This two part video looks at lightning scars in the Four Corners region. Lightning is becoming recognized as the premier cause of mountain erosion, having far more impact than water, wind, ice, or exfoliation, at least on some mountains around the world. Lightning can blast a house size boulder apart, toss rocks the size of buses around and pepper the ground with pock marks.
In the past, lightning was far more severe, when Earth Earth was in a different Solar environment. Scars on the land attest to a time when the atmosphere heavily ionized, turning it to a plasma maelstrom where lightning strafed the landscape like a machine gun, and grew to proportions that created electromagnetic blisters on the land so large that we mistake them for volcanoes.

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