Previously published at Thunderbolts.info

In Part 1 of Sputtering Canyons, we discussed Arches National Monument, and evidence it was formed by a complex sputtering discharge process. That process involved a thermal spiking, barrier discharge in a layer of wet sandstone.

In Part 2, we looked at how charge and charge depletion disperses through rock by the combined mechanisms of current drift and diffusion. We looked at evidence of diffusion patterns in the landscape and evidence of mechanical shear caused by sputtering discharge.

In Part 3, we’ll look at some secondary effects from electrical deposition and sputtering on the Colorado Plateau. These features involve processes besides sputtering discharge and lightning bolts, however. These features also involved the winds of the storm.

In the primordial, plasma typhoon that layered the dome of the Colorado Plateau, winds were mobilized by the Earth’s electric field. Ionic species of opposite charge were pushed in opposite directions. Positive and negative species segregated into streams of unipolar winds that circled the Earth in bands moving alternate directions.

The electric field gradient was from pole to pole, or at least where the poles are now, so the winds circled north to south and south to north. The effect was the same as the counter-rotating bands of wind on Jupiter. Where they met was the anodic hot spot where super-volcanoes belched ash and flame, and the bowels of the Earth spilled forth molten rock.

Between the super-volcanic maw of Yellowstone and the strato-volcanic cones on the Mogollon Rim sits the Colorado Plateau, where the winds mixed in a plasma cyclone. The meeting of the unipolar winds was the earth-sized equivalent of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter – a sustained and violent storm, charged with electricity and bent by magnetic fields – a storm beyond any Biblical description.

Like Jupiter, the winds screamed at several hundred miles per hour. Mach effects, like standing shock waves and supersonic shear created extreme pressure, density and temperature differentials. Vast updrafts and downdrafts developed, tornadoes spun-up fifty- to one-hundred miles across, and all of it carried electric current.

Where shock waves form, electric current flows. This is known phenomena. The whole idea of an EMP weapon – an electromagnetic pulse that can knock out transformers and electronic systems, destroying the grid and communications, is based on this fact. Explode a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere and it will send out a shock wave. The shock wave carries the electromagnetic pulse that spikes current suddenly and wipes out electronics and power grids.

There is no battery in the nuclear bomb that creates the EMP. The EMP forms naturally in the shock wave. There are several effects that cause this. First, the shock wave is a sharp discontinuity in density. Where the density is higher, of course there is more matter, so a higher concentration of ambient ions are there, naturally raising charge density in the shock wave. The temperature is higher too, so that causes ionization in the shock wave. There is higher pressure, so particle collisions are more frequent, again ionizing the shock wave. And the bomb itself sends radiation with the shock wave.

So all these effects add up to a large electric current in the shock wave, and it is self amplifying. As ionization frees electrons to roam, they knock away more electrons in a runaway chain reaction. The process is related to the diffusion of charge discussed in Part 2, but in this case, the current diffusion is contained by the shock wave. The shock wave and electric pulse are coherent with each other.

Any place a supersonic wind hits an object, or is forced to change vector, or where it shears against winds moving at a different velocity, a shock wave forms. A projection, like a mountain, would create a standing shock wave that creased the wind, and generated current. In a plasma atmosphere, that current would grow very large.

Another feature of shock waves is they reflect. Like any wave, a light wave, an ocean wave; when it hits something, some of it’s energy echoes. When it does, it reflects in harmonic relationship to the wave that made it. Shock waves can reflect off each other, or align with each other and vibrate in harmonic resonance.

Every lightning bolt, every belch from a volcanic vent, sent new shock waves to reverberate through the air and echo from whatever they hit. Every sheet of current in them altered the electric field around it, and the atmosphere vibrated with charged waves, stiffened and resonating with feedback from the energy of the storm.

Some traveled at the speed of sound; while standing waves, reflected from stationary objects exposed to wind, stayed in place. They crossed, interfered and canceled each other. In the chaotic turbulence of the supersonic electric storm, shock waves literally patterned the atmosphere. Because the shock waves carry current, and magnetic fields result, the right hand rule forces waves into a cross-flow pattern with 90 degree angles.

Consider how ocean waves can form a coherent pattern in a cross-current sea, as shown in this photo from Ile de Re lighthouse off the coast of France.

Shock waves formed a similar effect, only carrying electric current. As the layers of the dome built the Colorado Plateau, they scarred the land with these patterns.

This shock wave fracture pattern is almost universally found in the rim rock and cap rock of sputtered canyon walls, buttes and pinnacles. The fracturing takes the form of parallel joints, or checkerboard blocks. The blocks are sometimes deeply cut and look like broken teeth.

In other cases, they are straight, evenly spaced, parallel fissures. Razor thin shock waves created the fractures in the cap and rim rock as the dome was deposited, while it was still hot and plastic. Thermal contraction during cooling, and the tearing away of material during sputtering, broke the rocks along the shock induced fracture lines.

The same effect is seen in completely different geologic formations – the windblown buttresses on mountain flanks. These images are from Comb Ridge, which is the southern rim of the Monument Valley dome, and San Rafael Reef at the southern rim of the San Rafael Swell. Both are dunes of triangular buttresses formed by the supersonic winds sucked into the storm that formed the domes. The shock waves from the supersonic winds that formed the dunes impressed themselves into the rock.

The shock wave currents shatter into harmonic reflections in ever smaller patterns. In formations where extremely high energy was available, such as the hardened plates of flat iron buttresses on the San Rafael Reef, the shock waves continued to shatter, reflect and reverberate down to the smallest scale.

This rock photographed from a flat iron buttress in Utah by Robert Hawthorne, during a field trip following the 2017 conference, shows parallel cuts in rock only a half inch apart.

This rock photographed by the author from another buttress in Utah during the 2016 field trip. It shows the squiggled fractures of a dissipating, shock induced current along the back edge of the buttress. These rilles only penetrate a fraction of an inch into the rock, and really defy any other explanation, unless rock eating worms cut these paths.

Another feature related to shock induced currents in linear, parallel formations, are something we’ll call, inverse dykes. A dyke is a vertical wall of rock. It can be free standing, or it can be embedded in a parent rock, like a quartz vein in granite. Quartz veins are caused by very high-current shock waves (which immediately raises the question, how does gold get in them thar veins? But that is a question for a future article.)

These dykes are made of minette, which is very high in potassium ratio, making the rock highly alkaline, or anionic. Which means it’s electrons were sucked out.

They were made by shock wave currents – electro-sonic waves that scored across the land and fused the parent sands into walls of electro-chemically altered rock. They emanate from Comb Ridge on the south side of Monument Valley. And they are coherent with the triangular flat-iron buttresses of the Comb, which were formed by the same shock waves.

Inverse dykes are similar wall-like features that were formed by currents that depleted the rock, shielding it from sputter. These upended pancake walls at Arches N.M., Utah were left standing as the lanes between them sputtered away, in the same fashion that preferential sputtering left mesas and pinnacles in the shadow of lightning strikes. Only for these, the diffusion of charge depletion was shaped by electro-sonic shock waves.

You can see they are layered, like the deposition layers of the mesas. Dykes don’t have deposition layers – they actually cut through deposition layers. Inverse dykes have deposition layers because they were part of the dome before it sputtered.

Another phenomena related to the whole sputtering process is gaseous explosions. It primarily occurs during dome deposition, when hot sand rains down, accelerated by the electric field under the eye-wall of the storm, to be pressed into a layer on the dome.

After deposition, but while the rock is still hot and plastic, still popping and sizzling with excess charge, volatile mixtures accumulate in pockets. The pockets migrate through weak joints, dykes and veins in the rock, to explode near the surface, leaving holes from bubble bursts. Remember, the veins and joints are current carrying, shock induced features, so they dissipate heat and current as they cool.

It’s very similar to the heat spiking bubbles that created Arches, N.M., but this occurs during dome deposition, not sputter. The gases are aided, or caused, by residual current in the rock escaping after it deposited.

It can leave perfect bubble imprints in dense, hardened rock. Look carefully at the bubble imprint lower left of the arch. It has a “Y” shaped ridge that is the precise symmetric pattern molded into the rock that three bubbles connected would present, because they have to equalize pressure across their membranes. This is not water erosion. This is bubble explosion.

They also explode outward in large jets, off-gassing the hot fresh mountain as it settled and cooled, leaving ‘yawning throats’ like this.

The light at another time of day on the same ‘yawning throat’ in the San Rafael Reef, Utah shows the band of white crystalline dyke that the gasses migrated through. The ‘tonsils’ are a blade of the rock dyke.

This slot canyon in the San Rafael Reef was cut by a discharge of current and off-gassing. The discharge was powerful enough to cut the narrow canyon, implying it was an arc mode discharge.

The throat of the discharge is a hole about 3 feet in diameter. It is choked with an effluvia that followed the discharge and solidified as it dripped from the throat. There is a vertical dyke in the rock aligned with the hole, which can be seen as the white streak in the vee-notch above the hole.

The throat is completely choked with the effluvia. The effluvia is black and textured much like minette, found in lightning generated features elsewhere in the region.

A runnel of the black effluvia drips from the throat, and the walls near the throat are splattered with a white substance.

Taste testing the white substance indicated an alkaline bitterness. Being in a National Park, samples could not be taken, so no further analysis is available.

Off-gassing bubbles can be quite elaborate in volatile flows of foaming minerals. This carbonate rock fizzed like seltzer before it suddenly phase-changed to solid leaving exquisite bubble molds. Such sudden phase change implies an instantaneous electro-chemical process due to electrical discharge and recombination.

This image shows why off-gassing bubbles are part of deposition, not sputtering. The bubbles are in the untouched surface rock above, while the scalloped break in the rock (from a cupping spall caused by sputtering) has no holes. The holes were already there when the canyon was sputtered, and are only a near surface feature caused by off-gassing.

While theory and conclusions presented here are the sole opinion of the author, appreciation to the researchers who spent hot, grimy hours exploring Canyonlands to obtain photos and data is due. Researchers Larry White, Bruce Leybourne, David Orr Steve Cash and Ginger endured extreme heat, dangerous roads, treacherous heights and fine sand in their food, examining the wonders of Canyonlands, Utah for this article.

 Thank you.

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Also published at Thunderbolts.info

In Part 1 of Sputtering Canyons, we discussed Arches National Monument, and evidence it was formed by a complex sputtering discharge process. That process involved a thermal spiking, barrier discharge in a layer of wet sandstone.

In Part 2, we’ll take a broader look at some regions on the Colorado Plateau where similar sputtering discharge processes took place.

One of these is Monument Valley. Monument Valley was formed by sputtering discharge that almost completely etched a layer of the original dome away. What is left are the lonely pinnacles and buttes iconic to Western movies.

The reason these pinnacles and buttes are left standing, while the same layers of sandstone etched away around them, is due to preferential sputtering. Preferential sputtering is normally associated with sputtering an alloyed metal where one element in the alloy sputters more efficiently, eroding away faster than the other alloy metal.

In Monument Valley, the buttes and pinnacles left standing were portions of the dome that resisted sputtering because of a difference in charge density. The part of the dome that lifted away, did so when the wet layer – the icing in the layer cake – became a charged, hot ionized mud. A sheet of high charge density developed at the base of the mud with an attraction to the clouds above – and like an electromagnet picks up a junk car – the storm’s electric field lifted away the overburden to dissolve in electric winds.

The buttes and pinnacles are remnants that didn’t have the same charge in their wet layer, so they didn’t get pulled away by the electric field. The reason is: they were struck by lightning.

In the dark mode, drifting plasma current that causes sputtering, there is always the potential to spark. Manufacturers are careful to avoid this because it will flaw the finished surface. The pinnacles and buttes were parts of the dome where an arc, or many arcs struck and dissipated built-up charge. Instead, it altered the ground charge beneath the strike zone so the electric field couldn’t pull it away. Therefore, the buttes and pinnacles were preferentially – not sputtered.

In the parlance of the semiconductor industry, the charged layer was doped by the presence of water and minerals, which gave it an excess of electrons. When lightning struck, it depleted the charge and left an excess of “holes”, or the absence of electrons, which cancelled the attractive force of the sputtering discharge.

The evidence for this is manifold. To begin, consider the cap rock formations and spires found on buttes. Butte tops aren’t flat. They generally have something like a step pyramid, dome, or pinnacle on top, which is where lightning discharge was most intense.

Notice, in the images below, the pyramidal caps. The rock below the caps is darkened significantly more than adjacent stone. Not only is there black patina, but there is also more redness to the rock itself in streaks below the caps, with deep vertical fracturing. The charge depletion from lightning, and the subsequent recombination of the most severely depleted zones beneath where it struck, heated, shocked and hardened the rock more in these areas than in others.

The step pyramid structure, or terracing on canyon walls and buttes is another evidence of sputtering. Each sedimentary layer has different compositions of minerals and moisture, differentiating the dielectric property of each layer. The zone of charge depletion under lightning strikes spreads out in a conical diffusion pattern, but the cone is stepped, or terraced, because there is a step voltage across each dielectric layer.

Where there are towering cliffs with sheer vertical walls, it is because it is a monolithic layer with a consistent dielectric, causing a single large voltage step.

Where there is very hard rock, the edges are torn in chunky blocks. The flat, smooth breaks are not the result of millions of years of erosion of any type – wind, rain, ice, exfoliation, or flowing water. Any of those actions would have the opposite effect. The rocks have such smooth, flat faces, and sharp, angular, undercut edges because they were broken by mechanical shearing as the neighboring rock was ripped away.

Evidence of shearing is especially evident on monolithic walls. Sharp edged breaks are everywhere, leaving smooth, flat faces, hardly roughened, or rounded by any act of erosion.

Arching fissures are evidence of spalling, where the material tore away in flakes, cupped upward in the direction of shear. The arches often show concentric creases where flakes broke away in smaller sections deeper into the rock. One can see the same type of concentric flaking in broken glass.

In some places the canyon walls have the look of broken glass. In others it looks more like the broken end of a brick of hard cheese. Perhaps a well-aged Parmesan – stiff, dry and flaky, with a low shear strength.

Besides cupping spalls, some surfaces show other evidence of stress fracturing due to shearing force.

There is almost always a  thin layer of hardened rock at the interface of each terrace. This is where charge accumulated at the boundary layer of the strata, and the current hardened the charged sheet of rock more so than the surroundings.

Each dielectric layer spreads charge to the interface of its layer, driven by the electric field, to balance the voltage drop across the layer. So a charged sheet develops at the interface of each layer, and a step voltage to the next layer, which creates a surface tension at the interface, which makes the rock hard and dense. What is sandwiched between is often loosely consolidated.

Pinnacles in this region are of two types. Fulgarites, like the burnt shard of Agathla peak, are the direct result of lightning boiling up the crust of the earth in an electromagnetic blister. These types of pinnacles were discussed in Lightning Scarred Earth, Parts 1 and 2.

Sandstone pinnacles are where lightning struck and altered the charge in the rock beneath it, creating an electrical ‘shadow’ to sputtering discharge. They are literally, the shadow of lightning strikes.

The footprint of a ‘brief’ strike, comparatively speaking, produces a narrow cone of protection. How the cone slopes and steps depends on properties of the rock layers and the electric field potential.

More sustained, or potent striking begins to diffuse charge depletion outward, forming nodes, or star like breakouts.

Still larger accumulation of strikes, diffuses charge further, and nodules break out into ‘wings’, or dykes of charge depleted rock.

The shadow footprint grows as arcing continues, elongating charge depleted zones into wedges with dykes growing out the tips and edges. It’s actually the beginning of a fractal dendrite, as lightning bombardment soaks charge from the ground, diffusing outward in branches and creating a depleted zone protected from sputtering. If the process continued before the surroundings sputtered away, the dendrite nodules would grow and branch in ever smaller fractal repetitions, like branches of a tree.

As adjacent rock is struck, the depleted zones connect into networks of wedges, ridges and pinnacles.

Generally, the pinnacles and buttes left on a dome are layered flat, but in some areas buttes display a dip, indicating horizontal winds influenced the deposition. Sputtering follows the voltage gradient, and so carves away from the lightning depleted zone in alignment with the strata because the voltage gradient follows the dielectric layers, cutting at 90º to the dip angle, leaving a straight-edged non-vertical wall. If eroded by conventional notions of wind, rain and mass wasting, the rock would obey gravity and erode a vertical wall. It is in details like this that prove electrical formation.

What we see in the stepped pyramids and terraced canyons is the result of two types of charge transport in a solid state matter. One is drift ionization caused by the external electric field of the storm, and the other is diffusion current caused by differences in charge density within the material of the dome.

Drift current is the flow of charge created by the external electric field of the storm, which primarily drives the ionized region downward, vertically through the layers of sandstone. Drift currents obey Ohm’s Law.

Diffusion current obeys Fick’s Law, which is related to Ohm’s Law, but accounts for variations in charge density that causes ionization to migrate from a region of high charge concentration, to a region of low concentration. No external electric field is needed for diffusion current, because the difference in charge concentrations creates a gradient between regions that results in a local electric field. This is the primary process that migrates charge horizontally – spreading out through each layer of sandstone.

What is carved away by sputtering leaves distinct scalloped edges in very dry, low conductivity material. The scalloping is a fractal phenomena of electrical diffusion that repeats the scallop shape in ever larger scallops.

In wetter environments this isn’t as apparent, or it may be totally absent, because water diffuses charge more evenly, creating smoother surfaces.

Compelling evidence the scalloped and terraced walls are a result of charge diffusion is shown in this image, where the archetype of all fractal shapes emerges – the Mandlebrodt Set.

Although it’s not a computer perfect rendition of the Mandlebrodt Set, it is nearly so. It’s a naturally generated fractal based on the same mathematical relationships of iterating three dimensional motion that governs electrical charge diffusion in solid state electronics.

The implication is obvious.  The shape of the canyon walls, the terracing, the fractal repetition of form – everything known about applied physics dictates this is the result of electrical current diffusion on a continent-scale semiconductor under the influence of a gigantic electric field. The physics is not only laboratory proven, it’s been used to make every semiconductor device ever manufactured.

In fact, geophysicists and even Hollywood CGI artists, simulate geologic forms like watersheds and river systems, canyons and mountains, using the fractal geometry of electrical diffusion. So, what is being described here has been acknowledged by consensus science. The scientific conclusion that these land forms are the result of electrical diffusion caused by an intense electric field influencing Earth’s crust, in an event in the manner Electric Universe theorists have described since Immanuel Velikovsky, is scientifically unavoidable.

Yet avoid it they do – consensus science, that is. To quote from a Wikipedia article on diffusion:

“Analytical and numerical models that solve the diffusion equation for different initial and boundary conditions have been popular for studying a wide variety of changes to the Earth’s surface. Diffusion has been used extensively in erosion studies of hill slope retreat, bluff erosion, fault scarp degradation, wave-cut terrace/shoreline retreat, alluvial channel incision, coastal shelf retreat, and delta pro-gradation. Although the Earth’s surface is not literally diffusing in many of these cases, the process of diffusion effectively mimics the holistic changes that occur over decades to millennia.”

Do you see what is going on here? Geophysics uses diffusion models to recreate Nature’s landscapes – they use the mathematics and physics of charge diffusion to do it, but don’t understand why – they think it’s just a coincidence. Rather than conclude from empirical data they have in hand, in proper scientific fashion, that electric current diffusion has a role in shaping the landscape, they conclude it’s just coincidence.

One hates to be critical of hard working geophysicists, but to have an empirically proven answer staring you in the face – and even be using it, with great success, as your model – and still ignore it in favor of a preferred narrative, is what a politician does, not a scientist. The idea that diffusion “mimics the holistic changes that occur over decades to millennia” is nothing less than absurd.

Diffusion is caused by charge transport from higher to lower concentrations. It’s an inside-out physical phenomena. It occurs at the atomic level, where charge diffuses from atom-to-atom, and then works its way out with secondary effects to produce the macro-fractal patterns we can see. Conventional erosive forces of water, wind and ice act on the land from the outside in, not from the inside out. They can’t possibly produce the kind of landscapes we actually see, and that is why they cannot be modeled with hydrodynamics, or any of the unverifiable effects of slow random forces of wind, ice and water acting over millions of years.

Scientists are forced to use electrical diffusion to model the obviously fractal and non-random forms on the landscape because it’s the only model that works, yet are so invested in scientific dogma they can’t see the discovery they made. It verifies everything I’ve said, so I appreciate they’ve already proven my case. But their notions violate physics, which is something they obviously don’t understand, so they call it a coincidence instead.

Fortunately, in EU we like to deal in truths. In Part 3, we’ll examine a few more examples of Sputtering Canyon evidence.

Also published at Thunderbolts.info

In summer of 2016, following the EU Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, EU Geology researchers visited Arches National Monument, and the deep reaches of Canyonlands, Utah, where the Green and Colorado Rivers channel through the Colorado Plateau.

Arches National Monument is an astonishing place for anyone interested in EU Geology. By conventional reckoning, the high desert plateau was carved into fantastical arches and hoodoos after millions of years of subtle water and wind erosion. To the EU researchers, however, it was evident the land was zapped, carved and seared by electrical storms that could have happened last year, so fresh looked the marks of evidence.

The Arches’ formation tells a story which explains one of the key phenomena that shaped the face of the planet. The phenomena is called sputtering discharge. So let’s take a look at what that is.

Sputtering discharge, as used in manufacturing, is a dark, to glow-mode current in plasma used to deposit thin films of material onto a substrate surface. It’s analogous to electroplating, or galvanic reaction in a fluid.

An electric field accelerates positive ions in plasma to collide with a source material, which breaks molecular bonds, eroding the source material. This is what the term “sputter” refers to –  the breaking away of particles which then drift in an electric field to coat the substrate. The source material is the cathode, and the substrate is the anode in the circuit. The material exchange is performed by electricity. Manufacturers often use magnetrons to shape and control the current, and improve material transport efficiency with external magnetic fields.

The point to be made, however, is that high voltage, low current in a plasma will erode, or etch away a cathodic surface and plate itself in layers on the anode. This is the process that shaped Canyonlands.

To fully understand these canyons, however, we must first understand domes, because the canyons are carved from a dome. The entire Colorado Plateau is a dome – or rather, a series of domes overlaying each other. The domes are composed of sedimentary layers of limestone and sandstone. The layers are stacked for the most part evenly and flat, like a layer cake.

This basic layer cake structure is capped with the Rocky Mountains on the East and carved into canyons on the West, while shot through with the Lichtenberg patterned, vertically cut gorges of the Colorado and Green Rivers.

The dome structure of the plateau, and the canyons carved through it, is primarily the result of a natural sputtering discharge process created during intense electrical storms. Of course, in this case, we are speaking about storms created in a past environment, when Earth’s electric field was amplified to the point the atmosphere ionized.

Imagine the atmosphere stirred into a maelstrom lit with streamers of glowing plasma. Where lightning crackled, not only in the sky, but across the land, and mountain tops glowed with coronal fire under swirling clouds of dusty plasma.

It would have been surreal. A place where streams of wind became electric currents. Where high and low pressure zones acted like battery terminals, and mountain tops became electrodes drawing machine gun lightning from the sky. Anything standing in the wind would have hissed and snapped with coronal fire.

Dust in the air would have acted strange, too, as the energy of free electrons collided and overpowered weaker atomic bonds, ionizing matter, causing it to act like a ferro-fluid under the influence of a magnet. Ionic species segregated, forming unipolar winds that tore past each other in opposite directions, creating shear zones of intense electrical discharge, and vortex winds of supersonic speed.

The inside of Earth would have been in turmoil as well. Hot magmas spewing from volcanic vents. Aquifers boiling. Explosive eruptions of steam from deep underground, pocking the landscape with holes. Even arcs would erupt – lightning from the ground – caused by buried pockets of charge where minerals and water ionized.

The winds, dust laden and electric, deposited the Colorado Plateau, plating a cake across the western half of North America in the same way semiconductor manufacturers layer circuitry onto silica wafers. The stratified layers are interspersed with magma flows, petrified forests, inland seas and dinosaur bone-yards of different ages that indicate it formed in a series of events that likely recurred over millions of years.

To create the Canyondlands, the voltage potential had to reverse, and eat away at landscape newly laid down by the storm. Under the electric field of an electrical storm, the surface of the earth becomes positively charged. It becomes the anode in the circuit where lightning strikes from the negative cloud base, and where rain falls. In primordial ionic storms like those that formed the plateau, rain didn’t fall, but silica did, as dust in the air fell and adhered in layers to the dome.

Inland seas, or layers washed over by tsunami generated by the storm itself, became covered over with more layers of dry overburden as the storm progressed. This left a moist layer, like icing in the center of the layer cake. This icing layer then ionized under intense bombardment from sputtering discharge in the eye of the storm, and created what is known as a barrier discharge in the moist layer beneath the ground.

Which brings us to Arches National Monument, proof that the canyons were carved by sputtering discharge, aided by barrier discharge, in a moist layer of the big cake.

This image tells most of the story. A band of rock that looks tortured and fluid, as if it were boiled mud when it solidified, sandwiched between smooth, more-or-less even layers of stone. The canyon floor is flat, which is surprising, if one accepts the consensus view that the canyons were made by water erosion. Water erosion leaves deep channels and vee-cut valleys, not flat floors.

This closer image (below) shows the fluidity of the layers. The overburden rock barely sinks into the sagging layer that turned plastic beneath it, because it was still solid. The plastic layer sagged, but didn’t compress, maintaining a consistent thickness. But on the bottom, the ‘boiled mud’ layer fluidized and squeezed like toothpaste.

What turned this layer fluid, and caused it to sag beneath a solid overburden, was electrical current. A barrier discharge current, where no gaseous atmosphere was present to ionize into plasma, but instead, the moisture and mineral in the layer ionized, generating a subsurface current.

The moist layer ionized and charged species pooled into a plasma-like mud the electric field wanted to lift away. The electric currents boiled the moist layer and it began to foam and arc into the drier and electrically resistant overburden. When sputtering removed the surrounding overburden, pressure released and vapors expanded, making gas bubbles that raised the arches. Hardened pinnacles formed where mud boiled up in convective blossoms of hot ionization.

One can see how the moist layer boiled and heaved, while currents arched and thrust upward, trying to break through the overburden rock. But in this area, it was unsuccessful. The traces of barrier discharge remain in the rock.  The empty, flat canyon floor, where the overburden and moist layer were carried away is where the discharge broke through to complete the circuit.

Arches is a display of etching, or Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) stopped in process. The wet layer was boiling off due to the current in it, and lifting away with the overburden when the process stopped, leaving these arches and hoodoos. It likely stopped when the sputtering glow current suddenly jumped to arc mode, and lightning struck, dissipating the charge built-up in the wet, ‘boiled mud’ layer.

Sputtering discharge is typically used in manufacturing to remove only micro-meters of material. The ion bombardment on the surface of cathode material only shallowly penetrates to break atomic, or molecular bonds and release particles. So how could such a process remove hundreds of feet of solid sandstone?

One reason is the strength of the electric field at work on the charged species. In the primordial storm we are discussing, the electric field would have been many billions, perhaps trillions of volts. The electromotive force of such a field applied to any large pool of charged species could lift a mountain.

The other reason is diffusion of charge through a thousand feet of dry, sandstone overburden, to ionize the wet layer. The section of the dome overlaying the wet layer acted as a solid state semiconductor, coherent with the intense electric field. Charge diffused through the silica layers in a manner to be discussed in more detail in Part Two of this article.

The wet, ionized layer then underwent a process called heat spike sputtering. Heat spike sputtering occurs when diffusing ionization causes secondary reactions. The secondary reactions occur in the wet layer, which is highly conductive and volatile. Currents heated the material and caused thermal liquifaction, melting and steam micro-explosions.

In Canyonlands, the wet layer ionized, inducing currents which heat spiked, discharging from the wet layer to the layer above. The arches and bubble-like pinnacles in Arches N.M. were created by heat spike sputtering and bubbles from micro-explosions as the ‘boiled mud’ layer ionized, vaporized, and discharged into the overburden.

This short film produced by diveflyfish on YouTube helps visualize the process of diffusion through rock and barrier discharge that caused the ‘boiled mud’ layer to boil. In it, Jim Hamman, the creator of diveflyfish, and an EU contributor, employs a high voltage Tesla circuit to generate current through a granite block. There are two things to note as you watch the film.

First, note how the flow of electricity diffuses through the entire granite block. Instead of channeling directly below the electrode in a narrow stream, it flows out the full footprint of the crystalline granite block. The external electric field of the circuit is diffusing charge through the granite as in a solid-state body.

In the tense electric field surrounding the eye of the hyper-storm that etched the canyons, currents also diffused through the dome matrix in this way, ultimately ripping out mountains of earth in the blink of an eye as currents boiled and liquified the wet matrix below, similar to the plasma tornadoes swirling in the gaps between the electrodes and the granite.

Second, note the plasma tornadoes that bridge the gap between the block and electrode. They are not in bright arc mode, but are filaments in glow mode. The plasma tornado currents are in the air gap, where the air has ionized to plasma. In the Arches, there was no air gap between the ionizing wet layer and the overburden, so the discharge was a barrier discharge coming from the ‘boiled mud’ layer. The currents flowed around the boiling, bubbling, foaming heat spikes to fuse and harden the less conductive overburden in it’s pattern of arches and pinnacles.

Jim’s experiment was intended to look for piezoelectric amplification of the current, but isn’t instrumented to acquire a measurement in this video. It does however demonstrate diffusion of current through granite, which demonstrates how ground currents can diffuse in natural rock. Towards the end of the clip, arcing begins where hot spots begin to eat through the granite, collecting the current into a single path, and starving the diffusion currents.

There are many other evidences of sputtering discharge in the Utah Canyonlands. In part 2 of Sputtering Canyons, we’ll examine some more.

Thank you.