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The surfaces of the rocky bodies in our solar system testify to events that planetary scientists have never considered.
Andrew Hall explores lightning's powerful impact on Earth's surface, revealing unique crater formations and electrical discharge patterns worldwide.
Key Takeaways
- Lightning leaves permanent, identifiable scars on Earth's surface that standard geology overlooks.
- Electrical discharge patterns explain crater and mound formations across various desert landscapes worldwide.
- Subsurface water plays a critical role in attracting and intensifying lightning strikes.
- Lightning can vitrify rock and create unique geological features distinct from biological or volcanic origins.
- The Electric Universe perspective offers alternative insights into planetary surface features and geological phenomena.
Summary
- Standard geology fails to explain many surface features on rocky planets; electrical discharges offer alternative explanations.
- Laboratory experiments replicate puzzling planetary craters and features using electrical discharges.
- Lightning creates extreme heat and pressure, forming shock quartz and vitrified rock glass.
- Lightning strikes produce horizontal arcs and side flashes, creating crater and mound formations in desert regions.
- Unique sand mounds with fused pebble tops found near Kayenta, Arizona, are attributed to lightning strikes.
- These lightning-formed craters sterilize soil, resulting in sparse vegetation and highly alkaline pH.
- Similar lightning-induced features appear globally, including Namibia and Uzbekistan, often associated with subsurface water.
- Subsurface water intensifies local electric fields, attracting lightning and forming natural springs and wells.
- The video questions if lightning can form larger geological features like mountains, contrasting with volcanic processes.
- Volcano formation is acknowledged but the origin of magma chambers and eruptions remains speculative in conventional science.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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The interpretive manual of standard geology, limited to processes such as random impacts, wind and water erosion, and volcanism has never successfully explained countless of the features we see on rocky planets.
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For decades, experiments with electrical discharges in the laboratory have reproduced some of the most puzzling craters and other features seen on planets and moons.
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Within the Electric Universe community, a growing number of inquirers are exploring the surface of our planet, identifying the indelible marks left by high energy electrical discharges.
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In this episode, Thunderbolts colleague Andy Hall continues his remarkable series of presentations with his two-part exploration of the lightning scarred Earth.
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The blue-white arc of the lightning bolt stuns the senses, blinding radiance, elemental beauty, awesome power and primordial danger flash into existence from thin air and vanish before the mind catches up.
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We stare immobile, unthinking, in awe struck.
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In that moment, a channel of air the diameter of a quarter heats 50,000 degrees as trillions of electrons cascade to Earth.
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The volume of air blows up, radiating energy across the spectrum and sending sonic booms across the sky.
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Lightning also pummels the land, creating pressure waves exceeding 70,000 atmospheres, that's 1 million PSI.
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It can create a layer of shock quartz and vitrify surrounding rock into glass.
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Lightning is an interaction between the Earth and sky.
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It's caused an electric field between the electric storm above and the ground beneath our feet.
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Ground in this case is also a technical term, meaning the ambient voltage potential of the soil.
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Earth is a negatively charged body in space and current flows up from ground to atmosphere, normally in a drift of ions and electrons that is invisible.
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Storms reverse this current flow, causing electrons to avalanche back to Earth.
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The Earth and sky are part of a circuit, storms result from capacitance in this circuit.
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The atmosphere stores energy in the form of ionic charge and releases it through lightning among other effects.
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The ground is one plate of the capacitor where positive charge collects as negative charge builds in the cloud.
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It is repulsed from the ground below and positive ions are drawn in.
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The ground reaches up with plasma tendrils, they collect especially around tall structures.
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Pulling densely at sharp projections, surrounding them with a halo of charge the cascading electrons target for connection.
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When connections made, the arc touches Earth spreading current in horizontal arcs across the surface as much as 20 meters away.
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This is a death zone.
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If you're in it, you're a part of a 200,000 amp circuit.
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The horizontal arcing is a side flash, a scatter of arc tendrils that follow surface conduction across the ground.
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Radially away from the point of impact.
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The ground potential, type and shape of surface influences the character of the side flash.
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Dry sand acquires charge very easily, and so lightning attracts charged particles.
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And will sweep sand to it, leaving a display of the entire strike zone.
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Sand in the strike zone where current surges across the surface pulls inward, leaving a shallow crater with a cone of sand in the center.
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It's like grabbing a bed spread in the center, pulling it up and dropping it in a pile.
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The following photos were taken near Kayenta, Arizona on desert plains to the south of Comb Ridge.
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The form is like an ant hill, but these are not ant hills.
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Ants dig rocks from below ground and pile it outside the hole.
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These are built just the opposite.
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The sand is swept up from the surroundings, leaving a pile at the center of a crater.
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Besides, these don't have ants or ant holes.
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The mounds of sand are composed of fine, almost powder sand, but the tops of the mounds are dusted with pebbles.
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The pebbles are sand that was drawn into the lightning channel and fused before falling back to Earth when the flame extinguished.
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Following to cover the mound like candy sprinkles on an ice cream cone.
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Nothing grows inside the craters or on the mounds.
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It's as if the soil is sterilized.
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pH tests show the soil to be highly alkaline.
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What meager growth there is are low, ground covering grasses and weeds around the perimeter of the craters.
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The desert in this region of Northern Arizona is carpeted with lightning strikes that left crater and mound features like these.
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The land is on the Colorado Plateau just south of Monument Valley.
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They form what some call fairy rings when seen from the air.
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The next images show clusters of them.
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The craters vary in size from 15 to 30 feet in diameter or larger.
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The size of the central cone is proportionate to the size of the crater.
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Ranging from about 8 to 18 inches tall.
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The strikes especially cluster where black rock crusts over the sand.
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The lightning seems to have punched through, scattering rock and leaving the craters bare where nothing grows.
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Whether the lightning is attracted to the rock or the rock was made with the lightning isn't known.
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But the rock provides a clue.
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It appears the lightning came in a coherent event that peppered the land, punching through and shattering the rock.
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That at least is how it appears.
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It's as if there were two events, one that torched and melted the surface of the land, creating the cap rock.
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And a subsequent one that shattered the rock with lightning.
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What amazes is the number of them.
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Clustered in particular areas.
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They rarely overlap, spaced fairly even, but randomly apart.
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There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them scarring the land just south of Comb Ridge.
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There are regions around the world where features like these carpet the land for hundreds of square miles.
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They are seen in desert lands especially, since there is little undergrowth to obscure them.
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The next image is from Namibia.
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Here the features connect with filaments of stream beds, but note how they connect in linear arrays and branch radially like little stars.
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They are electric discharge patterns.
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Each feature seems to be a shallow basin or spring where water collects.
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Map resolution doesn't allow better detail.
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But these features are larger than the Arizona features, many cover several acres.
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Much of the country of Uzbekistan is also carpeted with similar features.
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As the following images from a small portion of Eastern Uzbekistan show.
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The Uzbekistan features are larger and more numerous still.
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They also appear to be shallow basins where the geology is distinctly changed.
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And there appears to be a source of water.
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In the last image, there appears to be a home or a ranch with a livestock tank.
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Well, or catchment at the center.
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It makes sense that water is found where lightning has struck.
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Subsurface water is a source of ionization that intensifies charge density and therefore the electric field.
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Attracting lightning to its location.
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Standing surface water won't do that because ions have no point to collect.
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They spread evenly over the surface of the water.
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But subterranean water is trapped in the Earth where ions can collect and build concentration.
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Locally intensifying the electric field.
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Pits, craters and rills formed by lightning leave depressions over aquifers that are natural for springs and wells.
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But what about larger features?
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Bigger than pits and piles of sand.
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Can lightning make a mountain?
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Volcanoes form mountains by extruding molten rock to the surface from hot pools of magma beneath the crust.
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This is conventional understanding and it isn't in dispute in the Electric Universe.
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After all, volcanoes can be witnessed doing this in real time.
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The resulting strato volcanoes, cinder cones, lava flows, ash deposits and lahars are seen across the globe.
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What creates magma chambers and causes them to erupt is not understood.
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Consensus science has a number of speculative theories based on conventional beliefs about the makeup and dynamics of the interior of the Earth.
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It's these theories EU has a problem with.
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EU theory proposes the mechanism for heating and erupting volcanoes is electrical discharge beneath Earth's crust.
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But our theories are also speculative because there's no way to look inside the Earth to be sure.
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One type of geologic feature attributed to volcanism can be challenged by EU theory, however.
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These are buttes, believed by the consensus to be the ancient throats of volcanoes, where a magma plug froze in the throat.
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And later erosion exposed them leaving a hardened pinnacle.
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Arc typical of these is Shiprock, a tall butte that lies near Four Corners.
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Where the US states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet.
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It lies in the heart of Navajo lands.
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Some Navajo traditionalists argue Shiprock is the work of the star people.
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Could it be they know more about it than our consensus scientists do?
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We can use this butte and the surrounding landscape to discuss how features were actually formed by lightning in the distant past.
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When lightning was a thunderbolt of the gods.
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But first let's look at some of the absurdities in consensus theory concerning its formation.
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Shiprock does not sit near a region of true volcanic activity.
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Northern Arizona has volcanoes along the Mogollon Rim that lie to the south and west of the Four Corners region.
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This is part of a super volcanic complex much like Yellowstone.
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Yet Shiprock itself and a number of similar formations are well removed from those volcanic fields, standing alone on the high desert plains.
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They are attributed to an ancient volcanic complex called the Navajo Volcanic Field, but are not surrounded by lava flows, ash deposits or other features provably volcanic in origin.
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In fact, for these to be considered the throats of ancient volcanoes, the consensus assumes it formed 2,500 to 3,000 feet below Earth's surface.
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And became exposed after millions of years of erosion.
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In other words, 3,000 feet of vertical surface lands had to be completely eroded away, leaving just a butte poking out of the flat sandstone desert floor.
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Shiprock is 1,500 feet of broken rock.
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Meaning 1,500 feet of surrounding plateau washed away in addition to the 3,000 feet of overburden.
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Along with the lava fields, ash deposits and other traces of volcanic field without washing away the butte.
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Let's just say that it's hard to conceive how wind and water could have washed across the land.
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Carrying away trillions of tons of other rock, but left this shard standing.
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It's not made of Kryptonite.
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It's no harder than the surrounding sandstone.
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Exposed to millions of years of such abuse, it would have dissolved like a popsicle in an Arizona summer.
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Nor is there any evidence of how or where this material disappeared to.
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There's no deposit of silts or remains of past river channels anywhere in the Western Hemisphere to provide evidence of this.
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How any river or inland sea could have washed the land away without a trace, leaving these volcanic plugs is a mystery that the consensus can only explain by invoking billions of years.
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It's the only excuse they know, and they feel it's safe as long as they ignore the Electric Universe.
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Shiprock and its neighboring buttes are made of sandstone and a similar material called Minette.
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Minette is chemically the same as the surrounding stone, except it is highly potassic and apparently fused together by heat.
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The composition of the rock is not hard, highly compressed or consolidated, such that it could withstand the kind of flood waters required to wash away the surrounding land.
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Nor is it like any rock we can witness being produced by volcanoes today.
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The more plausible and responsible theory is that they were made the way the Navajo say it was made.
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In part two of Lightning Scarred Earth, we'll look closer at Shiprock and other features caused by lightning and their role in mountain building.
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Thank you.
Topics:lightningelectric dischargecratersEarth geologyElectric UniverseColorado PlateauArizona desertNamibiaUzbekistanplanetary science
