[4] Causes of Planetary Cratering and Scarring
--- Impact Craters by Thermonuclear Explosion
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Meteor Charge --- Tunguska
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Impact Craters vs Interplanetary Electric Discharges
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Interplanetary Discharges --- Thermonuclear Mechanism --- Crater Central Peaks --- Meteor Shock Waves --- Meteor Explosions --- Shattercones
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Meteor Airbursts
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Meteor Airbursts --- Sonic Booms --- Bullseye Craters --- Shattercones
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Shattercones --- Deep Impact Video
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Lightning --- Piezoelectric Effects
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~
--- Lightning
http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&am~

--- Impact Craters by Thermonuclear Explosion
Postby CharlesChandler» Tue Jan 15, 2013 6:10am
.LK: Other TPODs propose that most impact craters are formed from similar megalightning, rather than from bolide impacts.
- Do you think the craters are likely formed by lightning or bolide impacts?
.CC: I think that all of the perfectly circular craters are formed by thermonuclear explosions.
- The instantaneous temperatures and pressures in the impact of a rock even only a couple of meters across, but traveling at 70 km/s, will be sufficient for nuclear fusion.
- The craters are circular, instead of oblong, because they were caused by the relativistic ejecta from the fusion event, not the trajectory of the impacter.
- And there is nothing to be found of the meteor because it was all reduced to plasma by the explosion.
.LK: Have you read any of the TPODs about the Tunguska event of 1908?
- They say a meteor from one of the major meteor streams caused the Tunguska event, that it had a different electrical voltage than that of the Earth's surface, which produced a megalightning bolt, which pulverized the meteor in the air and impacted the ground in Siberia, knocking down trees etc, and causing electrical effects, but not forming a crater.
.CC: Meteors that explode in the air are more difficult to explain, but I don't think that megalightning is the answer.
- A meteor will certainly be charged, having passed through the ionosphere, which is positively charged.
- But any net charge is always around the outside of an object, due to electrostatic repulsion.
- Discharging the potential might char the surface, but it isn't going to blow the thing apart.
- If you want an electrical explosion, the current has to pass through the center, like a transformer blowing up when struck by lightning, because the wires lead through the center.
- in a monolithic charged body, this shouldn't be possible.
- I did have one idea on the topic.
- A meteor coming in at an angle will start spinning, due to the pressure gradient in the air.
- (The air underneath is higher in pressure than the air overhead.)
- This sounds outlandish, but for a meteor 1 km across, we should consider that in the first km above the ground, the air pressure goes from about 1000 mb down to about 850 mb, so the air under the meteor is 15% more dense than the air above it.
- Hence there will be more friction on the bottom than on the top, and this will cause the meteor to "roll" across the air.
- Moving at 70 km/s would develop an extremely fast spin.
- And what do we know about charged objects that are spinning rapidly?
- They generate magnetic fields.
- So just as the Earth's magnetic field deflects charged particles toward the poles, the meteor's far more powerful magnetic field might be deflecting charged particles towards its axis of rotation (parallel to the ground, and perpendicular to the direction of travel).
- Hence there might indeed be an electric current flowing through the meteor's center.
- But it isn't megalightning between the meteor and the ground.
- Rather, it's a self-induced current due to its extremely rapid rotation.
- Would this current be powerful enough to blow the meteor apart? I dunno. :D
- But the magnetic induction from a rapidly rotating object moving through the Earth's magnetic field at 70 km/s would be huge, and this would certainly get the current going through the meteor, while electrostatic potentials between the meteor and the ground would not.

--- Meteor Charge --- Tunguska
Postby CharlesChandler» Tue Jan 15, 2013 11:04 pm
.LK: You discuss a one kilometer diameter bolide. Would that be too small to be compressively ionized?
.CC: Yes. I'm still trying to figure out how to accurately calculate degrees of ionization per pressure.
- (There are a lot of factors, such as chemical composition, and the laboratory data for extreme pressures are sparse. QM predictions are no help either.)
- But it "seems" that in the Earth, the crust is weakly ionized, and only in the lower lithosphere is the pressure sufficient to ionize the matter to the point that the crystal lattice begins to weaken.
- So that isn't even ionized enough to alter the chemical composition (i.e., break up the molecules).
- So a meteor not even as thick as the Earth's crust definitely doesn't have the gravitational force for CI.

- webolife wrote: 1. Wouldn't the charge accumulating on the meteor surface all be "like", eg. negative, producing a repulsion wrt the meteor centroid?
.CC: Exactly, though the charge on the meteor would more likely be positive, since the interplanetary medium and the Earth's atmosphere are positively charged.

- webolife wrote: 2. Wouldn't this charge accumulation be significantly rapid, resulting in no time for equalization or neutralization, promoting electrical instability of the object?
.CC: That's a good question. I "think" that the Earth's atmosphere, and especially the ionosphere, is more charged than the interplanetary medium.
- And the amount of time a meteor spends in the atmosphere, traveling at 70 km/s, is small.
- Then the only question is, "What's the electrical resistance of the meteor?" At zero resistance, electrostatic potentials get neutralized at near the speed of light.
- At infinite resistance, they never get neutralized.
- So we need to know the composition of the meteor, which is, of course, a matter of debate.
- For our purposes, we can just say that there is going to be some resistance, and the meteor will have some net charge, so we should consider the effects of a net charge.

- webolife wrote: 3. In addition, wouldn't Bernoulli's effect ... produce a region of low pressure not only around but especially in front of the meteor, accentuating the repulsive effect of accumulating charge?
.CC: There is a shock wave in front of a supersonic object, and I "think" that there is actually a low pressure at the forward point on a supersonic sphere, but I "think" that the net pressure on the sphere is positive, even with a detached shock front.

- Anyway... webolife wrote: 4. Wouldn't the three of these factors combine to create an explosive condition triggered by the friction of air resistance?
.CC: Hydrostatic pressure and electrostatic repulsion will both push outward.
- But the charge is on the outside, and assuming imperfect thermal conductivity, so is the heat.
- So this shouldn't cause an explosion, but rather, just some boiling or burning at the surface.
- To get an explosion, you need the repulsive forces on the inside, contained by inwardly directed forces on the outside.
- By the way, I read up on the Tunguska event.
- Interestingly, there wasn't just one explosion — there was a series of them, and some of the accounts mentioned that they occurred at regular intervals.
- In EM terms, I'd call this "sputtering".
- In my analysis of earthquake waves, I considered the possibility that an electric current flowing through microcracks in the crust creates ohmic heating, which causes the rock to expand.
- Interestingly, the expansion also closes the microcracks, and thus shuts off the current.
- If a rupture occurs, a negative pressure wave propagates back through the rock, re-opening the cracks, and the current flows again.
- Hence the current sputters.
- Similarly, an electric current through the Tunguska impacter might have sputtered before finally blowing the thing apart.

- webolife wrote: Sorry if this is a little off-thread, but as previoulsy noted the solar model must have wide applicablility.
.CC: This thread has been all over the Universe so far... :) But indeed, it's all inter-related.

--- Impact Craters vs Interplanetary Electric Discharges
Postby CharlesChandler» Thu Jan 17, 2013 7:43am
.LK: Have you seen the video, The Lightning-Scarred Planet Mars?
.CC: I find the instances of scalloping, and the crater chains, to be intriguing.
- A lot of the other stuff I find inconclusive, such as the comparison of dendritic channels to Lichtenberg figures.
.LK: If you think electric discharge blew up the Tunguska bolide, could not the same sort of electrical explosion occur when a bolide hits a planetoid's surface?
.CC: On impact with the surface, the thermalization of the momentum will be the dominant energy conversion.
.LK: I like Cook's theory that electric discharges from Saturn or the like melted the ice sheet, formed the Great Lakes and caused the scorching of North Amerca about 10,000 years ago and related events, like the extinction of mammoths, formation of the Carolina Bays etc.
.CC: I find the Carolina Bays and the concurrent extinctions to be highly suggestive of an impact on the ice sheet.
- Whether or not it ultimately ended the last Ice Age is debatable.
- (I think some people are saying that the water vapor from the fractured ice created a greenhouse effect that melted the rest of the ice.)
- I don't see how a discharge from Saturn would cause the Carolina Bays.
.LK: Another crater type that seems unlikely to be caused by bolide impacts are large craters on small asteroids, moons etc.
- Thornhill has said that bolide impacts would break apart such small bodies. Wouldn't that be true?
.CC: I don't know. It certainly blows up the "dirty snowball" theory.
- But an iron-core asteroid getting hit by a bolide half its size wouldn't necessarily get destroyed in the process.
- Also, keep in mind that the size of the bolide and the size of the crater are two different things.
- If the crater was formed by a thermonuclear explosion, a 1 km crater might have been formed by a 1 m bolide, and the 10 km asteroid wouldn't necessarily get destroyed by something like that.
- Also, the flat bottom craters are suggestive of an explosive that had an easy time excavating the dust at the surface, but didn't leave a dent on the solid rock below the dust.
- So again, the impacter might have actually been extremely small.
.LK: Do you think a compressively ionized planet or moon could break up from an impact or something?
- And, if so, could a chunk of it as small as 1 kilometer remain CI?
- Or would it necessarily lose all of its CI (compressive ionization)?
- I assume that with reduced pressure from reduced gravity, there would be a nova-like flare along with rapid loss of CI. Eh?
.CC: Remember tha[t] a CI object getting impacted is not just held together by gravity or its solid crystal lattice — the electric force between charged double-layers holds it together.
- This is a powerful force, and it is elastic, so it would likely absorb the impact, instead of breaking up.
- But yes, if a CI object was shattered by an impact, huge electric currents would flow in to neutralize the ions that no longer had an excuse to be ionized, and yes, that would probably produce a mini-nova or something.

--- Interplanetary Discharges --- Thermonuclear Mechanism --- Crater Central Peaks --- Shock Waves --- Meteor Explosions --- Shattercones
Postby CharlesChandler» Fri Jan 18, 2013 4:38am
.LK: Carolina Bays: All the life forms burned up to form a layer of soot.
.CC: I consider most of Cook's work to be epiphanies, which are a great place to start, but are not to be considered the final word.
- But is he saying that "all" life forms perished in the catastrophe?
- If so, by what process was the Earth repopulated by modern life forms, that just happen to be so similar to archaeological evidence from before the event?
.LK: Crater Chains: You said in the Mars video you found "the instances of scalloping, and the crater chains, to be intriguing".
- Do you think Thornhill's explanation for those features are plausible?
- Or do you have a modified version to explain them?
.CC: I don't know. But if EDM is credited with all of the craters, rifts, etc., then why are some of them scalloped, which proves that it was EDM, while others are not, without disproving that the others were caused by EDM?
- Why do we not see scalloped rifts on the Moon?
- At the very least, I'd like to submit that there might be a mixed bag of phenomena here, caused by a variety of mechanisms.
- Frankly, the scalloped rifts of varying depths look very much like EDM, as a discharge dwelled for irregular intervals at different points when wandering across the surface.
- But to then contend that the high-precision machining of a Martian plateau is proof of EDM is ignorant of the actual properties of EDM.
- Machining a flat surface takes tightly controlled conditions, otherwise you get a wandering discharge path with irregular dwells.
- Endowing EDM with magical powers isn't going to get us any closer to the truth.
.LK: Thermonuclear Explosions from Impacts: If cratering is pretty easy to explain by your theory, could you provide the main details of the crater forming process for us?
- How does high velocity impact produce thermonuclear explosion?
.CC: It isn't such a fancy hypothesis, actually.
- The simple facts are that nuclear fusion requires extreme temperatures (to get particle collisions that break up the existing nuclei) and extreme pressures (to keep the pieces from going anywhere until they get a chance to clank back together into larger nuclei).
- In an impact, the momentum is thermalized, so there's the heat source.
- And until all of the momentum is thermalized, the remaining inertial force provides the pressure.
- And there is no theoretical limit to the amount of energy that can be stored in momentum.
- The velocity "might" be limited to the speed of light, but there is no limit on the amount of mass involved.
- So at least hypothetically, it's an easy reach to conclude that an impact would create the necessary temperatures and pressures for fusion.
- A physicist would be able to tell you exactly how much mass, of what element, moving at what speed, would be required to get how much fusion.
- I'm satisfied that it's a hypothetical possibility, and that its properties match the observations.
.LK: How can central peaks contain strata like the surrounding bedrock?
.CC: This is a well-known fluid dynamic phenomenon, which would be an expected property of the ejecta from a thermonuclear explosion.
- When a high-velocity jet hits a perpendicular surface, it accomplishes little erosion where the jet is actually perpendicular.
- This is because there is nowhere for the fluid (i.e., nuclear ejecta) to go, so there is no excavation.
- Away from the normal point, the fluid can gouge out material and carry it off.
- So at the center of the crater, the only material that was removed was by simple vaporization.
- Away from the center, it's vaporization plus entrainment into the high velocity flow, which is more efficient at removing material.
- While on the topic of impacts, my "rolling electrodynamic meteor" epiphany hasn't fully satisfied me, and I kept thinking that I never actually fully answered webolife's questions, concerning a net charge that couldn't get fully neutralized fast enough, resulting in an electrostatic explosion.
- So I did some more thinking, and I came up with another epiphany.
- This concerns something that I have never fully understood about shock waves in front of supersonic objects.
- Why do they get detached from the objects themselves, and stand off by quite a distance?
- I mean how, mechanistically speaking, does this happen?
- Air molecules impacting the surface of the supersonic object shouldn't be able to bounce that far back through the onslaught of more air molecules.
- So by Newtonian standards, the shock front should never become "detached" from the object, and molecular rebounds should be fully absorbed in the first dozen collisions, producing an extremely thin buffer between the object and the oncoming air.
- And this isn't just my naivete (which is generally sufficient to get me to say stupid stuff).
- Kim, H. D. (2007): Shock Induced Boundary Layer Separation, 8th International Symposium on Experimental and Computational Aerothermodynamics of Internal Flows, Lyon, France:
- Though there have been many works on boundary layer interactions to investigate shock-induced separation, a clear and concrete idea of its onset is still lacking.
- Then I remembered something that I read about the heliopause.
- The interstellar wind creates a charge separation at the heliopause. <-----------< [That now seems questionable - LK]
- This is because at the termination shock between the solar wind and the interstellar wind, atomic nuclei penetrate deeper into the opposing wind than free electrons, because the electrons are so much lighter, so they get stripped off.
- (May, H. D., 2008: A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 36 (5): 2876-2879)
- Well, what if this is also an explanation for detached shock waves in front of supersonic objects?
- In other words, maybe the shock front isn't a fluid dynamic phenomenon, but an electrostatic one.
- High-velocity atoms in the approaching air are getting embedded in the boundary layer, stripped of their electrons, and therefore building up a positive double-layer around the supersonic object.
- The greater the speed, the thicker this positive double-layer, with electrostatic pressure pushing against the hydrostatic pressure of the oncoming air.
- For impacters getting into the thicker atmosphere, the implication is that this "detached positive double-layer shock front" might be highly charged, and therefore, might be responsible for an enormous amount of electrostatic repulsion within the supersonic object.
- In other words, if the meteor is surrounded by a layer of highly charged air, the air is going to suck all of the electrons out of the meteor.
- Then the whole thing will come unglued.
- The absence of valence electrons will weaken the crystal lattice of the solid object, and electrostatic repulsion will generate an outward force that wasn't there before.
- Once the meteor disintegrates into smaller pieces, the friction goes up exponentially, as that is a function of surface area, which is much greater for a bunch of small pieces than it was for one big piece.
- The increase in temperature adds hydrostatic pressure to the existing electrostatic pressure, and ba-boom!
- So I'll walk this epiphany around the neighborhood for a few days, and see if it lasts longer than the previous one. ;)
.LK: Shatter Cones: Impact crater shatter cones should point upwards to point of impact.
- Vredefort Dome, South Africa, shatter cones point downwards and to different points of origin, evidence of traveling underground blast, like from rotating Birkeland current.
.CC: This might also be evidence of an impact where later crustal deformation due to tectonic forces rearranged everything after the fact.

--- Meteor Airbursts
Postby CharlesChandler» Fri Jan 18, 2013 7:14am
- Speaking of EM bolides, I found this info on a bolide air burst near Vitim, Irkutsk, Russian Federation, 2002-09-25.
- http://www.meteorites.com.au/odds&ends/russia.html
- The Vitim bolide may be categorized as so-called electrophonic bolides.
- At the time of luminescence in the area of the settlement of Mama, eye-witnesses report sounds (rustling, buzzing).
- The employee of the Mama airport Georgy Konstantinovich Kaurtsev witnesses that the filament lamps of the chandelier glowed to half their intensity at the time of the bolide's flight, although the entire settlement was devoid of electrical power supply that night.
- The airport guards Vera Ivanovna Semenova and Lidiya Nikolayevna Berezan pointed to a scaring phenomenon: a bright luminescence at the upper ends of thin little wood poles of the fence surrounding the airport's meteorological ground.
- All that may be treated as resulting from a strong alternate electric current that was produced when the bolide was flying.
- It should be noted that the distance from the flight path in upper atmospheric layers to the settlement of Mama was several tens of kilometers.
- No evidence of a bolide-to-ground discharge was reported.
- Note that rustling/buzzing sounds are characteristic of an electrostatic discharge.
- Also note that the author states that it was an alternating current, but a DC current can produce the same effects (power light bulbs and create corona discharges from pointy objects).

--- Meteor Airbursts --- Sonic Booms --- Bullseye Craters --- Shattercones
Postby CharlesChandler» Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:30am
.LK: I think some of the most valuable science that we could do is to help acquire enough knowledge to accurately predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, dangerous solar events and dangerous extra-solar events etc.
.CC: I totally agree, and I believe that these are achievable goals.
- I also believe that EM is the missing ingredient in all of these things.
.LK: Electrostatic Shockwaves: Wow! That's quite a theory, Charles.
- Now that you explained it, it sounds like a foregone conclusion or a sure thing, not just theory.
- In fact, it seems odd if no one else has thought of it.
.CC: Actually, it looks like it's already well-founded. (See the references in the final write-up that I did: Meteoric Airbursts.)
- It appears that the only piece that I have added concerns the effects of the charge separation on the meteor itself.
- In other words, I found support for the idea that supersonic objects create detached bow shocks due to ionization in the boundary layer, and for the idea that the charge separation generates EM waves.
- But I take it the next step in saying that the ionization helps blow the meteor apart, as webolife was saying earlier, just with a different charging mechanism.
.LK: Boats make little bow shockwaves on water. I wonder if that could be electrostatic as well.
.CC: That might be purely Newtonian, where the inertia causes the water to rise up, but gravity then causes it to splay outward.
.LK: And then there are many shockwaves that conventional astronomers credit for causing all kinds of events in space.
- It would be ironic if those are electrostatic too, since they apparently use the term shockwave in order to divert attention away from possible EM forces.
.CC: Yes. May, H. D., 2008: A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 36 (5): 2876-2879
.LK: Do sonic booms make more sense by your theory too than by conventional theory?
.CC: My initial take is that the first boom makes sense just with regular fluid dynamics, as a pressure wave created by a supersonic object.
- The secondary boom is what has me confused.
- Stern wakes ain't 'posed to be as powerful as bow wakes, yet I grew up near a naval air base where they regularly did supersonic test flights, and yup, the secondary sonic boom is as powerful as the first (when they're far enough apart that you can tell that there were two of them).
- I "think" that this is too complicated for me to work out, so I might not pursue it.
- My "idea" is that if the bow shock gets an assist from ionization, then the stern shock might be getting an assist from charge recombination.
- But from what little I know about it, the stern wake is several orders of magnitude more complicated than the bow wake, so I might leave it at that. ;)
.LK: Some [impact craters] have bullseye craters within the craters, either in place of the central peaks, or on top of the central peaks.
- Would those also be explained by your bolide thermonuclear explosion theory?
.CC: I think so. I'm proposing two different material removal mechanisms: vaporization and entrainment.
- Vaporization occurs by direct contact with the nuclear ejecta, where temperatures above the boiling point convert the solids or liquids to gases or plasmas.
- Entrainment (in this context) is the excavation of loose material by high-velocity winds.
- In the center of the bullseye, you'll get vaporization (perhaps in a concave form), but not much entrainment where the nuclear ejecta hit the surface normal to it, and didn't have anywhere to go from there.
- The entrainment occurs where the ejecta hit the surface at an angle and then went further afield, gouging out stuff in the process.
- For example, in the Tunguska event, trees directly under the blast were left standing, though the branches were stripped off, while trees away from the perpendicular point were knocked down.
- So it's that sideways motion, away from the perpendicular point, that can do the excavating.
.LK: Cook theorized that an object much larger than a meteor or asteroid must have caused the devastation of North America nearly 10,000 years ago.
- He didn't suggest that the entire biosphere was wiped out, just that of North America, which continent must have been facing the planet whose plasmasphere upon contact with Earth's apparently caused the shockwave that caused the devastation.
.CC: I think that the evidence is piling up for a comet impact (i.e., much larger than a meteor or asteroid) on the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
- Iridium levels are well above normal, but less than the K/T impact, and other markers are clearly indicative of an impact, though different in one way or another from "typical" impacts.
- It's possible that the uniqueness of the event came from a comet bouncing off of the ice sheet, leaving some extraterrestrial markers, yet not as much as one would expect from something that had such dramatic effects, and without leaving a crater anywhere.
- While I respect Cook's in-depth scholarship as well as his open-mindedness, I think that the data will eventually decide this one.
.LK: Upside-down Shattercones: Do you mean you consider a traveling underground electric current blast to be unlikely?
.CC: I don't know. ;) If there was an earthquake or a bolide impact, yes, but how would a huge lightning strike become an underground blast?

--- Shattercones --- Deep Impact Video
Postby CharlesChandler» Tue Jan 22, 2013 8:00am
.LK: How about if the bolide impact produces a large underground lightning bolt that makes underground blasts that form the upside-down shattercones?
.CC: Actually, a bolide could create electric currents in the ground, by altering the degree of compressive ionization.
- Those currents could cause an explosive expansion, and then you'd get upside-down shattercomes, and they'd be pointing in "different" directions, where the difference came from them pointing at an underground source, or perhaps toward multiple in-ground discharges. Hmmm... :)
.LK: JC posted a link to this Youtube video of a crater that apparently formed recently on the Moon immediately after a bright flash of light. Do you have a comment on it?
.CC: This looks like a fake.
- Look at the way craters near the "impact site" are brightened, supposedly by the light reflected off of the dust cloud (?), but craters just a bit further away are not affected at all.
- And check some of the other fake videos from the same YouTube poster (i.e., Chris Brobs), such as the ones with highly detailed UFOs flying past the camera. ;)
.LK: Have you seen the Deep Impact video of the impact of an artificial projectile on comet Tempel 1?
- I think that there was an electrostatic discharge just prior to the impact.
.CC: Thornhill correctly notes that the impactor's camera picked up some EM interference just before the impact.
- But that doesn't prove that the main flash was electrical.
- I sorta think that it wasn't, for reasons stated earlier — net charges congregate on the outside of an object, due to electrostatic repulsion within the object, and a flash between two objects really only affects the outsides of each of them, begging the question of what provided the internal pressure necessary for an explosion.
- I don't know if a 370 kg object colliding at 10.3 km/s is sufficient for a thermonuclear explosion, but that's where I'd start.
- Then, the most curious thing about Tempel 1 was that the dust plume persisted, and was still there when the last image was taken, 12 hours after the impact.
- It also had noticeable striations in it, like the helmet streamers in the Sun's corona.
- So I think that there was a sustained discharge. And what would cause that?
- I got to thinking about another strange thing about Tempel 1, and it gave me an interesting idea.
- Scientists noted that the comet is covered in a layer of fine dust.
- That's really weird, because you'd think that getting sandblasted by 450 m/s solar winds would keep the thing swept clean.
- So how could dust still be laying there, after so many laps around the Sun?
- Well, what if the comet has a positive atmospheric sheath, for the same reason that meteoroids have positive sheaths — particles impinging on the boundary layer get stripped of electrons in the particle collisions, and the positive ions penetrate deeper because of their greater inertia?
- The self-sustaining positive sheath then protects the surface from direct exposure to the solar wind.
- The source of the dust would be ionization, which breaks up crystal lattices.
- The ionization would be from the positive sheath, and photo-ionization from the Sun's UV rays.
- Then it makes sense that comets & asteroids have impact craters that should have been worn away long ago.
- If the coma from a comet was actually particles getting worn away by friction in the solar wind, those craters wouldn't be there.
- But if the comet is actually protected from the solar wind by a positive double-layer, and is just being eroded by ionization, topographical features could last a long time.
- The positive sheath also explains the electrostatic discharge experienced by the impactor.
- I would tend to think that both the comet and the interceptor were out in space long enough to get electrically comfortable with the surrounding interplanetary plasma, and I'm skeptical of Thornhill's assertion that the comet and the impactor should have had a potential difference between them.
- But if the comet had a positive sheath, then all of a sudden, the impactor would have crossed the boundary into that sheath, and there could have been a large potential.
- NASA scientists noted that the impactor hit something before hitting the surface.
- They're calling it particles in the coma, but I didn't see any coma thick enough to knock a 370 kg impactor out of alignment.
- http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/media/deepimpact-070805.html
- NASA wrote: Engineers have established the impactor took two not unexpected coma particle hits prior to impact.
- The impacts slewed the spacecraft's camera for a few moments before the attitude control system could get it back on track.
- So I'm thinking that these two "particle hits" were at the boundary of the positive sheath.
- If all of that is true, then the explosion (by whatever means) would have ejected positively charged matter from the comet, since that's what's at the surface.
- Such an ejection would then leave the comet with a net negative charge, and with a sustained discharge in the direction of the ejected particles, limited only by the internal resistance of the comet.
- In other words, it was like a CME on the surface of the Sun ejecting positive plasma, and motivating a sustained discharge due to the charge imbalance.
.LK: At near the 8' mark, an image is shown with the statement that new jets formed 15 hours after impact far from the location of the impact.
- Can your theory account for that?
.CC: I agree with Thornhill that alterations in jets could only be evidence of an alteration in the net charge of the comet.
- But I disagree that the net charge of the impactor could have directly affected the net charge of an object 11 orders of magnitude more massive than itself (i.e., 370 kg versus 7.9×10^13 kg for the comet), as this just isn't physically possible. So I'm going with a charge imbalance that was created by the ejection of lots of ions from the surface of the comet by a thermonuclear explosion.

.LK: At just after the 10' mark on the Deep Impact video, scalloped edges are said to be visible on the comet.
.CC: I'm currently brewing an idea on what actually causes the erosion on such bodies.
- As mentioned above, photo-ionization will certainly cause erosion (over an extremely long period of time).
- This might help explain some of the extremely flat surfaces, such as the Martian northern plains, and the lunar mares.
- Thornhill says that these were excavated by EDM, but it actually takes extremely tightly controlled conditions (including immersion in a dielectric) to get smooth surfaces with EDM, and nature doesn't provide such tight controls.
- But if photo-ionization is doing the excavating, this is easier to understand.
- Any feature protruding above a plain will get more sunlight, and hence more ionization, which will convert the solids to plasmas that become part of the atmosphere.
- Over a long period of time, you wind up with a perfectly flat surface.
- But I don't see how this would produce scalloping.

--- Lightning --- Piezoelectric Effects
Postby CharlesChandler» Thu Nov 15, 2012 9:46 pm
.LK: And how do you think geodes form?
- Have you seen any of the TPODs on geodes, concretions etc?
.CC: I don't know much about these.
.LK: Do you contend that lightning is non-tornadic?
.CC: Yes, lightning is just an electrostatic discharge.
- A tornado is a more complex interplay between fluid dynamic and electromagnetic forces.
.Maol wrote: It's easy enough to extrapolate from [the piezo effect] that a sudden jolt of solar EM forces on a planet could excite expansion and contraction of all or some portion of the body and be the tipping point resulting in an earthquake.
.CC: That sounds reasonable to me. I'll see if I can find any papers on this.
- If not, it will be up to us to find the correlations between the space weather data and the earthquake occurrences.
- I think that it will be probabilistic, beyond chance, but not the only factor.
.Maol wrote: Phenomena such as the Taos hum could be a harmonic of piezoelectric or magnetostriction activity in the local basalt.
.CC: Would that be like a piezo woofer? :)
- Anyway, it's certainly possible.
- One of the recordings of "the hum" in Auckland NZ found the center frequency to be 56 Hz.
- This is interesting because of how close it is to the frequency of AC current. (NZ's standard is 50 Hz.)
- The pulsations of the power grid can be picked up from satellites out in space, so it's easily possible that they're detectable by the ground, which is a bit nearer the source! :) If this is the case, it would explain why nobody has been able to locate a source for the sounds.
- If it's the Earth itself, it's coming from everywhere, and low frequencies wrap around obstacles, making it difficult to detect the source.
- Furthermore, the current might be in one place, but the sound might become audible in another, depending on the geometry of the piezo "driver".
.LK: I think you need to rethink the size and motion of the universe some more.
.CC: I have neglected this, partly because nothing in my model is dependent on absolute distances or durations.
- So the Universe could be big or small, old or young, but the relative distances and durations might be similar, and the same mechanisms apply.
- Anyway, I'm not sure when I'll get to this, but I certainly agree that it's an open topic.
- I created a page on my site for collecting info on the redshift controversy, in the hopes that others could add more substance to it.
.LK: I guess you'll make some diagrams there to help explain some of the processes eventually.
.CC: Yes, I'm working on the diagrams right now.
- The transition from verbal to visual thinking is a rough process, as things that sounded good don't always look good! :) I also have a lot more reading to do, to ratchet up the specificity.
- There actually seems to be a good deal of literature related to seismic piezo-electricity, so I'm trying to get my reading list prioritized.

--- Lightning
Postby CharlesChandler» Fri Nov 16, 2012 1:36 pm
.LK: Don't the magnetic field/s cause the ions [in lightning] to move in helical paths?
- That's what made me think that lightning is tornadic.
.CC: Yep, the electrons in a lightning strike (or any discharge for that matter) will spiral if there is an external magnetic field.
- This is because of the Lorentz force.
- In other words, they become B-field-aligned currents (i.e., Birkeland currents).
- Vacuum vortexes spiral just because of the conservation of angular momentum from the cyclonic inflow.
- So once it gets organized, you could say that the particle motion is the same, but for very different reasons.