Welcome to space news from the Electric Universe
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
The Electric Universe theory has laid the foundations
for an entirely new understanding of planetary geology.
For decades, “experimentalists”, using electrical discharges,
have reproduced many familiar geological features,
including types of crater forms that have long proved puzzling to standard geology.
These experiments may provide clues to past events
that the scientific mainstream has never entertained:
high-energy electrical discharges at an interplanetary scale.
Is it possible to integrate these new possibilities
into a geology that also includes standard geological processes?
In this episode our guest Barry Setterfield,
the astronomer at the New Hope observatory in Grants Pass Oregon,
outlines a number of guidelines for assessing whether craters on planets,
moons and other bodies, were created by impacts, or by electrical discharge machining,
[Barry] Okay, while I was teaching astronomy at the time and the issue of the origin of craters
on astronomical objects of all sizes would come up;
and we needed to resolve this issue with the students.
For example in the days before the Apollo moon landings, and even for some time after,
there's a strong body of opinion which held that all such craters were the result of volcanism
and that idea died slowly.
It was replaced by the idea that all craters are the result of impact,
but then the results of electrical experiments became available
which solved problems that neither impact nor volcanism could;
and I needed to do some cratering experiments to distinguish
between the various types of craters and then present these results to my students.
Volcanism usually has craters at the tops of mountains, unlike the moon and planets;
the crater bottoms (they) go below the level of the surrounding plains.
The volcanic craters that look like those on the moon are called calderas.
But the calderas are only circular if the ground level has collapsed to a depression,
or was the first major volcanic outburst, and that's rather rare.
The basic rule of thumb is that the rim material of lunar craters
will approximately fill the pit.
This is not usually the case of volcanic calderas which have a different profile.
However, it is the case with these other two methods.
Now Venus is covered with 1600 volcanoes,
mainly the shield-type of volcano which is similar to those in Hawaii,
but they are more broad and flat.
Radar surveys also show that Venus has built 1,000 craters,
similar to the moon and Mercury and Mars
and these have a different character, so they are formed by different processes.
In addition the proliferation of craters on very small asteroids and dwarf planets,
rules out volcanism as being the origin for those craters.
You can't have a volcanic hot magma centered at such a small body; it doesn't work.
So, there are features of both impact-based and electrically-based crater formation
that correspond with what we see on objects in our solar system.
Both methods of crater formation describe some
but not all of the features that we observe.
From the electrical and now experimental analysis that I've done
it seems that we have a mix of both electrical and impact-based craters
and these experiments seem to allow us to determine whether or not
a particular crater may have formed by impact,
or by electrical discharge machining, EDM.
Craters can be formed by the impact of some solid body such as an asteroid or a meteorite.
As that body hits a planetary surface, its velocity
can range up to 45 miles per second, which is pretty fast.
This can’t be simulated in the lab experimentally,
since real impact will smash any material from soft pumice to alloy steel.
The material that we use in the lab should have no tensile strength.
Now there is such a material, and it is dust,
and for practical reasons, we use cement dust.
It comes in uniform quality.
And so, we have a layer of cement dust about six inches thick, in a large box or a pan.
And the meteorite is then a spoonful of slightly compressed cement dust,
dropped from a height of about four feet.
The resulting craters have a striking resemblance to lunar craters generally.
In the case of an actual impact, as the impactor penetrates the surface,
it pushes ahead of it an increasingly large plug of matter
that becomes intensely hot and under high pressure.
Eventually the pressures involved reach something like 200,000 atmospheres
and this stops the plug of intensely hot material, and then a massive explosion occurs.
It doesn't matter what direction the meteorite comes from,
the focus of the explosion forms a circular crater around that.
The pressures involved form what is called shocked quartz in the the plug,
which can’t be formed by volcanic processes.
As the crater forms, the horizontal strata at the rim of the crater
becomes upturned and folded back on itself by the explosion.
So, the strata will actually fold back in a reverse order, like a mirror image.
These mirror-image strata sit beneath the debris layer near the rim
and is an expected feature of many impact craters.
The impact craters can exhibit rays made up of powdered material,
thrown out from the explosion center.
These rays are bilaterally symmetrical, mirror image that is, not radially symmetrical.
And this is typical of explosion pits on Earth.
The best example on the moon (of the rays), is the ray system of the crater Tycho.
Impact craters often have radial ridges of material excavated from the explosion as well,
and in addition there will be central peaks formed, for craters within a specific size range.
That range depends on the gravitational pull of the planet or the moon that it is formed on.
Lesser gravity means larger craters for explosions of the same energy.
Craters from impact will often have terraced walls,
as the rim wall slumps along the tangential fault line set up by the explosion.
This also set a radial fault line, going away from the crater center for the same reason.
The craters, the terraces, the central peaks the rays
and the radiating ridges can be reproduced in the lab experiment.
So can multiple and overlapping craters, especially if the impacting body breaks up
just before hitting, either in reality or in the lab.
And in fact, if you use a plaster-of-paris meteorite
instead of a cement dust meteorite,
you can see what happens to the meteorite as it impacts,
and you find the meteorite fragments become concentrated under the rim of the crater.
In contrast to the characteristic features of impacts,
what are some of the tell-tale signs that a crater was most likely formed
by the process called electrical discharge machining?
Craters formed by this process of electric discharge machining, or EDM,
happen when there's a persistent electric current in the lightning-like discharge
which excavates or machines out a circular pit.
This is being investigated in detail by lab experiments at,
for example the Vemasat Laboratories by C.J. Ransom and others.
Although electric discharge machining (EDM) can produce craters that are bowl-shaped,
many craters formed by EDM processes have vertical walls and almost flat floors.
This is rather like a number of craters on Mercury and Mars.
There may or may not be a rim of debris around the EDM crater pit,
depending on local conditions, and because of behavior of electric currents,
multiple or overlapping craters can often occur.
The second is scalloping of the crater edges or the wall.
Where the current is high (and this is something important too that I noted),
where the current is high, the ground in the region around the crater, or craters,
is often discolored, and you can see this in some locations on Mars.
One of the diagnostic features of EDM craters is that they can have
a series of ejecta blankets on top of each other that looks like a series of fluid flows
as you get one blanket on top of the other, you get loops and scarps and so on.
This happens as one layer of dust and debris from the machining
gets added on top of another over a relatively short time.
However, it's impossible for this sort of blanket to be formed by
more or less instantaneous explosions from an impact,
as several different explosions would be needed in a series of events,
to form the different blankets to a single crater.
Instead of radial ridges, the electric currents involved
can form a radial system of grooves around the crater.
These are a form of Lichtenberg figure, machined out by the electric arc.
In addition, the dynamics of the process allows for central peaks
and craters of any size (you can't do that for impact craters),
as well as circular rings in place of the central peak.
When you have circular rings in place of the central peak,
these are called “peaked rings”,
and they usually occur in craters with flat floors and vertical walls;
and so, they probably have an EDM origin rather than impact.
For example, the crater Meade on Venus consists of almost vertical walls,
several concentric rings and flat floor is about 175 miles across.
This strongly suggests an EDM origin.
Some small crater chains can be formed by impact.
But the extensive systems on the Moon and Mars rules out any impact origin.
In addition, many craters in the chains are connected by flat-floored grooves.
The craters themselves usually have flat floors and some of the small craters
even have central peaks, and such is impossible to form by impact.
These characteristics also eliminate volcanism and only leave EDM as their origin.
Indeed such machining can produce this form of crater chain rather easily
and there are some excellent examples on Mars and on the moon
which parallel electrical experiments.
So, these crater chains are actually evidence of EDM.
We have noted the ability of electrical discharges to produce flat-floored craters.
Does this mean that all flat- floored craters
on planets and moons are electrical in nature?
No, probably not.
For example, there are some flat-floored craters on the moon
which border the Great Plains, like Archimedes and Plato, around the Mare Imbrium.
When their walls are examined,
there's evidence of flying debris from the formation of Imbrium itself
when the explosion happened, and it crashed through these walls.
So, these craters were there before that great plain formed.
The material that now covers that floor has the same texture, color,
and spectral composition as the material making up the great Imbrium plain.
So, it seems that this originally molten rock
that formed the plain has penetrated these craters,
filled up the depressions, giving them flat floors as a result.
So, we need to be discerning as we have a look at this surface issue.
In summary, we asked Barry Setterfield which features he feels
are most reliably diagnostic for distinguishing impact craters
from those unequivocally associated with electrical discharge machining.
Okay, if we start with impact craters,
any or all of the following features would indicate impact has occurred.
You got your overturned rim layers, with inverted strata on the rim;
you got a ray system and/or radiating ridges;
you have nickel-iron bodies embedded under the rim;
you have shocked quartz and/or an associated Iridium or Osmiridium anomaly;
and a concentration of Mass, a Mascon as it is sometimes called, associated with it.
Now for EDM, any or all of the following characteristics
will determine if the crater has an electric origin.
You've got your vertical walls and horizontal room strata that are not a mirror image.
You've got an ejecta blanket system of multiple layers;
a central peak, if the crater is outside the accepted size range for impact;
and then you have a peak ring system
forming the appearance of concentric craters with flat floors and scalloping of crater walls.
So, all of these criteria would form the basis for determining
which craters are formed by either process, unless of course,
new developments in both electric discharge machining or geology come to prove otherwise.
For continuous updates on Space News from the Electric Universe
stay tuned to
Thunderbolts.info