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  • Our celestial neighbour, the planet Mars.

  • Astronomers once considered Mars to be a long barren and geologically dead rock in space.

  • But since the arrival of our probes beginning in the 1960s,

  • the planet has come alive for us.

  • It does not reveal the inactive and worn down landscape

  • astronomers and planetary scientists had expected.

  • Nevertheless, investigators continued to apply geologic concepts

  • based on their understanding of the Earth and the Moon.

  • They could only see volcanism, erosion, surface movement and surface collapse,

  • all punctuated by episodic impacts from space over billions of years.

  • What force created the sharply cut gouges and depressions across the surface of Mars,

  • looking as if a giant trowel descended to scoop out material,

  • at radically different and irreconcilable depths.

  • Running north to south, we see massive interwoven scratches or grooves

  • extending hundreds of miles.

  • And how remarkable that a planet only half the diameter of Earth

  • exhibits canyons on a scale dwarfing anything seen on our own planet.

  • And mountains that would tower over Mount Everest.

  • Today, no planet outside the Earth has received more attention than Mars,

  • but the mysteries and theoretical contradictions have grown spectacularly.

  • For decades now, investigators have wondered

  • why the two hemispheres of Mars look as if they were formed in different worlds.

  • A southern hemisphere dominated by craters,

  • a northern hemisphere with only sparsely scattered craters.

  • And note, the contrasting crustal depths of the two hemispheres.

  • Shallow crust in the North, much thicker crust in the South.

  • Why would a planet evolving in isolation display such a profound dichotomy?

  • It's as if, some unknown force excavated the northern crust miles deep.

  • The hemispheric removal of crustal material

  • requires a force external to Mars, acting on the planet.

  • But when it comes to external events

  • scientific convention has only one thing to work with:

  • random collisions.

  • Could a planetoid or huge asteroid crashing into Mars

  • have removed millions of cubic miles of crust?

  • A shattering impact

  • is all that theory would allow.

  • But what would Martian history look like

  • were we to include electrical events?

  • Events on a scale sufficient to sculpt the surface of the Red Planet from pole to pole.

  • Of all the enigmatic features in the solar system

  • perhaps none provokes greater amazement

  • than Valles Marineris.

  • The largest canyon on any planet or moon,

  • the deep trench complex stretches a third of the way around the planet,

  • hundreds of times larger than the Grand Canyon.

  • It would reach from San Francisco to New York and beyond.

  • Prior theory of planet formation had never anticipated such a chasm on a small planet.

  • What natural force excavated this colossal trench?

  • With the arrival of the Mariner probes,

  • NASA scientists thought the chasm could have been cut by water erosion,

  • though nothing even close was ever achieved by water on the known watery planet Earth.

  • In any erosional hypothesis, three million cubic miles of material were removed.

  • 3,000,000 cubic miles! And it had to go somewhere.

  • Neither the means of fluid drainage, nor the vast outflow required are in evidence.

  • Now, we know that Valles Marineris reaches to a greater depth

  • than any outflow channel originally envisioned.

  • And the tributaries imagined by some

  • turned out to be cleanly cut alcoves and stubby depressions.

  • They are not connected to feeder streams at all.

  • One portion of the Valles Marineris system, in particular, underscores our point here.

  • Planetary scientists acknowledge that Hebes Canyon,

  • much larger than our Grand Canyon, is an inseparable part of Valles Marineris.

  • The scientists have now acknowledged it was certainly not created by water.

  • Hebes Chasma: "a fairly large canyon in the Valles Marineris complex that has absolutely no inlet or outlet on the surface."

  • Nor is it plausible to suggest that surface spreading

  • created the massive caisson of Valles Marineris

  • with its repeated morphology of sharply scalloped walls.

  • The surface was not torn, it was carved

  • and the detailed images imply a removal of material

  • along the entire length of the chasm,

  • a process clearly illustrated by the neatly machined so-called tributaries

  • all the way up to their rounded, cleanly cut terminations.

  • Whatever formed the canyon complex could not stop at the margins of the primary channel,

  • but added irregular craters and crater chains, and surface grooves and gouges.

  • So, the question can not be escaped.

  • Is there anything known to science today

  • that can account for the extraordinary profile

  • of Valles Marineris?

  • There is an explanation well-known to science

  • though it's never entered the geologist's lexicon.

  • Lightning!

  • In the plasma laboratory, it's power is demonstrated

  • in electric discharge experiments.

  • But the form unfamiliar to conventional science today is the cosmic thunderbolt.

  • It was the brilliant engineer Ralph Juergens, who first suggested decades ago,

  • that cosmic thunderbolts carved Valles Marineris.

  • "..This entire region resembles nothing so much as an area zapped by a powerful electric arc advancing unsteadily across the surface..."

  • With the benefit of more recent data,

  • electrical theorist Wallace Thornhill returned to this extraordinary possibility.

  • "Valles Marineris was created within minutes by a giant electric arc sweeping across the surface of Mars...

  • ...Rock and soil were lifted into space and some fell back to create the great, strewn fields of boulders first seen by the Viking and Pathfinder landers."

  • Yes, the electric hypothesis will unnerve many scientists

  • but it is the only hypothesis that meets the test of direct observation.

  • Here is a scar left by an electric arc on a piece of wet wood.

  • Electric discharge provides a direct and complete explanation for the Valles Marineris.

  • The so-called tributaries of the valley were cut by secondary streamers of the discharge.

  • That is a typical signature of an electric arc when it cuts a surface channel.

  • And here is the scar from electric discharge to an insulator.

  • Notice in particular the network of secondary streamers to the left;

  • a perfect counterpart to the western edge of Valles Marineris.

  • It was long held that this remarkable region on Mars

  • was the result of uplift, fracturing and spreading.

  • And from a distance, it did look like fracturing.

  • But with a closer view in front of us, it is simply irrational to cling to that interpretation.

  • Material has been cleanly removed, exactly as in the discharging to the insulator.

  • The evidence now available demands a new perspective,

  • a larger field of view.

  • In Thornhill's interpretation,

  • the discharge took the form of a plasmoid,

  • not unlike the plasmoid from which the spiral galaxy is formed.

  • Plasmoid simulation

  • On his website, Thornhill noted how the discharge effect

  • spiraled upward to the East and downward to the West,

  • an effect that shows up quite clearly on the elevation map given on his website.

  • In fact, if we extend the view of the elevation map,

  • we see an even larger effect.

  • It seems that the spiraling trails to the East and West nearly completed two circles

  • as they swung back to the trench itself.

  • But one difference between the northern and the southern extension stands out.

  • The northern extension is entirely constituted of ravines and depressions,

  • while the southern extension consists of ridges and mountainous terrain.

  • For this unusual contrast, electrical experiments offer a startling explanation.

  • It was George Christoph Lichtenberg who in the 18th century first showed

  • that electric arcs create ravine networks on more negatively charged surfaces

  • and elevated ridges on more positively charged surfaces.

  • Could it be that simple?

  • ...that a cosmic thunderbolt carving Valles Marineris

  • acted on two regions of different charge, negative to the north and positive to the south?

  • If such was the case, the only plausible cause of the charge differential

  • would be an electrical exchange between Mars and other charged bodies in the past.

  • And what was the relationship of these events to the hemispheric dichotomies,

  • the removal of crustal material to the North and the densely cratered southern hemisphere?

  • In the electrical interpretation, the violent excavation of the surface to create Valles Marineris

  • would have created immense deposits of sediment on surrounding topography.

  • And indeed, we see that previous craters in the region were completely buried,

  • with only the largest craters appearing as outlines penetrating through the deep deposits.

  • It's apparent that the released material had a net drift to the West,

  • since the blanket of deposited sediment stretches all the way to the eastern flank

  • of the towering Olympus Mons.

  • Keep in mind as well that an electric discharge

  • at energies necessary to create the chasms of Valles Marineris

  • would have ejected great volumes of rocky material into space.

  • Much of the rocky debris would have fallen back to litter the Martian landscape.

  • And indeed, shattered rock of all sizes across the surface of Mars is a long-standing mystery.

  • And the mystery is resolved by electrical events on a continental and even hemispheric scale.

  • Given the energies of the events

  • considerable volumes of material would have surely escaped the planet altogether.

  • And what might this tell us about the Mars-Earth connection

  • in our reconstruction of ancient events?

  • Or the surprising discovery that rocks from Mars have fallen on our own planet?

  • When Meteorites Fell from Mars

  • One of the great surprises of the Space Age

  • was the discovery that certain meteorites had arrived from the planet Mars!

  • Initially, most scientists rejected the idea outright.

  • For rock to escape Martian gravity,

  • they could only imagine an asteroidal impact

  • blasting rock into space at more than three miles per second!

  • That is five times the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle.

  • The energies would either pulverize or vaporize the rock.

  • But the question was eventually settled by gases trapped inside a suspect meteorite.

  • The gases bore the atmospheric signature of Mars.

  • Martian meteorite

  • "The trapped gases match these that Viking measured in the martian atmosphere."

  • By 2003, at least 30 meteorites had been identified as Martian.

  • But how could the removal of rock from the Martian surface have occurred?