Mars's identity as the God of War
is the ultimate key to understanding the events which make Martian geology so
mysterious to this day.