- "When humans visit Mars, they'll have to watch out
for towering electrified dust devils".
-
- With these words, a NASA news release, dated July 14,
2005, gave official sanction to an idea that has percolated up from separately
funded research projects in recent years. These new research involved chasing
dust devils in the Arizona desert where investigators were surprised to
find that these vortices are electrically charged. The obvious inference
is that Martian dust devils might be charged too. Meanwhile, in 1999 the
leading theorist of the Electric Universe had written, based on other evidence:
"Electric discharges from space cause Mars' huge dust devils and planet-wide
dust storms". (Link)
-
- A good indicator of electrical discharge from ground
to air within a Martian dust devil can be seen in the frames of a movie
taken by the rover Spirit as the vortex spun across Gusev Crater just before
noon on March 15, 2005. The luminosity of the apparent discharge activity
at the base is compelling and confirms the earlier claim of Electric Universe
advocates that the dark tracks left by the tornado-like whirlwinds on Mars
are due to electric discharge. (Link)
-
- The NASA release described a typical dust devil on Mars
as a "monster column towering kilometers high and hundreds of meters
wide, 10 times larger than any tornado on Earth". Were an astronaut
to come face to face with such a monster he would encounter "red-brown
sand and dust whipping around faster than 30 meters per second (70 miles
per hour)" as visibility dropped to zero. And the "scariest part"
would be the incessant crackling and flashing of miniature lightning, the
article reports.
-
- Wallace Thornhill and others have proposed for at least
a decade that dust devils, tornadoes, and waterspouts are electric discharge
phenomena. [See "Electric
Dust Devils"]
-
- The electrical theorists urge NASA researchers to drop
once and for all the long-standing and unsupported dogma of an electrically
neutral solar system, which has prevented meteorologists from seeing the
larger role of electricity in weather phenomena on all planets, and even
on the Sun! [See "Solar
Tornadoes",]
-
- Scientists exploring Martian dust devils are forced to
locate the "cause" of the electrical discharges in solar heating
and the resulting mechanical energy of air convection. But in the Electric
Universe, rotating columns of air are a natural consequence of atmospheric
electric discharge. Rotating columns are the prevalent forms taken by electric
currents in plasma. A researcher unaware of the global circuitry involved
will be limited to mere discussions of localized charge separation. Effect
will be confused with cause. Charge separation will be attributed merely
to the physics of dusty air circulation within the vortex.
-
- But from the electrical vantage point, the dusty vortex
itself is caused by charge exchange between the Earth and the solar plasma.
The towering dust devils on Mars help to force the issue because they are
too big and too powerful to be explained by the popular idea of mechanical
charge separation.
-
- The news release provides an example of this blind spot.
According to Mark T. Lemmon, associate research scientist in the Department
of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M University, dust devils on Mars
form the same way they do in deserts on Earth. But that's not saying much
when their formation on Earth only recently prompted more research into
their electrical properties. Lemmon tells the usual story, "You need
strong surface heating, so the ground can get hotter than the air above
it". Heated less-dense air close to the ground rises, punching through
the layer of cooler denser air above. In this way rising plumes of hot
air and falling plumes of cool air begin circulating vertically in convection
cells. Then, if a horizontal gust of wind blows through, "it turns
the convection cells on their sides, so they begin spinning horizontally,
forming vertical columns -- and starting a dust devil".
-
- The NASA release suggests, "Dust devils get their
charge from grains of sand and dust rubbing together in the whirlwind.
When certain pairs of unlike materials rub together, one material gives
up some of its electrons (negative charges) to the other material...Smaller
dust particles tend to charge negative, taking away electrons from the
larger sand grains".
-
- In this view, the rising central column of hot air that
powers the dust devil carries the negatively charged dust upward and leaves
the heavier positively charged sand swirling near the base. In this way,
the charges get separated, creating an electric field.
-
- But such an internal electric field, according to Thornhill,
operates to prevent further charge separation. The convection process may
be sufficient to trigger a larger scale discharge, but that requires an
external field for the dust devil to grow to the size and power observed.
-
- On Earth the vertical electric field at sea level on
a dry day is approximately 100 volts per meter.
-
- Orthodox models of the Earth and its atmosphere offer
no realistic explanation for this field. Thornhill claims that at Mars'
distance from the Sun, the lack of energy from the Sun, in combination
with the extremely rarified atmosphere of the small planet, prevent atmospheric
movement from generating the required charge separation without the existence
of a global atmospheric electric field.
-
- The atmospheric pressure on Mars is only 1 percent that
of Earth at sea level. Thus, a simple mechanical model, drawing on nothing
more than mild warming of the Martian atmosphere, cannot account for the
Everest-sized dust devils and global dust storms. After all, the global
dust storms on Mars only serve to reduce solar heating at the surface.
[See "Dust Storms on Mars",
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050324dustmars.htm]
-
- For the electrical theorists, giant electrical vortices
on Mars are expected because there are insufficient water clouds to provide
an intermediate electrical path from the ionosphere to the surface through
normal lightning ? as we find on Earth. The discharges that drive the dust
devils on Mars have more in common with the "sprites" and "jets"
phenomena recently discovered in the rarified atmosphere above earthly
thunderstorms. In this view, the intensity and number of dust devils will
be affected by solar outbursts and the planet's elliptical orbit. Mars
is moving radially to an appreciable extent through the electric field
of the Sun. And this movement is sufficient to generate electrical events
on a scale and frequency that would not occur if Mars were on a more perfectly
circular orbit.
-
- If the electrical researchers are correct, the issue
of dust devils on Mars cannot be resolved without addressing a bigger picture.
Electric discharges can do what a rarified atmosphere cannot do -- scorch
dust black, raise dust into rotating vertical columns, generate global
dust storms enshrouding the planet, and suspend large volumes of dust in
the atmosphere.
|