Called the
“largest volcano in the solar system”, the great mound of
Olympus
Mons on the planet Mars is taller than three Mount Everests and
about as wide as the entire Hawaiian Island chain.
In previous Pictures of the Day, we have noted that the defining characteristics
of Olympus Mons find no counterparts in known volcanoes on Earth.
Rather, the towering mound reveals the telltale markers of a
lightning blister, as do its companion mounds on the equatorial
Tharsis Bulge.
The “pancake”
shape of the mount, with its steep scarp almost four miles high,
finds its best analog in the bell-shaped blisters found on the caps
of lightning arrestors. The “moat” around much of the base of
Olympus Mons also has its counterpart in the lightning blister.
Familiar volcanic domes do not reveal such features.
Nothing like
the overlapping flat-bottomed craters of the “caldera”, nearly two
miles deep, are observed in volcanoes on Earth. But the pattern
matches the features of
craters formed atop laboratory
discharge blisters on an anode, or positively charged surface. The
discharge creates the flat bottoms of these craters by electrical
machining of the summit, vaporizing surface material to create
smooth and flat crater floors.
In the
electrical hypothesis the same force that raised the blister cut the
superimposed craters on the summit. But an event of such power would
surely leave trademark scars explicable by no other hypothesis! We
have noted, for example, the
"pits,
scoops and gouges" near
the summit of Olympus Mons. Here, the geologists’ explanations
(“collapse pits”, etc.) do not withstand scrutiny, while the
formation of such pits by electric arcs is well known to everyone
familiar with the effects of electric discharge machining (EDM). For
a similar example of scooped out pits in association with the great
chasm of Valles Marineris, see the chain of craters on the far left
of the picture here.
In our Picture
of the Day for
March 7, 2005, we observed that the finely
filamented “mane” radiating down the flanks of the mount presents
the telltale evidence of charge redistribution. The extremely
shallow grooves of the “mane” offer clear evidence that the summit
of Olympus Mons, the focal point of a massive electrical discharge,
acquired a strongly negative charge as the arriving electrons of the
discharge raised the mound and excavated the craters. We wrote: “To
achieve surface equilibrium, then, secondary discharging occurred
between the "caldera" of Olympus Mons and the surrounding region in
a way analogous to the discharge of a negatively charged comet
nucleus as it enters the positive region of the Sun's electric
field”.
The hypothesis
set forth here can now be tested against the superb images returned
by orbiting cameras. In the picture above, the best ever taken of
the complex caldera, we see regions of the caldera cut by shallow
grooves or channels. Planetary scientists had previously identified
these with grabens or faults on the flat surfaces of crater floors.
This interpretation simply followed the standard ideology of Olympus Mons, which sees the flat floors as former lakes of molten lava. But
look closely at these sharply cut grooves. We have placed
higher-resolution images of the inset regions
here and
here.
Do you see any evidence of faulting? It is not
necessary to guess here, since the grooves extend from the walls of
deeper, flat-floored craters. These steep cliffs are where the most
obvious evidence of faulting would appear. The evidence is not
there.
Not a hint of
surface spreading is evident: what we see instead are scratches
across the surface, as if giant claws reached down to scoop out
braided channels.
But perhaps
these grooves already look familiar to you. We’ve seen them before,
cutting across the buttes of
Labyrinthus Noctis on the
western termination of Valles Marineris. And for an even more
dramatic parallel, consider the network of undulating and entwining
grooves on Saturn’s moon
Enceladus.
The
irony is that the advanced engineering that allowed our probes to
reach distant planets and capture such compelling images appears to
be far ahead of the established theories. But now things are certain
to change, just as soon as the specialists are able to look at the
pictures directly, not through the lens of prior assumptions.
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