Geological Narratives
Jul 27, 2009

For centuries, the narrative of choice was, “God did it—catastrophically.”

In 1785, James Hutton replaced that narrative with the principle of “the present is the key to the past.” God became optional, and the story became more intricate, if less dramatic: Processes that we witness today, acting gradually and uniformly over millions of years, deposited sediment in layers on the bottoms of oceans and seas. The layers of sediment solidified into strata of rock; the strata were uplifted into peaks and eroded into valleys; and the detritus was recycled into sediment.

In 1978, Luis Alvarez interrupted the narrative of “gradual and uniform” with a few episodes of drama: An asteroid, perhaps several, had collided with the Earth and caused mass extinctions. This twist in the plot violated the integrity of gradual and uniform quotidian processes. The collision of Comet SL-9 with Jupiter in 1994 seemed to bring cosmic collisions within the purview of “the present,” but the “gradual and uniform” story line had been irreparably broken. Geology again became catastrophist, but this time without God among the characters.

God had been the mechanism, the energy, in the old catastrophism. The new catastrophism was entirely mechanical and suffered from the lack of an adequate mechanism. Impacts could not account for the growing number of facts that were now interpreted as catastrophic: not only craters but also extinctions, lava floods, global soot, and climate anomalies. Time spans were shortened, and actions had to be more vigorous. Mechanical processes lacked sufficient vigor.

Recognizing that the universe is composed mostly of plasma introduced a new character to the plot. Plasma is electromagnetically active, and the forces can exceed the strength of mechanical forces such as gravity by trillions of orders of magnitude. Plasma processes can provide practically unlimited vigor. Strata can be deposited in days or hours instead of centuries or millennia—and the layers need not be horizontal. Craters and canyons can be excavated in similarly short periods, and the debris can be lifted into space or pulverized, sorted, and deposited elsewhere.

Studies in comparative mythology have identified the ancient gods as planets and the thunderbolts that they hurled at each other and at the Earth as plasma discharges. We see similar phenomena today at larger scales throughout the universe in the jets and flares of stars and galaxies. At a planetary scale, we have the possibility of explaining geological formations and biotic successions with vigorous and fast-acting electromagnetic mechanisms that incorporate bodies of evidence excluded from presently accepted theories.

One such body of evidence is the collection of legends and myths from around the world. A number of legends have been confirmed as accurate reports of geological events, such as the Aboriginal legend that located several peaks which are now under water off the coast of Australia.

If legends about locations are accurate, legends about orogeny can’t be dismissed out of hand merely because they seem unfamiliar with respect to the consensus narrative. Many legends describe the appearance of mountains on previously different terrain.

Dwardu Cardona documents many of these legends in his book Flare Star. Native tribes in North America, for example, relate that the Cascades now occupy what had been a grassy plain. Were those mountains electrically deposited during the catastrophe that ended the Pleistocene Ice Age? Their present altitude is dated to that epoch. Were they deposited as dust and fused into rock, in similarity with electrical painting technology? Was the process similar to the formation of sand dunes? No experiments have been conducted to determine if electric mechanisms play a part in dune dynamics, despite the discovery of large electric fields in dust devils.

As the difficulties and contradictions in consensus catastrophism grow more unmanageable, theories of plasma catastrophism grow more promising. Because plasma phenomena are scalable, the mechanisms of plasma geology can be investigated under controlled laboratory conditions, something unavailable to “gradually over millions of years” mechanics. Theoretical, experimental, and interpretive work has barely begun. The field is wide open to adventurous scientists.

Mel Acheson