Tag: weather

Lightning and Megaliths – The Connection

Lightning…

The blue-white arc of a lightning bolt stuns the senses. Blinding radiance, elemental beauty, awesome power and primordial danger flash into existence from thin air, and vanish before the mind catches-up. We stare, immobile, unthinking and awestruck.

In that moment, a channel of air the diameter of a quarter heats fifty thousand degrees, as trillions of electrons cascade to Earth. The volume of air blows-up, radiating shock-waves to peel and boom across the sky.

Lightning also pummels the land, creating pressure waves exceeding seventy-thousand atmospheres  – that’s one-million psi. It can create a layer of shocked quartz and vitrify surrounding rock into glass.

Lightning is an interaction between Earth and sky. It’s cause is an electric field between the electric storm above and the ground beneath our feet. ‘Ground’ is also a technical term, meaning the ambient voltage potential of the soil.

Earth is a negatively charged body in space, and current flows up from ground to atmosphere, normally in a drift of ions and electrons that is invisible. Storms reverse the current flow, causing electrons to avalanche back to Earth.

The Earth and sky are part of a circuit. Storms are capacitors in the circuit. They store energy in the form of ionic charge, and release it through dielectric breakdown of the atmosphere, causing lightning, among other effects.

animation_16a The ground is one plate of the capacitor where positive charge collects. As negative charge builds in the cloud, it is repulsed from the ground below, and positive ions are drawn in.

The ground reaches up with plasma tendrils. They collect especially around tall structures, pooling densely at sharp projections, surrounding them with a halo of charge the cascading electrons target for connection.

When connection is made, the arc touches Earth, spreading current in horizontal arcs across the surface as much as twenty meters away. This is a death zone. If you are in it, you are part of a 200,000 amp circuit.

The horizontal arcing is a side flash – a scatter of arc tendrils that follow surface conduction across the ground, radially away from the point of impact. The ground potential, type and shape of surface influences the character of the side flash.

Dry sand acquires charge very easily. Lightning attracts charged particles, and will sweep sand to it leaving a display of the entire strike zone. Sand in the strike zone, where current surges across the surface, pulls inward leaving a shallow crater with a cone of sand in the center. It’s like grabbing a bedspread in the center, pulling it up and dropping it in a pile.

The following photos were taken near Kayenta, Arizona on desert plains to the south of Comb Ridge.

The form is like an anthill, but these are not anthills. Ants dig rock from below ground and pile it outside the hole. These are built the opposite. The sand is swept-up from the surroundings, leaving a pile at the center of a crater. Besides, these don’t have ants, or ant-holes.

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Darkened, fused sand pebbles dust the surface of the mound of powder. No ants, no hole.

The mounds of sand are composed of fine, almost powder sand. But the tops of the mounds are dusted with pebbles. The pebbles are sand drawn into the lightning channel that fused and fell back to Earth when the flame extinguished, falling to cover the mound, like candy sprinkles on an ice cream cone.

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This is an anthill

Nothing grows inside the craters, or on the mounds. It’s as if the soil is sterilized. PH tests show the soil to be highly alkaline.

What meager growth there is are low, ground covering grasses and weeds around the perimeter of the craters.

arizonaThe desert in this region of Northern Arizona is carpeted with lightning strikes that left crater and mound features like these. The land is on the Colorado Plateau, just south of Monument Valley. They form what some call fairy rings when seen from the air.

The next images show clusters of them. The craters vary in size from fifteen to thirty feet in diameter, or larger. The size of the central cone is proportionate to the size of the crater, ranging from about eight, to eighteen inches tall.

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Fairy rings are lightning strikes that made shallow craters with central peaks. Nothing grows inside the strike zone. The darkest areas are covered in broken rock, except where lightning has excavated the craters.

The strikes especially cluster where black rock crusts over the sand. The lightning seems to have punched through, scattering rock and leaving the craters bare, where nothing grows.

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Whether the lightning is attracted to the rock, or the rock was made with the lightning isn’t known, but the rock provides a clue. It appears the lightning came in a coherent event that peppered the land, punching through and shattering the rock. That, at least, is how it appears.

What amazes is the number of them clustered in particular areas. They rarely overlap, spaced fairly even, but randomly apart. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them scarring the land just south of Comb Ridge.

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There are regions around the world where features like these carpet the land for hundreds of square miles. They are seen in desert lands especially, since there is little undergrowth to obscure them. The next image is from Namibia. Here the features connect with filaments of stream beds. But note how they connect in linear arrays, and branch radially like little stars. They are electrical discharge patterns.

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Each feature seems to be a shallow basin, or spring where water collects. Map resolution doesn’t allow better detail. These features are larger than the Arizona features. Many cover several acres.

Much of the country of Uzbekistan is carpeted with similar features, as the following images from a small portion of eastern Uzbekistan show.

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The Uzbekistan features are larger and more numerous still. They also appear to be shallow basins where the geology is distinctly changed, and there appears to be a source of water. In the last image, there appears to be a home, or ranch with a livestock tank, well, or catchment at the center.

It makes sense that water is found where lightning has struck. Subsurface water is a source of ionization that intensifies charge density, and therefore the electric field, attracting lightning to it’s location. Standing surface water won’t do that because ions have no point to collect – they spread evenly over the surface of the water. But subterranean water is trapped in the earth, where ions collect and build concentration, locally intensifying the electric field. Pits, craters and rilles formed by lightning leave depressions over aquifers that are natural for springs and wells.

Megaliths…

There have been times in the past when electric storms were far more severe than we experience today. That is one cornerstone of Electric Universe cosmology – that cataclysms in the past have an electrical cause due to events in the Solar System. Mythology records Thor’s Hammer, Neptune’s Trident and Zeus’ Thunderbolt, along with stories of the heavens in chaos.

To understand enigmas of the past requires first understanding what the environment was like. Are these carpets of lightning evidence of what the ancients experienced? And if so, is there other evidence besides stories from past epochs?

The only way to protect against a storm so intense is to get below Earth, or shelter beneath something that will serve as a lightning rod to route current to ground safely.

A lightning rod is a conductive path for current to reach Earth. It channels current to ground so it doesn’t spread out and reach you, and the things you want to protect. It provides a Faraday cage, or zone of protection, because it is more conductive the current flows through it instead of you.

So consider the function of standing stones. The megalithic stones erected thousands of years ago in circles and causeways. Or erected in dolmen formations with roof stones, as if refuge from demons. Never mind the mystery of how they were built with such gargantuan blocks of stone – that will be the subject of another post some day – but why were they built. That is the enigma we need to solve.

 I believe they did it for protection, and we need to take heed of that.

They are usually made of granite. Granite is an excellent conductor, more robust than a metal rod. Granite is a blend of quarts and other silica crystals. Crystal is more than a passive conductor, it’s piezoelectric, so actively creates charged pathways for current to flow.

Standing stones and megaliths would glow with St. Elmo’s fire under intense electrical stress. They would send active plasma streamers to draw current from a sky turned electric, attracting lightning and connecting it to ground.

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So, perhaps Dolmens, megaliths and standing stones actually were protection from demons in the sky. Perhaps this explains why megalithic structures are so closely fitted of giant stone to make positive contact everywhere. Maybe it’s why copper and bronze connectors were set between stones, not for structure, but for electrical continuity.

Tiwanaku-Interlocking-Piece-between-stones-Pumapunku-200x200If there is no low resistance path offered by a lightning protection system the high voltage current from a strike will divide to follow every conductive path to ground it can find. Currents will pass through materials normally considered insulators, instantly generating heat. Porous material can shatter violently as air inside expands with super sonic speed. Material containing moisture can explode more violently as water is flashed to steam. Other materials melt, or burst into flames.

Stone, and in particular granite, is well suited for the task of lightning rod. Seamless continuity would be the most critical factor in using them for that purpose.

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Nicolas Rénac – Walls of Sacsayhuaman

That seems to be the case. Ancient megalithic structures are typically unadorned. Unlike temples, or tombs, they are not covered in symbolism, or art. They appear functional, purposeful, like something with industrial intent.

And they required the utmost care to construct, with tolerances that go far beyond cosmetic appearance. Walls and ramparts are often built of stones with beveled edges, perfectly fitted to prevent water from seeping into cracks. They were made that way to provide a current path, prevent side flashes from the walls, and to prevent water getting into cracks to cause arcing and blasts.

The close fitting of stone in jigsaw puzzle shapes isn’t really required for any other reason. It is believed they are constructed that way to withstand earthquakes. But why? To avoid death from an earthquake, one should stay away from standing stones in the first place. It makes far more sense the stones were constructed that way to protect from lightning.

Another clue may be a strange feature shared by megalithic structures around the world – knobs. Knobs are odd protrusions of rock on some megalithic stones.

It’s easy to understand how they got there. As stones were excavated from a quarry, they were left attached at the side, or bottom for support until rough shaping was complete. Then the attachment point would be broken to remove the stone, leaving a knob jutting out.

Companion knobs – the other side of the attachment point, can be found in the quarries. Unfinished works still have attachments in place, proving their original purpose.

Some also speculate the knobs were left in place to aid in lifting and maneuvering the stones. No doubt they provided an easy grip, or attachment point for a loop of rope, and were no doubt used that way. But for such master stone cutters, who fit stones so closely a knife blade can’t find a crease, it seems odd they would leave knobs jutting out of the finished work.

At the end of this article is a video from vlad9vt which shows photos of many megalithic sites and quarries which displays evidence of the knobs function as attachment points. Watch his film and you will see many examples, but finish the article first so you can judge my new theory.

It is curious to me why they were left on some stones, but not all stones. In some they have been ground away, and on others left protruding. Sometimes they protrude in seemingly random places, and sometimes in a pattern that might be considered decorative. They seem to be more prevalent around passageways and gates. They also seem to be on the lowest, or next to lowest course on stone walls; or the upper course, overhead, particularly in passageways.

I’m thinking they were left purposely to create side flashes, directing excess current away from the doors to flash harmlessly to ground without snaking through the passage itself. Or to divert side flash away from the foundation, or passage, to prevent current finding it’s way to occupied areas.

The Connection…

Megalithic structures were built in a time we only know through mythology. They were built to withstand the great wars of gods that legend tells of. They were built to withstand screaming winds, tidal waves and quaking earth. But electrical storms were the primary reason for megaliths. They carried current to ground from layers of electrified plasma pressing down against Earth.

Archaic storms would have been immense compared to a hurricane today. Caused by a Solar System awash in energy, the Earth responded with induced currents. The atmosphere stacked into layers of differing plasma properties, as dust, soil and water ionized on the ground. Giant currents connected Earth and sky to generate thunderstorms that evoked gods and demons.

Wooded areas would have erupted in firestorms. Volcanoes and earthquakes would have rattled the land. Winds would have screamed at Mach speeds, billowing smoke and ash to intensify arcing, like grain enclosed in an elevator. And lightning would have intensified, building in proportion to the electric field, creating currents that machine-gunned Earth in megaton blasts.

Atmospheric ionization was held at bay by standing stones migrating the flow of electricity through them. They acted like tent poles, holding back the lowering sky, the way mountains hold storms above a valley.

That’s why storms on the plains and low lying islands are so low to the ground, where the clouds seem just above tree-tops. There are no mountains to raise the ground voltage gradient high into the atmosphere to attract current, so the clouds close the gap by lowering closer to the ground.

Crops, stored grain, or animals sheltered beneath stones would have found protection from electrocution, and the winds and heat of the electrified plasma coursing above. Megaliths around the world show evidence of magnetic and electrical flux, charring and even vitrification. Many appear to have exploded.

7868243390_c2aca589ea_nWhere possible people would have taken refuge underground, hiding beneath cliffs, in caverns, or in shelters they dug.

Stones and megaliths were set to protect precious lands, crops, water sources, food stores and huddles of animals they couldn’t take to the caves with them. They had to place them so there would be something to come back to – to carry on life after the storm.

They set them in fields and on hilltops, where they could work with the landscape to protect the area from obliteration. They provided a degree of refuge from storms bearing down with blistering peels of lightning and electric winds.

Or at least that’s what I think. Enjoy the video and resources below to learn more about lightning and megaliths. See if you discern a pattern to prove the purpose of the stones. See if you see what I see.

From vlad9vt

Lightning – it’s more powerful than you think…

Don’t forget the like button below! And please share with your friends.

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Thanks!

Electric Weather

Re-posted courtesy of the Thunderbolts Project

A three part examination of electricity and it’s role in severe weather.

Thunderstorms exhibit precisely the attributes of plasma discharge between an electrode and ground. I show that laboratory produced coronal emissions from a point electrode, through an air gap, to a flat plate electrode, produce the same effects as a thunderstorm. I correlate these effects with the morphology of a super-cell and the lightning, rain, downdrafts and vortex winds they produce.

Yes, dear reader, everything is electric.

Related articles:

Nature’s Electrode

The Summer Thermopile

Tornado – The Electric Model

Tornado – The Electric Model

Re-posted courtesy of Thunderbolts.info

Previously, in Nature’s Electrode, we looked at an Electric Earth model for lightning genesis driven by a plasma corona formed from condensing and freezing water vapor in the central updraft of the thunderhead. We also looked at the thunderstorm itself, and an electrical model for the circuit that drives it, in The Summer Thermopile. Now let’s consider the most dramatic weather event of all, the tornado, and how these massively destructive whirlwinds are also formed by a plasma corona in a thunderstorm.

For air to become plasma and carry current, the air has to be partially ionized. A plasma state can be defined by “plasma density” – the number of free electrons per unit volume, and the “degree of ionization” – the proportion of atoms ionized by loss, or gain of an electron.

A gas with as little as 1% of the particles ionized is a plasma, responding to magnetic fields and displaying high electrical conductivity. A partially ionized plasma is often referred to as a “cold plasma”, and highly ionized plasma is referred to as “hot”. Discharge from a corona is predominately a cold, dark current, invisible to the eye.

Cloud-to-ground arcs come from high charge density regions of the corona, surrounding the central updraft where current from the updraft generates ions. Ground charge builds below this region in response, and the electric field strengthens, magnifying and focusing electron avalanche the way a lens focuses light, into a continuous plasma channel. When the channel connects with ground and discharges a hot current, it wraps tightly in it’s own magnetic field, in what is called a ‘”Z” pinch’.

Moving away from this self ionizing/high electromagnetic field region of the corona, free electrons spit at the ground, but lack the energy and focus to avalanche all the way, creating instead a mobile cloud of ionized gas that follows the field gradient to ground, generating a dark current. The current is said to “drift” in this region, yet the electric field still organizes the drifting ions into a columnar channel.

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In the image, the center of the coronal discharge is focused and imparts more energy to cascading electrons, creating the potential for arcs (see the current density distribution at the bottom of the diagram). Closer to the outer edge of the corona, weaker reactions manifest in transfer of momentum and heat with ions and neutrals. Downdraft and down-burst winds are the common result.

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Momentum transfer manifests as downdraft winds by the process of electrokinesis, which is neutral species attracted to, and mobilized by, the charged particles zooming down the electric field gradient towards ground, creating an ‘electric wind’ that moves the bulk fluid along the electric field gradient.

If the ionization rate exceeds the rate of recombination, the plasma will build a streamer, a tendril of plasma from cloud to earth, pushing a plasma generating ionization region ahead of it, and drawing behind it a cloud of cold plasma. When this plasma hits ground, a cathode spot is produced, and the electromagnetic field redistributes along the plasma channel, focusing it.

The cathode spot on the ground  draws positive charge to it, dragging neutrals, again by electrokinesis, and creating the in-flowing winds that generate a ground vortex. This is the moment of tornado touchdown, as charged air and dust flow in and spiral upwards around the invisible plasma tendril.

The action is analogous to the lightning bolt leader and positive ground streamer that meet to create a channel for lightning discharge – two seemingly separate events, organized into one coherent structure by the electric field.

The plasma current thus created is a complete circuit to ground, only it’s partially ionized, diffused with predominately neutral species. Its energy and charge densities are too low to make an arc, so it forms a complex plasma channel called a Marklund Convection.

400px-marklund-convection
Marklund convection, showing diffusion of neutral air away from current tendril (blue arrows) creating low pressure. Plasma drift (green arrows) draw positive ions at ground level, creating inflowing winds to the point of contact with the plate electrode.

Rotation is a natural consequence of the circuit. Neutral air is diffused away from the Marklund current creating low pressure. But positive ions near the ground drag air, dust and debris to the ground contact and create in-flowing winds and a sudden change in direction up, and around the tendril. The meeting of these opposing winds is the ground vortex.

The current flow in the plasma will itself rotate, taking a helical path as it interacts with the magnetic field around it. The appearance of a tornado is precisely the expected morphology of a Marklund current. Increasing current flow “spins up” the tornado.

It forms an inner, spiraling, negative current to ground and an outer spiral of positive ionic wind flowing up to the source of coronal discharge in the cloud.

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Because the tornado is a cold, partial plasma current exchanging charge between ground and atmosphere, it can be pushed by winds to create a slanted, or kinked path, and travel away from it’s point of origin.

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Evidence…

There are several tell-tale signs the electric model of tornado genesis is correct.

Wall clouds…

One evidence is the wall cloud. Wall clouds form before a tornado in a typical storm evolution. It develops rotation and sometimes its clouds can be seen to rise and fall in an agitated manner. Puffs of low level clouds are drawn to it below the main cloud base.

The wall cloud is a physical expression of the corona. As the corona gathers charge, it creates a lowering, vertical wall of cloud as ionization condenses moisture in the column of air below that is incongruous to the general slant and motion of the storm clouds and in-flowing winds. It’s visual evidence of a region where the electric field is strengthening and the corona is increasing charge density prior to establishing a current to ground with a tornado.

lakeviewThe funnel cloud doesn’t always emerge from the center of the wall cloud. The funnel often appears along the edges of the wall cloud, or from the surrounding clouds.

This is because the region of charge density is mobile and can wander. They can also multiply, creating several tornadoes.

Characteristic of parallel currents, multiple tornadoes stand off from each other as if repulsed like two parallel wires flowing current in the same direction. Rare occasions when tornadoes seem to merge, it may be that one simply dies as the other steals it’s current.

The sudden disappearance and reappearance of tornadoes, and the reported skipping, or lifting they seem to portray, are likely caused by pulsating current from an unstable coronal discharge that weakens until recombination steals the current, and then revives when the rate of ionization again overcomes the rate of recombination and a complete circuit to ground is reestablished.

Tornadoes and lightning…

As discussed in Nature’s Electrode and The Summer Thermopile, lightning frequency is highest around the central updraft and increases in frequency with the strength of the updraft wind. When a tornado forms, cloud-to-ground lightning frequency diminishes until the tornado dies, and then picks-up again to the previous baseline. It’s also found that positive lightning is more common in tornadic storms.

The latter is evidence the corona in the storm’s anvil, that spits positive lightning, is instrumental in creating the electric field strength necessary for a tornado. It amplifies the field strength affecting the negative corona in the cloud base, below, creating conditions necessary for tornadoes.

The fact that cloud-to-ground lightning dissipates as a tornado spins-up is evidence the corona is part of a coherent electric circuit, where current in one region robs current from another.

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Sights, smells and sounds…

Storms that produce tornadoes are often characterized by a greenish tint in the clouds. The green tint is excused by many scientists as a reflection of city lights. While their search for green-tinted city lights continues, the dim glow of a coronal discharge internal to the cloud formation explains the green tint.

Luminosity in the clouds and the funnel are also reported. Consensus science blames this on misidentified sources of light from lightning, city lights, or flashes from downed power lines. Some of it no doubt is, but some of it is likely the effect of coronal discharge. Lightning flashes don’t make a continuous glow.

Ionized oxygen  can recombine to produce ozone, which has a distinctive chlorine-like “gassy smell”. This smell is often reported by witnesses.

220px-tornado_infrasound_sourcesSo are hissing sounds from the base of the funnel. Funnel clouds and small tornadoes are known to produce harmonic sounds of whistling, whining, humming, or buzzing bees. As ozone is liberated it produces such a hissing sound.

Energized transmission lines subject to over-voltage conditions produce all of these same effects: faint luminescent glow, ozone production and it’s accompanying hiss and smell. It’s cause is coronal discharge.

Tornadoes also produce identifiable infra-sound. It’s inaudible to the human ear, but it can be felt. It will produce nausea, agitation and body heat, effects often felt in the presence of tornadoes – although fear might do that, too.

Lightning has been reported internal to the funnel. These may be a form of cloud-to-cloud discharge, between the counter-flowing positive and negative currents in the Marklund convection.

Tornadoes are seen to have an inner and outer column, although this is disputed by consensus scientists as an illusion. The inner column, however, is seen if the outer dusty sheath dissipates, or is blown away. This is consistent with the double wall formed in a Marklund convection.

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Double wall – an inner tube with an outer sheath of dust can be seen.

Tornadoes emit on the electromagnetic spectrum as measured by researchers. Tornadoes emit sferics, the same type of broadband radio noise lightning discharges produce.

Non-super-cell tornadoes…

220px-great_lakes_waterspoutsSo what if there is no super-cell? How do all the other vortex phenomena form – landspouts, waterspouts, gustnadoes and dust devils, and how are they related.

By the same mechanism proposed here for the super-cell tornado, only in lower energy form.

Funnel clouds, which never result in a touchdown are a tendril of Marklund convection current that begins to recombine faster than it generates ions, and it dies.

Landspouts, gustnadoes and waterspouts all begin with a surface disturbance – a vortex without a cloud, or at least not one showing a wall cloud, or rotation. These are instances of stronger ionic accumulation at ground level, creating a strong ground vortex first in easily ionized sand, or water, whereas the corona above is weak and diffuse.

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This comports with observations of twisters of all kinds, including dust devils and spouts which are seen to begin on the ground. Or water – in the case of a waterspout – where documented evolution begins with a mysterious “dark spot” on the water.

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Thunderstorms, lightning and tornadoes – all products of the same weather event – can be perfectly modeled electrically. Electromagnetic fields, ionization, current, capacitance and induction rule nature. It is evident in Nature’s every aspect, because the fractal, self-same patterns always appear.

Consensus science adheres to a gravity model that ignores this fundamental causation and instead feverishly dissects the emergent thermodynamic and fluid dynamic interactions looking for answers, like trying to tell time by taking apart the clock. They continually come up short, as a result.

The Summer Thermopile

Re-posted courtesy of Thunderbolts.info

In a previous Thunderblog, we talked about Nature’s Electrode… how a cold plasma corona is the proper electronic model for lightning genesis, and how mechanisms for ionization in a thunderstorm work.

Now let’s take in the bigger picture to get a more coherent look at a thunderstorm.

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The proper electrical analogy for a super-cell storm is a thermopile.

A thermopile is an electrical circuit that you’ve probably seen in use. Ice coolers made for cars that plug into the cigarette lighter are one example.

Thermocouple_circuit_Ktype_including_voltmeter_temperature.svgThermo-couples are an instrument to measure temperature used in your car and home air conditioning and heating units.

The thermo-couple is a circuit that couldn’t be simpler. All it takes is two, or more wires of different conductivity connected in series. The effect can also be made with solid state materials similar to solar cells.

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Current generation from thermo-electric effect.

The different electrical properties of the dissimilar wires create a temperature difference – one conductor chills and the other heats up  in the presence of current; or vice versa, current is produced by a temperature difference.

Now, hold that thought for a moment – current is produced by a temperature difference. Temperature is wholly a consequence of electrodynamics. There are all kinds of complexities about temperature and radiation and how it’s transported by conduction and convection, but the bottom line is electricity.

There are three mathematical relationships that describe the conversion of current to heat and heat to current in terms of a circuit, called the Seebeck, Peltier and Thomson effects. The details aren’t needed for this discussion because they describe different conditions and aspects of the same thing. Current produces heat, and heat produces current, provided the right dissimilar materials are properly arranged in the circuit.

The relevance to a thunderhead is in the central updraft core of the storm, which becomes a thermo-couple circuit. It’s a flow of wind bearing ionic matter which produces a current.

In Nature’s  Electrode, we discussed several mechanisms for how ions form a cold plasma corona by virtue of field emissions in a strong electric field. The updraft rapidly chills as it rises, becoming more saturated with condensate and ionization. It also shrinks. The central updraft column gets denser as it rises, so the column has to shrink in volume, and this causes it to speed-up.

250px-ShelfcloudThe many changes to the state of the air in the updraft changes the conductivity of the air in the column. The updraft column is electrically no different than a wire of changing conductivity, which in the presence of current, will exhibit a thermo-electric effect.

It won’t maybe do it, it’s gonna do it. It has to do it. In the presence of a huge electric field, a wet, surface-wind rising into the cold dry stratosphere is going to cause a whopper electric current. If anyone doubts this, go look at a thunderstorm.

When there is a sequence of several conductors of different conductivity in series, the thermo-electric effect can be amplified by adding more junctions. This is called a thermopile. It’s several thermo-couples connected together.

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Thermopile Circuit

A super-cell thunderstorm is a thermopile. It has more than one ionization event and each one changes the column’s conductivity in a feedback that increases current and amplifies ionization.

The rising central updraft ionizes where the moisture is saturating and condensing, or freezing, at specific temperature layers. All around the column is a shear zone between it and the surrounding air, and this is where the ions go to collect. The shear zone is an interface – a dielectric barrier that attracts charged species to it.

Again, let’s refer back to our previous discussion of Nature’s Electrode: we discussed how ionization occurs at different altitudes as the moisture in the air condenses, supersaturates and freezes.

It’s been known since the beginning of the twentieth century, that a fast-moving charged particle will cause sudden condensation of water along its path. In 1911, Charles Wilson used this principle to devise the cloud chamber so he could photograph the tracks of  fast-moving electrons.

In 2007, Henrik Svensmark published a theory on galactic cosmic ray influence on cloud formation, and later demonstrated his theory in a cloud chamber at Cern, demonstrating certain cloud formations are catalyzed by cosmic rays ionizing the atmosphere.

These are examples of ionization causing condensation. Now let’s consider condensation causing ionization.

Water vapor condensing into droplets self-ionize into cations and anions. In the huge electric field of a thunderstorm, the ions are torn apart as they form, filling the rising air with charged species. This condensation event forms the first corona, a negative corona around the central updraft with charge density concentrated in the lower clouds where condensation first occurs.

Above 1% volume of charged species, the air will exhibit the dynamics of a plasma. Plasma acts as a coherent fluid organized by the electromagnetic field. It seeks balance in an equi-potential layer transverse to the electric field, so it spills out from the walls of the column and forms ‘sheets’, which is what is detected in thunderstorms: ‘sheets’ of charged species.

noaaelectrical-charge-in-storm-cloudsThey actually have more complex geometry than a ‘sheet’. They organize into plasma coronas that actively spit out electrons and ions in channeled currents. Coronas have a geometry and produce effects that depend on the polarity of the charged species mix.

The channels of discharge they create explain every aspect of  a super-cell thunderstorms. Coronas explain rain, downdrafts, tornadoes and lightning.  They explain cloud-to-ground lightning and positive lightning; intra-cloud lightning and inter-cloud lightning. They explain sprites, elves and gnomes – electrical discharges to space that are the Earth’s equivalent to a solar flare, caused by the same thing – corona. They explain the shape of wall clouds, beaver-tails, the meso-cyclone and anvil.

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Because this is the electric model of a thunderstorm it’s closer to the truth. It’s not that convection doesn’t occur, it does. But convection is heat transfer and that is fundamentally electric, like everything else. Pressure and temperature are intimately related as physical expressions of electrodynamics.

290px-Chaparral_Supercell_2The anvil top is another coronal expression where the water freezes to ice. The ionic mix here is different and a positive corona is the result. It has a different shape, being a broad diameter and less dense in terms of charge density.

The coronas are the thermopile’s different current junctions, where charge bleeds out of the central updraft column, just as it will from a power line if the insulation is damaged. Atmosphere is a leaky insulator. It’s the strength of the electromagnetic field that gives the storm it’s shape.

And once the motor gets started – the conveyor belt of wet wind in the updraft keeps rev’ing as charge density builds. The rain curtain and downdraft are the same current looping and dumping hydrolyzed charge in the form of rain at the exhaust of the updraft.

It’s a looping current from ground to atmosphere, and back to ground, in a continuously changing conductive path through several temperature regimes – in other words, it’s a thermopile circuit.

And so builds the strength of the corona, until it spits electrons that avalanche into lightning bolts. If conditions are right, a charged corona will lower towards the ground, abating it’s lightning to send downwards a twisting tendril of plasma, while stirring ground winds below into a vortex. A tornado is born of a corona.

Slide2In the diagram, a point electrode generates a corona opposed to a plate electrode connected to ground, with a gap in between. This is a similar circuit to a storm except the corona in the clouds would not have the geometry of a point electrode, but likely a flattened toroidal shape.

In the region in the gap labelled drift region, channels of current are created based on the charge density of the region of corona from which it radiates. The outer edges where charge density and electric field tension is lowest, the corona can’t make lightning, but it still spits electrons that drift towards ground. The drift region of a corona creates unipolar winds as drifting electrons drag ions and neutral matter along by electrokinesis.

Slide3Sudden and intense down-bursts and mammatus clouds are highly mysterious to atmospheric scientists and they attribute them to density bombs – pockets of dense heavy air that rapidly sink from the clouds. These violent downdrafts will slap airliners from the sky. They aren’t density bombs – they are unipolar winds and ionizing tufts from the anvil corona.

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The entire morphology of a thunderstorm is explained by a thermopile circuit with leaky insulation. But that isn’t all it is. In Electric Earth Theory, there is a more significant meaning.

The looping circuit of a super-cell is a weak form of electrical expression known as a coronal loop. Coronal loops are the result of the corona’s themselves moving relative to the plate electrode. The differential movement creates an offset between the center of charge density in the sky versus the center of charge density on the ground, distorting the electric field. It’s a dog chasing a cat that can never catch-up – negative chasing positive polarity in a wave.

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The result is it bends the current into a loop. It goes up in a wind born discharge of current and comes down, energy expended and recombined into rain. If charge builds enough, though, the loop breaks out into a fully realized discharge. The current breaks through the dielectric barrier of the atmosphere to splash charge into space. On the Sun we call them Solar Flares, and Coronal Mass Ejections. On Earth we call them Sprites, Elves and Gnomes.

So, here we are in the world of plasma. Double layers, Alfven waves, z-pinches and corona – it happens in our everyday lives as much as it does on the surface of the Sun – because it’s all the same thing.

Prominence_(PSF)So too, we have symmetry. Not the artificial symmetry of mathematical equations and categories consensus science keeps force fitting to Nature, but Nature’s true symmetry of nested harmonic repetition.

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Solar Coronal Loop

Such organization and harmonic resonance between phenomena across all orders of scale is not the result of random anything. It’s the result of electricity.

The same phenomena is found on any planetary body that carries an internal current that forms an electromagnetic field. The coronal loops are ultimately caused by the voltage between the magnetosphere and Telluric currents below Earth’s crust, just as they occur above and below the photosphere of the Sun and in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus.

The electrical stress across the layers of atmosphere and crust is charge building on layers of dielectric, which is what a capacitor is. A storm is an expression of capacitor discharge.

Tornadoes are a harmonic fractal repetition of the super-cell storm as a whole. They are nested coronal loops inside the bigger loop of the storm. Because they are smaller and generate from an intense charge density region of the corona, the energy is more concentrated.

Look again at the image of a solar coronal loop and see there is a smaller loop of higher intensity. This is the effect of an embedded harmonic repetition; and that is what a tornado is to the storm it’s born from. But, as always, it’s more complicated than that. We’ll delve deeper into tornadoes next time to complete the picture of a thunderstorm.

Nature’s Electrode

Re-posted courtesy of Thunderbolts.info

The following image is from NOAA, and illustrates the consensus theory of lightning genesis. As you can see, it shows electrons collecting like marbles in a sink, accelerating down a slippery slope into what looks like a drain.

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A typical cloud-to-ground lightning needs a billion-trillion electrons. Are electrons just randomly floating in the clouds when suddenly, a billion-trillion of them jump into an imaginary drainpipe like this image portrays?

The consensus notion is that charge builds in thunderstorms because of static electricity. The friction of hail stones and rain colliding in the storm generates static charge, like rubbing a balloon against hair, or shuffling feet on carpet.

Positive and negative charged particles from this friction separate into layers according to the consensus notion. The layers where they are found “pooling” are at distinct thermal boundaries. So it’s thought these thermal boundary layers keep the “pools of charge” apart, except when they arc.

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Super-cell electrical anatomy

The situation is depicted in this NOAA image of a super-cell, where layers of charge are shown stratified inside the cloud. To become coherent, stratified and able to build enough charge for a five-mile long lightning bolt – a billion-trillion electrons worth – the charge density required implies a plasma is involved.

In fact it’s more than an implication. How else could so much charge collect to create such arcs? There is no wire in the sky, no battery terminal, or electrode to generate an arc. These “pools of charge” must be plasma’s.

It only takes 1% of neutral air to be ionized for it to behave as a plasma. Lightning genesis requires a plasma, because that is what forms the “electrode” in the sky. Let’s consider lightning and how, why and where plasma forms to play a role in making it.

Electric Sky

We know Earth’s atmosphere is an electric circuit. It carries charge, current and voltage.

The air is a weak conductor with a variable, vertical current between the ground and the ionosphere of 1 – 3 pico-amps per square meter. The resistance of the atmosphere is 200 ohms. The “clear sky” voltage potential averages 200 to 400-thousand volts between Earth and the upper atmosphere.

At any given moment, there are about 2,000 lightning storms occurring worldwide. To create lightning, the electric field potential must overcome the dielectric breakdown of air at 3 million volts per meter. It does so because the electric field in a thunderstorm jumps to over 300-million volts.

A typical lightning bolt is three to five miles long, and momentarily delivers about 30,000 amps to ground. The collective current from a typical storm delivers from .5 to 1 amp.

The circuit is completed – a worldwide current from Earth to sky, and storms that return it from sky to ground. The 2,000 concurrent lightning storms, each about an amp-and-a-half, means this worldwide current is about 3000 amps.

Only that isn’t the whole story, because there is much more science doesn’t know about Earth’s circuitry. There is also an exchange from atmosphere to space, and space to atmosphere. This has yet to be accurately measured, or understood.

The existence of plasma discharges from thunderstorms to space, called Sprites, Gnomes and Elves for their brief and ethereal appearance, is a relatively recent scientific discovery. Their genesis, power and frequency is far from understood. Wal Thornhill discusses these phenomena in much more detail in his article, The Balloon Goes up over Lightning.

Cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, adding charge continuously. The rate Earth is exposed to solar wind fluctuates widely, both because the Solar current fluctuates and so does the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. Sometimes the shield it provides moves around, letting more cosmic rays enter through “holes”.

Electricity flows around Earth in Birkeland currents, molded by the Geomagnetic field. How these currents fluctuate in density, and the resulting induced currents in the atmosphere and ground, is another area of scientific uncertainty.

Because of the variability, variety and the fact they haven’t noticed until recently, consensus science can’t yet understand how much current is entering, or leaving Earth’s atmospheric system from space.

The ground also carries potential that varies. Except for the monochrome view of seismic returns, we can’t even see what is below the Earth’s crust to comprehend the flow of current there. Nor whether, how, or where Earth’s current might enter the atmosphere. For electricity, boundary layers like the Earth’s crust isn’t an impermeable barrier, it’s an electrode.

There is a “cavity” defined by the surface of the Earth and the inner edge of the ionosphere. It’s been calculated that at any moment, the total charge residing in this cavity is 500,000 coulombs. Electromagnetic waves reflect from the boundary of the cavity – the ground and ionosphere – and establish quasi-standing electromagnetic waves at resonant frequencies. W. O. Schumann predicted the resonant properties of the cavity in 1952, and they were first detected in 1954. They are called Schumann’s resonances and are measured as broadband electromagnetic impulses at frequencies in the range of 5 to 50 Hz.

The atmosphere is undeniably electric. It’s not a few ions benignly floating around in the air, occasionally forming into “pools of charge”, but a globally active and coherent circuit. What should that tell us about lightning? Mustn’t it also be part of this coherent resonant system. Doesn’t it beg for a better model than marbles in a drainpipe?

Fortunately, there is a model to look to. It’s called electronics.

Atmospheric arcs created in a circuit are generally recognized to occur by thermionic emission. Everyone has seen a hot cathode arcing, as in a welding arc, where electrons are freed from the metal surface of the electrode by heat. The metal is heated by its own resistance to current, and begins emitting electrons above a certain temperature threshold specific to the electrode material. The temperature for many materials is thousands of degrees.

Another form of discharge less well recognized is field emission, or cold cathode emissions. They do not generate electrons by thermionic emission. The electrode warms, but not appreciably because heat is not what frees the electrons. It’s the electric field strength – a high voltage potential, that strips electrons from whatever material is present, including the air itself.

When this happens, the field forms ionic matter into a plasma structure, called a corona. Corona is the electrode in the sky that discharges lightning.

Coronal discharge is used in a variety of ways in modern technology. It requires a high voltage, which is precisely what is present in a thunderstorm – 300 million volts, or one thousand times stronger than in clear weather.

Corona is the only electrical phenomena that can result in a non-thermionic discharge under atmospheric conditions. It’s the driving force of the storm and the generator of lightning.

Corona occurs in a layer perpendicular to the electric field where the field strips electrons from atoms, sending them downward at near the speed of light along the field gradient, to collide inevitably with another atom.

The collision strips more electrons free to follow the electric field, leaving ions behind. The region where electrons are stripped is a cold, partial plasma. Increasing charge density by stripping and collision amplifies and shapes the electric field, which self organizes into a corona. The “pools of charge” layered in the atmosphere are not pools of positive and negative charge as depicted, but coronas that exhibit positive, or negative polarity, composed of some mixture of ions and neutral species electrically interacting.

animation_7aFree electrons continue the process of collision in what is called an avalanche. Avalanche is portrayed in the step-leader process depicted in the image, and is a witnessed precursor to a lightning bolt.

The avalanche is one half of the picture, however. Lightning comes from below, as much as from above. The electric field also pools positive ions on the ground below the storm. Ionic streamers, filaments of positively charged air stretch up the electric field towards the clouds. A lightning bolt occurs when the cascading step leader and streamer meet, completing a plasma channel. None of this is seen with the naked eye. It’s all dark current up to this point.

animation_16aThe lightning channel is complete when it connects to a ground streamer. The connection allows a dump of electrons from the corona to ground. Then, heavier, and significantly slower ions, carry up the channel in a return stroke.

The return stroke can be seen in the image as the bright flash that occurs the moment the first tendril of the avalanche current strikes Earth, leaving only one path glowing after the flash.

Corona provides the reservoir of charge and the dark current mechanism for avalanche required to make an arc. This is what is missing in the consensus notions.

The other consensus notion, that static charge builds from hailstone collisions, is also inadequate.

A study using interferometer  and Doppler radar to correlate lightning with updraft and downdraft winds, showed that lightning forms in low pressure winds around the storm cell central updraft of warm moist air. As a storm organizes and the updraft speeds up, lightning frequency dramatically intensifies.

220px-lightning_over_oradea_romania_croppedUpdraft winds don’t produce much lightning until they reach 10 to 20 mph. Then strike frequency escalates with updraft speed. From 20 to 50 mph wind speeds, lightning frequency might be 5 to 20 strikes per minute, whereas above 90 mph, the flash rate can exceed one strike per second.

It’s like a motor running and the central updraft is the primary mover.

Water in a thunderstorm updraft goes through all of it’s phases. From water vapor, to cloud condensate, to rain droplet, to ice. The structure of a thunderstorm is oriented vertically around the central updraft. The phase changes stratify charge at temperatures where the transitions create ionization events.

Water is self ionizing. Water in its liquid state undergoes auto-ionization when two water molecules form one hydroxide anion (OH-) and one hydronium cation (H3O+). Water can further be ionized by impurity, such as carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid. Water condensing into clouds and droplets within a strong electric field provides an ionization event.

Water can become supersaturated – rising above 100% relative humidity if air is rapidly cooled, for example, by rising suddenly in an updraft. The supersaturation instability provides another opportunity for ionization.

Ice is typically a positive charge carrier, meaning that current flows over it’s surface in streams of positive ions. Flash freezing water onto ice, as hail stones grow, provides another opportunity for ionization.

Each layer of air in a storm has different temperature, humidity, pressure and velocity, transporting different phases of water at different partial pressures, which means the conductivity of the air is changing too.

This last item is important to remember. More about how this creates coronas requires a broader look at the circuitry of a super-cell thunderstorm, which you will find interesting because it will show how coronas produce other effects. Perhaps it even explains all of the effects of thunderstorms. The electrical circuitry of a super-cell will be continued in the next companion article on Earth’s electric weather.

Over the series of articles we’ll present, corona and it’s role in our weather will lead back to geology and previously presented discussions of Arc Blast and how mountains are built. Like all things electric, fractal forms repeat such that a coherent picture emerges, and boy, have we got a picture for you.

Thank you.

Trailer Park Cosmology – 6

[Note to the reader… Sorry for the long hiatus. Family matters took me away on a long trip, and then I had to prepare for my presentation at the upcoming Electric Universe Conference. I’ll excuse it as research, because the long road trip allowed me to see things that not only confirmed some hypothesis, they also brought new things to light. Preparing for the conference helped focus ideas. The benefit will come out in later chapters.]

Chapter Eight – When I was Young

My Father liked cars that had a sense of style.  The chicken ranch he built, and dairy route he owned, never produced income for lots of shiny, new things, so he bought salvageable luxury models.

The first I remember was a mid-fifties Cadillac Coupe DeVille. White, with blue vinyl interior, small fins and titty-bumpers. It carried an air of panache and comfort that newer models didn’t have, and a chrome superman on the hood that  I couldn’t keep my grimy young hands from touching. A classic car hoarder would pay dearly for it at auction today.

The air conditioning blasted from variable azimuth, round louvered vents, precisely fitted to the little shelf behind the rear seats. I used to climb onto that shelf and lay, letting the louvered vent blow up my shorts. It felt good after skittering out of the intense heat of a summer day.

Only for a minute though, because the fucker blew ice. It was the coldest air conditioning ever made. The nylon seats wouldn’t hold heat for anything, so long trips became a battle against exposure in my Mother’s lap, snuggled into her sweater. Dad kept the air cranked full – always. Mom wore a sweater in the car on 110 degree days.

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Later, he bought a baby blue ’61 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. The seats were beautifully woven, silky fabric, bordered in blue leather. I longed to touch that delicate fabric, but never got the chance. It was covered with clear, diamond patterned, plastic sheeting, which remained until it was towed away, peeling and curling after decades of intense UV bombardment.

Sunday drives were the ultimate relaxation for Mom and Dad. After Mom took us to church, Dad would be waiting – he had no use for church except funerals and weddings. A long Sunday drive was a time for them to get away from the constant toil of caring for kids and chickens; washing, grading and crating eggs, cooking meals and pulling weeds. Invariably, because of where we lived, those drives brought us to the mountains.

I’ve always been fascinated by mountain shapes. There is a harmony in them that pushes through the jaggedness. Something that draws my attention and never let’s go. Those post-church, Sunday drives bent my mind to their cactus studded slopes and sharp cliffs. Something ghostly seemed to resonate there, the peaks and hoodoos conveyed a presence, like tombstones in a cemetery of bare, windy slopes. I’d lay my head against the window and fly in my mind across the landscape, the car’s vibration embedding the scene in my brain.

We were never poor by any means. We had those classy, slightly used cars and the biggest home on the block, but what we had was a result of my parent’s backbreaking work more than profitable business. I didn’t notice, except for the rare cuss words at the end of the month when Dad paid bills, cranking the handle on the old Burroughs adding machine. It seemed we lived a perfectly fine life. It wasn’t until I made friends from other neighborhoods at school that I realized how low we stood on the economic scale.

I can still remember Sunday dinners that began with Mom and Grandma cutting the heads off chickens and hanging them by their feet on the clothes line to bleed. The smell of scalded chicken feathers is forever en-trained in my brain.

Looking back, I know I was extremely privileged. I wish children today could experience such adventure and fun growing up. There is no way an anodized video game world compares. Besides, in today’s world, social workers would intervene.

We spent our days riding go-carts powered with lawn mower engines, or playing hide and seek among manure, rusty nails and frayed wiring in the chicken house. There were miles of deserts to explore just down our unpaved street, where we caught lizards in loops of string, shot pellet guns and raced minibikes.

Swords and blow guns came from pieces of cut bamboo, shields from the lids of old chicken feed bins. Forts were constructed from milk crates and discarded plywood, and battles were waged with dirt clods and dried chicken manure.

It was a treat to go to the library. There, my brother learned how to make gunpowder. Back then, one could buy sulfur and salt-peter at the drug store, and mixed with pulverized charcoal bricks, we made enough incendiary material to fry every anthill on the property.

It’s not that Mom and Dad didn’t care about our safety and well being. Dad kept our ears and nose clean with his handkerchief, Mom kept us fed and dressed in T-shirts and jeans that hung, fashionably, an inch above the ankle. Every time we’d play in the old junk pile of two-by-fours and rusty tin behind the chicken house, Mom warned us to watch for Black Widow spiders and snakes.

There were a few minor injuries, like the rusted ten-penny nail that stabbed through my foot and kept me out of school for two weeks, or the slingshot I nearly put my brothers eye out with, but all-in-all, we came through a wild youth mostly unscathed. What was special was, we had to exercise our imaginations. Except for the water rockets, balsa wood airplanes, and squirt guns we bought with weed-pulling money at the five-and-dime, most of our fun required some ingenuity.

When it was too hot to go outside, there were books. The American Standard Encyclopaedia answered any question, with type charts for mammals, fish and reptiles and pages of transparent overlays that showed the assembly of the human body. The Book of Knowledge had classic black and white photos of sphinxes, Buddhas, pyramids and people in far away places who wore giant ornaments that deformed their dark, naked skin. The one and only constant subscription we ever had was to National Geographic. Fascinating stuff to explore under the cool blast of the coolers when the Sun was so hot it blistered our skin.

Dad fueled a deep curiosity in me when he pondered questions like: what happened to the Maya, the Olmec and the Anasazi. He was fascinated by these enigmatic societies who vanished from their vast empires leaving pyramid cities and creepy cliff dwellings. He knew there was more mystery to our past than we were being led to believe.

Sunday school taught me of impossible events my burgeoning rationality couldn’t quite accept. Societies of good and evil, cataclysmic floods, pillars of fire and prophecies ascribed to dreams and voices from heaven. I couldn’t understand why the Bible told stories of things that can’t actually happen, but they captured my imagination.

Life in a raw environment forced a kind of situational awareness that I don’t see in kids today. Forced to look up from their smart phones, they exhibit a dull wasteland behind the eyes. They imagine they know what space-time is, but how could they? Science has yet to figure it out.

The virtual reality of video, the witless humor and vapid, phony portrayals on TV, the idiotic pursuit of celebrity endorsed tennis shoes; the self important culture we live in is so far removed from a life actually lived, I have trouble relating.

So I’ve returned to the property where I grew-up. I live in the tiny house my Grandmother lived, in the trailer park Dad built where the chicken house once stood. It’s the place I sat with her on the cool cement steps while she traced lines on my palm to foretell what a long life I’d live. It’s the house where she’d give me a piece of dough from the biscuit batter to play with. Where she’d sit with my Mom and pick ticks from the dog and crush them in napkins on top of the old gas heater, talking the afternoon away.

Now I live on little income and no bills. Instead I have time to think, read, write and explore. I keep my old Range Rover loaded with gear, ready at a whim to go camping any day I can afford gas. I prefer this to the Marin County, high salaried slavery I lived a few years ago. I couldn’t go back if I tried. I miss eating sushi three times a week, and roaring my Ducati through wine country on weekends, but that’s about all I really miss.

After shelter, food and sex, there isn’t anything I need except joy. Joy from made stuff simply isn’t sustainable. Buying a new thing brings fleeting satisfaction that requires constant feeding. I find it’s better not to trigger the appetite, and find true joy in more lasting pursuits. Fortunately, my childhood taught me how to find it.

It may sound like pure laziness, but instead of spending time chasing dollars to pay someone for something I don’t need, I prefer to spend time paying attention. It isn’t that I seek return to a simpler, less technological time when people scrubbed clothes clean on rocks, or bled chickens on the clothes-line for a Sunday meal, but I do think we have lost an appreciation for reality. We are no longer grounded to Earth. We have become a culture of dependents, depending on the scientists and politicians to figure things out, and people of no better means to dig our ditches and farm, cook and package our food. It’s a big mistake.

Technology is fabulous and has raised lives out of the mud, but without any mud between our toes, we forget we are animals of the Earth. We live the fallacy we are somehow above it, immunized against it, and on the brink of controlling it. We have no need for God, because there is an illusion we are Gods.

Attempts to recapture Nature buying overpriced organic produce at a farmer’s market fails to bring us in contact with the dirt it grew in. Actually doing something worthwhile has been replaced by virtue signalling concern, satisfied with a small percent of tax deductible, disposable income. Real adventure has been replaced by Disneyland, or, at best, a guard-railed weekend in a National Park. Watching nature at a safe distance is not truly experiencing it. It just displays how disconnected we are from it, and dependent on the those economically enslaved to bend their backs.

I believe it is a form of illness. We are removed from Nature so far we can no longer recognize what it is. Reality has drifted away and we are losing the thing that makes humanity special – the ability to comprehend. The scientific minds we depend on for our technological culture are the least comprehending of all.

Science has all but given-up on experiment, depending instead on mathematical models. The problem is that numbers can be made to do anything, whether true, or imagined. Powerful computers allow inhuman calculations that purportedly simulate Nature, yet scientists don’t have a clue why mathematics works to model Nature in the first place.

That is, consensus science doesn’t have a clue. There are a handful of people rediscovering the principles of the Universe. I say rediscovering, because it’s quite apparent mankind once did comprehend. They left markers for us to read, but science without any philosophical wisdom has led us to believe these are the relics of ignorant superstitious societies with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do. Yet we couldn’t recreate their feats if we tried.

Pyramids and megaliths encode lost knowledge and great universal principles our science is too ignorant to interpret. Seriously stupid scientists are the greatest criminals we face, because they mislead us at every turn with their critical, but not creative thinking, and profoundly naive hubris.

Rediscovered principles go by the name of Vortex Mathematics. Vortex Math describes vibration. The universal energy of the atom, of sound, of light, and life itself, is encoded in a math the ancient “stone age” people understood. It’s the math of electricity and harmonics – the unifying force of the entire cosmos. It’s the encoded ether of information that governs fractal form and function; the algorithm for the Grand Simulation.

The first modern person to perceive this was Nicola Tesla. In his words: “If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe.”

Within his mind alone, with no calculator, or particle accelerator, he discovered alternating current and transformed all of society. Through his insight, our lives were electrified. He turned darkness to light, which we have used unerringly to plunge our souls back into darkness. How ironic is that?

Of modern science, Tesla said this: “Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ”

Contemporary with Tesla, was Kristian Birkeland. He translated the findings of pioneers in real science; Faraday, Maxwell, Franklin and Tesla, to name a few, into an understanding of the Solar System itself. He discovered the electrical link between the Sun and the Earth. Though few believed him, his work was verified when mankind fired satellites into space and found his theories of magnetic fields and aurora were real after-all.

Immanuel Velikovsky came next. Though his approach and reason for discovery were motivated differently, his insight was more profound. As a psychologist who studied under Freud, he ignored the arrogant scientists to seek understanding of Social pathology through an examination of our past. Unlike most of science, he didn’t relegate ancient mythology to superstitious ignorance, he assumed credence in myth and legend.

Earth has been through many cataclysmic episodes. Anyone bright enough and brave enough not to live in the paradigm knows this. Velikovsky was perhaps the first person to take the Red Pill, and break with the paradigm enforced by the less inventive minions who followed his good friend Einstein.

He compared mythologies from all corners of the world and across millennia to observe they all said the same thing. Once this observation was made, he concluded what any dummy would: terrible things occurred that nearly wiped mankind from the face of the Earth.

Beyond that he had a brilliant grasp of Nature to the extent his predictions have far exceeded those of modern astrophysicists – who are still seeking validation for whatever the fuck Einstein was talking about.

Space-time? I guess it’s a cool idea, but it doesn’t really fly. Space is just space we can measure with a stick. There is only one time and that is now. Past and future are concepts to describe what was and will be. These aren’t things that can be modified and never have been in any experiment. Velikovsky predicted, among many things, the heat on Venus and the radio emissions of Jupiter. Tangible things we have since verified with true measurements, not abstract, engineered simulations.

Many now recognize this, It’s become an industry to itself. From scientific realists like those in the Electric Universe community, to bumbling wannabe theorists like the “Ancient Alien” crowd, millions of people have come to realize we have been misled. I hate to say we are lied to because I prefer to think of modern theoretical science as simply well meaning but unwise, rather than evil. Science counts things and catalogs them, like an accountant of Nature who can sort things into columns but hasn’t a clue what they mean.

The stories of the Bible, I’ve come to realize, actually contain more truth and wisdom than any University textbook. I don’t take this upon faith, though. I am not religious, nor do I believe in God – at least not some bearded man in the clouds. The impossible stories I learned in Sunday School have a basis in physics. The ghostly remnants of that understanding are still jealously guarded by secret societies, architects and religions. Whether they know what they mean is a puzzle to me, yet they show-up in architecture and symbols everywhere.

We’ll continue this discussion, but first let’s return to the fractal exhibits of Nature. We can finish with weather by examining the most horrific expression we can witness in today’s world of calm ignorance – the Whirwind.

Chapter Nine – Cold Dusty Plasma

Previously, in Nature’s Electrode, we looked at an Electric Earth model for lightning genesis driven by a plasma corona formed from condensing and freezing water vapor in the central updraft of thunderstorms. We also looked at the thunderstorm itself, and an electrical model for the circuit that drives it, called a thermopile. Now let’s consider the most dramatic weather event of all, the tornado, and how these massively destructive whirlwinds are also formed by a plasma corona.

Discharge from a corona is predominately dark current, invisible to the eye. Cloud-to-ground lightning arcs come from high current density regions of the corona, primarily surrounding the central updraft where current from the updraft intensifies the electrical tension. Higher voltage focuses discharging electrons the way a lens focuses light, into a continuous plasma channel. When the channel connects with ground and discharges a hot current, it’s wrapped tightly in it’s own magnetic field, in what is called a “Z” pinch.

Moving away from the high electric field region of the corona, free electrons still spit at the ground, but lack the energy and focus to avalanche all the way, leaving instead ionized gas that is said to drift, yet the electric field still shapes the drifting ions into a dark current channel.

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Above, the center of the coronal discharge is focused and imparts more energy to cascading electrons, creating the potential for arcs (see the current density distribution at the bottom of the diagram). Closer to the edge of the corona, or ionization region, weaker reactions manifest in transfer of momentum and heat with ions and neutrals. Downdraft and down-burst winds are the common result.

slide2Momentum transfer manifests as downdraft winds by the process of electrokinesis, which is when neutral species follow the moving charged particles, creating an ‘electric wind’ that moves the bulk fluid along the electric field gradient.

If the ionization rate exceeds the rate of recombination, the plasma will build a streamer, a tendril of plasma from cloud to earth, pushing the ionization region ahead of it, and drawing behind it a cloud of cold plasma. When this plasma hits ground, a cathode spot is produced, and the electric field redistributes along the plasma channel.

The cathode spot on the ground draws positive charge to it, dragging neutrals, again, by electrokinesis, and creating a ground vortex. This is the moment of tornado touchdown, as charged air and dust flow in and spiral upwards around the invisible plasma tendril.

The action is analogous to the lightning bolt leader and positive ground streamer that meet to create a channel for arc discharge – two separated events, organized into one coherent structure by the electric field.

The plasma current thus created is a complete circuit to ground, only it’s partially ionized, diffused with predominately neutral species. Its energy and charge densities are too low to make an arc, so it forms a complex plasma channel called Marklund Convection.

400px-marklund-convection
Marklund convection, showing diffusion of neutral air away from current tendril (blue arrows) creating low pressure. Plasma drift (green arrows) draw positive ions at ground level, creating inflowing winds to the point of contact with the plate electrode.

Rotation is a natural consequence for two reasons. Neutral air is diffused away from the Marklund current creating low pressure. But positive ions near the ground drag air, dust and debris to the ground contact and create in-flowing winds and a sudden change in direction up, and around the tendril. The meeting of these opposing winds is, by definition, a vortex.

But current in plasma will itself rotate, taking a helical path as it interacts with the magnetic field around it. The appearance of a tornado is precisely what one would expect from such a current. Increasing current flow “spins up” the tornado. It forms an inner spiraling negative current to ground and an outer spiral of positive ionic wind flowing up to the source of coronal discharge.

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Because the tornado is a cold, partial plasma carrying a significant mass of neutral air and dust, the corona driving it can be pushed by winds to create a slanted, or even kinked path, and travel away from it’s point of origin.

classicsupercell

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Evidence…

If tornadoes are caused by coronal discharge generating a Marklund convection current from cloud-to-ground, what are some tell-tale signs?

Wall clouds…

One evidence is the wall cloud. Wall clouds form before a tornado in typical super-cell evolution. It will develop rotation and sometimes its clouds can be seen to rise and fall in an agitated manner. Puffs of low level clouds are drawn to it below the main cloud base. It creates a vertical wall of cloud inconsistent to the general slant of the storm and winds in-flowing to it.

This is evidence of the vertical orientation of the electric field created by the coronal discharge. The electric field doesn’t pay attention to the wind.

lakeviewThe funnel cloud doesn’t always emerge from the center of the wall cloud. The funnel often appears along the edges of the wall cloud, or from the surrounding clouds.

This is because the tendrils of current are mobile on the negative electrode and can wander. They can also multiply, creating multiple tornadoes.

Characteristic of parallel currents, multiple tornadoes stand off from each other as if repulsed like two parallel wires flowing current in the same direction. Rare occasions when tornadoes seem to merge, one simply dies as the other steals it’s current.

The sudden disappearance and reappearance of tornadoes, and the skipping, or lifting they portray, is inconsistent with simple fluid momentum, but is consistent with a pulsating current from an unstable coronal discharge. Recombination steals the current, and then revives when the rate of ionization reestablishes to complete the circuit to ground.

Tornadoes and lightning…

When a tornado forms, it’s been noted that cloud-to-ground lightning frequency diminishes until the tornado dies, and then picks-up again to the baseline level. This is evidence the electric field has re-aligned along the Marklund convection in the non-ionizing plasma region, sapping energy from the ionizing plasma that manifests lightning and migrating it to the drift region of the corona.

It’s also been noted by observers that positive lightning originating from the anvil cloud is more common in tornadic thunderstorms. This implies a strong positive corona in the anvil plays a role in causing tornadoes, amplifying the electric field.

Sights, smells and sounds…

Tornadoes are formed by cold, dark current, so light emissions aren’t evident, at least below the clouds. Storms that produce tornadoes are often said to have a greenish tint in the clouds, however. The green tint is excused by many scientists as a reflection of city lights, and their search for green city lights continues. The glow of ionization internal to the cloud formation explains the green tint.

Luminosity in the clouds and the funnel are also reported. Consensus science blames this on misidentified sources of light from lightning, city lights, or flashes from downed power lines. Some of it no doubt is, but more likely it is the effect of coronal discharge. Lightning flashes don’t make a continuous glow.

Ionized oxygen  can recombine to produce ozone, which has a distinctive chlorine-like smell. This is commonly noted by witnesses.

220px-tornado_infrasound_sourcesThey also report hissing sounds from tendrils at the base of funnels. Funnel clouds and tornadoes are known to produce harmonic sounds of whistling, whining, humming, or buzzing bees. As ozone is liberated it produces such a hissing sound.

Energized transmission lines subject to over-voltage conditions produce all of these effects: faint luminescent glow, ozone production and it’s accompanying hiss and smell. It’s cause is coronal discharge.

Tornadoes also produce identifiable infra-sound. It’s inaudible to the human ear, but it can be felt. It can produce nausea, agitation and body heat… not that a tornado really needs infra-sound to do that.

Tornadoes have an inner and outer column. The inner column is seen if the outer dusty sheath has little dust to obscure it. This is consistent with the double wall formed in Marklund convection.

cordell
Double wall – an inner tube with an outer sheath of dust can be seen.

There goes Aunt Em…

A good friend who had the misfortune of being in a tornado, said he was momentarily lifted from the bathtub he was hiding in because he was weightless. He swears no wind was lifting him – he was simply weightless. Stories from other survivors also report the sensation of momentary weightlessness, floating as if no wind was pushing. This is likely because of electrokinesis.

At ground level, the accumulation of positive charge beneath the influence of the electric field from the storm may be charging items, including people and lending them an attraction to the electrode overhead.

Perhaps this explains other odd events reported. For instance a house demolished, yet a table sits with a glass of water in the middle of the carnage untouched. Maybe if you don’t want to get picked up and carried away, give yourself a negative charge. Of course, too much of that will kill you, too.

Tornadoes emit on the electromagnetic spectrum as measured by researchers. Electric fields are detected and tornadoes emit sferics, the same type of broadband radio noise a lightning discharge produces.

Non-super-cell tornadoes…

220px-great_lakes_waterspoutsSo what if there is no super-cell? How do all the other vortex phenomena form – landspouts, waterspouts, gustnadoes and dust devils, and how are they related.

By the same mechanism proposed here for the super-cell tornado, only in lower energy form.

Funnel clouds, which never result in touchdown are a tendril of Marklund convection current that begins to recombine faster than it generates ions, and it dies.

Landspouts, gustnadoes and waterspouts all begin with a surface disturbance – a vortex without a cloud, or at least not one showing a wall cloud, or rotation. These are instances of stronger ionic accumulation at ground level, creating a strong ground vortex first, whereas the corona above is diffuse and invisible.

funnel-800

This is consistent with the observations of twisters of all kinds, including dust devils and spouts which are seen to begin on the ground. Or water – in the case of a waterspout – where documented evolution begins with a mysterious “dark spot” on the water.

The tornado is a fractal form generated by an intense electric field and current looping between cloud and ground. The ground charge is as much a part of the circuit as the cloud. There is feedback in the system, oscillations of electric field and charge density that originates with the Earth’s magnetic field, which does not stop at Earth’s surface. The Earth’s internal structure harbors electric currents induced from the Solar Wind. Kristian Birkeland and Nicola Tesla tried to tell us this, but arrogant men intrigued with science fiction didn’t listen.

Trailer Park Cosmology – 5

Chapter Seven – Nature’s Electrode

Have you ever wondered what causes lightning?  There’s no wire in the sky, no battery terminal, so where do those giant sparks come from? What’s going on up there?

Don’t expect an answer if you ask. Science seems to avoid the issue. In fact, you won’t find a real explanation outside of the Electric Universe.

The following image is from NOAA, and portrays the consensus theory. As you can see, it shows electrons collecting into a funnel, like marbles in a sink, accelerating down a slippery slope into what looks like a drain. Apparently gravity is hard at work, as usual in the consensus world.

animation_6a

This came from a popular science blog, authored by a physicist, no less. The article did point out that a bolt of lightning needs a billion-trillion electrons, or electron marbles as they like to portray them. But it didn’t even try to explain this drainpipe business. Where do we see electricity act like that?

Ummmm… Nowhere.

The consensus notion (it shouldn’t be considered a theory) is that charge builds in thunderstorms because of static electricity. Hail stones and rain colliding in the updraft generates the static charge, like when you rub a balloon against your hair, or shuffle your feet on the carpet. We’ve all seen  five-mile long sparks come out of our fingertips when we reach in the clothes dryer, right?

Positive and negative, statically generated charged particles separate into layers according to the consensus notion – it’s never talked about how this happens. The layers where they are found “pooling” are at distinct thermal boundaries. So it’s thought these thermal boundary layers somehow keep the pools of charge apart, except when they fall into the drainpipe.

noaaelectrical-charge-in-storm-clouds

It’s a non-answer answer. No one has generated lightning by stirring hot and cold air around and rubbing hailstones together. Generating arcs even a fraction of the size of a lightning bolt generally requires lots of large gauge copper wire, big generators, and courage.

Nor has anyone stratified layers of arcing static charge in atmosphere using wind and humidity. The consensus explanations are scientifically inadequate. Considering lightning was first studied by one of the pioneers of modern science, Ben Franklin, over two hundred and fifty years ago, it’s absurd that science still can’t explain what is going on.

One of the problems is depicted in the above NOAA image of a super-cell, where layers of charge are shown stratified inside the cloud. To acquire enough charge for a single lightning bolt – a billion-trillion electrons worth – the charge density required implies a plasma is involved.

NOAAlightningYou can call this simple, deductive reasoning. It only takes 1% of neutral air to be ionized for it to behave as a plasma. A billion-trillion electrons has to be concentrated in the cloud more than that before it can spit a thirty-thousand amp, sixty-thousand degree, five kilometer long column of fire. Lightning genesis requires a plasma, because that is what forms the “electrode” in the sky. But you’ll never hear that from NOAA.

So forget them and let’s consider how, why and where plasma forms to play a role in making lightning.

Electric Sky

Earth’s atmosphere is an electric circuit. It carries charge, current and voltage. The air is a weak conductor with a variable, vertical current between the ground and the ionosphere of 1 – 3 pico-amps per square meter. The resistance of the atmosphere is 200 ohms. The “clear sky” voltage potential averages 200-thousand volts between Earth and sky.

At any given moment, there are about 2,000 lightning storms occurring worldwide. To create lightning, the electric field potential must overcome the dielectric breakdown of air at 3 million volts per meter. It can do this because the electric field in a thunderstorm jumps to 300-million volts. A typical lightning bolt momentarily delivers about 30,000 amps to ground. The collective current from a typical storm delivers an average current from .5 to 1 amp.

sprites__elvesTherefore, the circuit is completed – Earth to sky, and sky to ground. Only it isn’t, because there is also an exchange from atmosphere to space, and space to atmosphere. This has yet to be accurately measured, or understood. The existence of plasma discharges from thunderstorms to space, called Sprites, Elves and Gnomes for their brief and ethereal appearance, is a relatively recent discovery. Their power and frequency is still an immature study.

Cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, adding charge continuously. The rate Earth is exposed to solar wind fluctuates widely, both because the Solar current fluctuates and so does the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. Sometimes the shield it provides moves around, letting more cosmic rays enter through “holes”.

Because of this variability, we really can’t say we understand how much current is entering, or leaving Earth’s atmospheric system from space.

The ground also carries potential that varies. Except for the monochrome view of seismic returns, we can’t even see what is below the Earth’s crust to comprehend the flow of current there. Nor whether, how, or where Earth’s current might enter the atmosphere. For electricity, boundary layers like the Earth’s crust isn’t an impermeable barrier, it’s an electrode.

There is a “cavity” defined by the surface of the Earth and the inner edge of the ionosphere. It’s been calculated that at any moment, the total charge residing in this cavity is 500,000 coulombs. The 2,000 concurrent lightning storms, each about an amp-and-a-half, means this worldwide charge is flowing at about 3000 amps between the ground and sky.

Electromagnetic waves reflect from the boundary of the cavity – the ground and ionosphere – and establish quasi-standing electromagnetic waves at resonant frequencies. W. O. Schumann predicted the resonant properties of the cavity in 1952, and they were first detected in 1954. They are called Schumann’s resonances and are measured as broadband electromagnetic impulses at frequencies in the range of 5 to 50 Hz.

The atmosphere is undeniably electric. It’s not a few ions benignly floating around in the air, but a globally active and coherent current flow. What should that tell us about lightning? Mustn’t it also be part of this coherent resonant system. Doesn’t it beg for a better model than marbles in a drainpipe?

Fortunately, there is a model to look to. It’s called electronics.

Atmospheric arcs created in a circuit are generally recognized to occur by thermionic emission. Everyone has seen a hot cathode arcing, as in a welding arc, where electrons are freed from the metal surface of the electrode by heat. The metal is heated by its own resistance to current, and begins emitting electrons above a certain temperature threshold specific to the electrode material. The temperature for many materials is thousands of degrees.

Another form of discharge less well recognized is field emission, or cold cathode emissions. They do not generate electrons by thermionics. The electrode warms, but not appreciably because heat is not what frees the electrons. It’s the electric field strength – a high voltage potential, that strips electrons from whatever material is present, including the air itself.

When this happens, the field forms ionic matter into a plasma structure, called a corona. Corona is the electrode in the sky that discharges lightning.

Coronal discharge is used in a variety of ways in modern technology. It requires a high voltage, which is precisely what is present in a thunderstorm – 300 million volts, or three orders of magnitude stronger than in clear weather. One would think that for an electrical storm that spits five mile long arcs, this factor would be considered in the structure and actions of the storm.

Not so, say the consensus. It’s caused by layers of cold, dry air and hot, humid air colliding, convection to stir it up, some hail to rub together, and viola… there be electricity.

animation_7a

Corona is truly the only known electrical phenomena that can result in a non-thermionic discharge under atmospheric conditions. The electric field rips the air into a plasma and the plasma forms a corona. It’s an integral part of the thermoelectric current and the generator of lightning.

Corona occurs in a layer perpendicular to the electric field, where the field strips electrons from atoms, sending them downward at near the speed of light along the field gradient, to collide inevitably with another atom.

The collision strips more electrons free to follow the electric field and leave behind ions. The region where electrons are stripped, leaving ionic matter, is a cold plasma, which self organizes into a corona, because that is what an excited, discharging plasma does.

Free electrons continue the process of collision in what is called an avalanche. Avalanche is portrayed in the step-leader process depicted in the image, and is a witnessed precursor to a lightning bolt.

The avalanche is one half of the picture, however. Lightning comes from below, as much as from above. The electric field also pools positive ions on the ground below the storm, which itself becomes a cold, partial-plasma corona. Ionic streamers, filaments of positively charged air from this corona, stretch up the electric field towards the clouds. A lightning bolt occurs when the cascading step leader and streamer meet, completing a plasma channel.

None of this is seen with the naked eye. It’s all dark current up to this point.

animation_16aThe lightning channel is complete when the avalanche connects with a ground streamer. The connection allows a dump of electrons from the corona to ground. Then, heavier, and significantly slower ions, carry up the channel in a return stroke.

The return stroke can be seen in the image as the bright flash that occurs the moment the first tendril of the avalanche current strikes Earth, leaving only one path glowing after the flash.

Corona provides the reservoir of charge and the dark current mechanism for avalanche required to make an arc. This is what is missing in the consensus notions.

It’s also worth noting – when you see a news report about lightning killing a herd of cows, elk, or reindeer, they are always found piled together. The reporter will say, they were huddled together for warmth in the storm, or some such. The reason is they were all part of the positive coronal return stroke – as charged bodies, they got pulled into a pile by the lightning.

Water is self-ionizing. Water in its liquid state undergoes auto-ionization when water molecules combine – as in condensation – to form one hydroxide anion (OH-) and one hydronium cation (H3O+). Water can further be ionized by impurity, such as carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid. Therefore, water condensing into clouds in a monster electric field provides an ionization event. The E-field strips the ions apart as they form.

Water in a thunderstorm goes through all of it’s phases. From water vapor, to cloud condensate, to rain droplet, to ice. The structure of a thunderstorm is oriented vertically around a large central updraft. The phase changes occur in layered strata of increasingly colder temperatures.

Water can become supersaturated – rising above 100% relative humidity if air is rapidly cooled, for example, by rising suddenly in an updraft. The supersaturation instability provides another opportunity for ionization.

Ice is typically a positive charge carrier, meaning that current flows over its surface in streams of positive ions. Flash freezing water onto ice, as hail stones grow, provides another opportunity for ionization.

Slide4Each layer of air in a storm has different temperature, humidity, pressure and velocity, transporting different phases of water at different partial pressures, which means the conductivity of the air is changing too. This effect we discussed already as the cause of the thermoelectric engine in the thunderstorm.

If you know any commercial, or military pilots who have flown through the heart of thunderstorms, ask them if they saw the corona themselves, glowing on parts of the airplane.

This is still only part of the matrix of cause and effect that makes thunderstorms. The storm clouds are a corona – the interior of the clouds contain cold plasma. Corona are the result of current in the updraft driven by the thermoelectric effect, and water condensing and freezing. All of the effects of lightning, tornado, rain and downburst wind is a form of electrical discharge from the corona.

The specifics of a tornado will come next in the discussion. There is more to discuss about lightning and winds, also. There are different types of lightning which come from different corona, but we’ll pick-up on that when we get into geology.

Trailer Park Cosmology – 4

Chapter Six – King Roach

A tornado is nature’s demon. Rotating winds, tight as a knot, with a body and energy that give it life, coherency, and a dislike for trailer parks. It’s lucky for me they are rare in Tucson. This town has so many trailer parks, and so few tornadoes, I hardly worry about them.

We do get hellacious thunderstorms, though. They make a lot of lightning and rain – never enough, of course – this is a desert, but it all comes down in the “monsoon” season, so for the moment it can seem like a lot. Monsoon season is July through September. It’s often spotty. Storm days can be separated by weeks of blazing, cloudless, dog days.

Tornadoes and lightning are intimately related. You might not get that impression from consensus science – they don’t treat them as related in any physical way other than the fact thunderstorms produce them both. Gee, that doesn’t imply any connection does it?

No, say the consensus. Lightning is just a static discharge from hailstones rubbing together, and tornadoes form by some chance circumstance of cross winds into spontaneous, coherent spirals of death. The only connection is the winds that rub the hailstones and spin the tornado come from the same storm – that’s all. Nothing else to see.

I beg to differ.

Tornadoes and lightning are two forms of electrical discharge from corona. Since the storm itself is a coronal construct of looping electrical current from the updraft core, it has to dump all that energy. Making rain, in some cases, isn’t enough.

Three facts help help illustrate the connection. One is that the faster the updraft wind flows, the more lightning the storm makes. Another is that when a tornado forms, the lightning abates. And finally, tornadic storms are prone to produce more positive lightning.

It’s a motor running. Plug it in and it sparks and spins.

SAM_0366
Back Porch

My own experience with lightning began watching summer thunderstorms from the back porch. The roof of the porch extended the length of the house, facing north with a view of the mountains. Thunderstorms formed over the mountains, and spread across the valley to engulf us. Lightning was often intense before and during the downpour.

Watching thunderstorms form was more than casual entertainment. Thunderheads building over the mountains gave hope – hope that there would be rain to break the heat. In the sweaty days of August, the evaporative coolers – the only means of cooling the house – didn’t work. The air is already saturated with moisture, so the damn things just blow hot air.

Thunderheads start with bright white cumulus piling over the nine-thousand foot peaks of the Rincon and Catalina mountains. The updraft can be seen doing its work, pushing the cloud into a tower, broadening its base until it turns black. Under the blackness is rain, winds and licks of lightning we see striking the peaks.

We will that horror to come our way, because it is preferable to the horror of melting alive in 110 degree heat. If the clouds lower and swallow the mountains, that is a good sign it’s spreading out to get us, too.

As a child, I remember my Dad paid a lot of attention. He’d say, “Nope, that one will miss us. They have to form over there to reach here,” and he’d point to the north-east. He also kept tabs on weather in the gulf of California and Mexico. “If they have a cyclone, it’ll come our way,” he’d say, anticipating days in advance the effects.

SAM_0360
Dad’s Antenna Tower

My Father was a ham radio operator. He also had several CB radios, and had erected a large truss tower for all of his radio antenna. I think he violated code when he installed it, and had to remove the top section to bring it into compliance. It’s still there, though, the bottom section at least, used as a permanent ladder to the roof of the house.

When the lightning struck, I was in the living room with my niece.

“Holy crap,” we said, or words to that effect. After that, it was, “Do you smell smoke?”

This quote I’m sure of. Dad’s radio room was full of it. One of the CB’s was still flaming when we got there. We found the CB antenna fifty yards away. It had speared off the tower like the crucifix on the church in the “Omen”. Fortunately, there was no priest below to catch it (I doubt my Dad would have allowed a priest on the property).

I had another experience like this in Sumatra. For a few months, I lived in an oilfield work camp in the jungles of central Sumatra, a place called Duri. I and a colleague from another oil company were doing a feasibility study for a joint-effort project to be located there.

011
About to eat at a Padang cafe in Sumatra

We lived and worked in a three-bedroom bungalow with the address, Jati 103. Every day our team of a dozen local engineers and analysts would assemble in the bungalow and work with us on computer models and power-point presentations – that is how building a power plant begins.

It was like working from home – I never had to put my shoes on. After work when everyone left, Gary and I would pop bottles of Bintang, and relax with cockroach target practice.

Sumatran cockroaches are very large and wily. Jati 103 had a resident roach that was as big as a baby’s shoe. He was the only one I saw there – apparently it was his territory.

The whole camp were these family bungalows for expats and local management. It was like a little suburban neighborhood sitting in the middle of the jungle. There was a golf course, if you didn’t mind the cobras. Also a gym, a community store and a club with a nice restaurant and pub. And that was it.

I spent spare time at the gym, or taking a run through the camp. No one else ran there. I figured it must be the heat, but then found it was because of the monkeys. They ran in packs like coyotes. They’d tear into garbage and run across the roof of the bungalows at night. They were as big as chimpanzees and dangerous. They were not cute monkeys.

I found myself far at the outskirts of the camp on one run. I went all the way to the fence, behind which was a wall of green rain forest. My attention was drawn to a single huge tree. I didn’t know why, but something seemed off about it.

After I stared at it for a minute, I saw a branch move, and one of these monkeys stared back. Then another branch moved, and another face appeared. This kept happening faster and faster, until I was being stared-down by a tree with a hundred monkeys. I ran for my life.

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Lightning in Sumatra

Gary had brought a set of juggling balls with him for a time-passer.  The cockroach had a timetable and was always punctual – at six P.M. he’d appear. The only uncertainty was where he’d appear, but he always came out like clockwork. So most evenings we’d drink beer and lay in wait with the juggling balls.

I don’t know how, but King Roach always moved out of the way. We were both good shots, but never hit the thing even though it was as big as the side of a barn. We did hit some computers and lamps, I recall, but never the damn roach. Anyway, we were so occupied when Jati 103 got hit.

Wham! It was like a sledgehammer hit the ground. The house shook and we smelled ozone. Then the telephone wire began to buzz. A sparkling ball of discharging electricity passed down the wire in slow motion, maybe a foot from my elbow. It took at least three seconds for it to pass down the wire from the ceiling to the phone jack, where it exploded in blue flame.

It was way better than King Roach for excitement, however briefly it lasted.

Those storms in Sumatra were like storms in the mountains. The cloud comes right down to the trees and the lightning just pounds out of it. There is no flickering, no peeling crack, no counting seconds… just wham. Flash, crack and destruction in a single moment of awe.

I’ve seen a tree blown apart in the Sierra’s. At ten thousand feet in the mountains you’re part of the storm. Lightning damaged trees litter the high passes and ridges, and huge rocks are blown apart. Lightning has much more to do with erosion than it’s given credit for.

Let’s take a look at lightning, and tornadoes and see if we can’t make sense of it all.

Trailer Park Cosmology – 3

Chapter Five – The Summer Thermopile

Even consensus science acknowledges a super-cell thunderstorm is electric. They often liken it to a battery, where immense static charge builds as it sweeps over the land, and winds internally stir water and ice.

Convection cells of warm moist air rise into frigid layers of the stratosphere, causing condensation towers with anvil tops. Winds rise and fall carrying rain and hail, and occasionally twist into vortexes that drop to the ground and scour the scrim of humanity from their path.

These are effects of temperature and pressure in the act of convection we are told.

Baloney.

classicsupercellThe proper electrical analogy for a super-cell storm is a thermopile. Actually, it’s not an analogy, it’s what it is.

A thermopile is a thermo-electric circuit that you’ve probably seen in use. Plug-in-the-cigarette-lighter ice coolers made for cars use the thermo-electric effect. Look it up if your curious, we’ll only need to talk about the basics.

Thermocouple_circuit_Ktype_including_voltmeter_temperature.svgThermo-couples are an instrument to measure temperature that use the thermo-electric effect. It’s a circuit that couldn’t be simpler. All it takes is two, or more wires of different conductivity connected in series. When current is passed through, a temperature difference arises at the junction of the wires. Or reverse that – heat the wires, and generate a current. The effect can also be made with solid state materials in a manner very similar to photo-voltaic solar cells.

220px-Thermoelectric_Generator_Diagram.svg
Current generation from thermo-electric effect.

The different electrical properties of the dissimilar materials create a temperature difference – one conductor chills and the other heats up  in the presence of current; or vice versa, current is produced by a temperature difference.

Full stop and allow me to repeat that. Current is produced by a temperature difference. Temperature is a consequence of electrodynamics. There are all kinds of things one can delve into about temperature and radiation and how it’s transported by conduction and convection, but the bottom line is electricity – excited electrons. Most people don’t think of it that way, and they should.

There are three related mathematical relationships that describe the conversion of current to heat and heat to current in terms of a circuit, called the Seebeck, Peltier and Thomson effects. The differences are not important – they describe different conditions and aspects of the same thing. Current produces heat, and heat produces current, provided the right dissimilar materials are properly arranged in the circuit.

The current-temperature relationship is precisely understood. Properly calibrated thermo-couples are used to detect the slightest temperature differences in every kind of scientific and industrial application, as well as to measure the most extreme temperatures.

The relevance to a thunderhead is in the central updraft core of the storm, which becomes a thermo-couple circuit. It’s a flow of wind bearing ionic matter – water vapor is one, and surface dust is another – which produces a current.

The updraft rapidly chills as it rises, becoming more saturated with condensate and more ionization. It also shrinks. The central updraft column gets denser as it rises, so the column has to shrink in volume, and this causes it to speed-up.

250px-ShelfcloudAll of these changes to the state of the air in the updraft drastically change the conductivity of the air in the column. The updraft column is electrically no different than a wire of changing conductivity, which in the presence of current, will exhibit a thermo-electric effect.

It won’t maybe do it, it’s gonna do it. It has to do it. In the presence of a huge electric field, a wet, surface-wind rising into the cold dry stratosphere is going to cause a whopper electric current. If anyone doubts this, go look at a thunderstorm.

When there is a sequence of several conductors of different conductivity in series, the thermo-electric effect can be amplified by adding more junctions. This is called a thermopile. It’s several thermo-couples connected together.

Thermopile2
Thermopile Circuit

A super-cell thunderstorm is a thermopile. It has more than one ionization event and each one changes the column’s conductivity in a feedback that increases current and amplifies ionization.

The rising central updraft ionizes where the moisture is saturating and condensing, or freezing, at specific temperature layers. All around the column is a shear zone between it and the surrounding air, and this is where the ions go to collect. The shear zone is an interface – a dielectric barrier that attracts charged species to it.

Have you ever seen llamas in a field? They always stand at the fence, because they are like guard dogs protecting their perimeter. Charge does the same thing. It flows to the interface, like a llama runs to the fence. And if there is a hole in the fence it leaks out.

There is a perception of a charged species being an independent particle that will immediately be attracted to the first oppositely charged particle it finds and neutralize. Plasma won’t do that. It acts as a coherent fluid, organized by electric field. It seeks balance in an equi-potential layer transverse to the electric field, so it spills out from the walls of the column and forms ‘sheets’, which is what is detected in thunderstorms: ‘sheets’ of charged species.

noaaelectrical-charge-in-storm-cloudsThey actually have more complex geometry than a ‘sheet’. They organize into plasma coronas that actively spit out electrons and ions in channeled currents. Coronas have a geometry and produce effects that depend on the polarity of the charged species mix.

The channels of discharge they create explain every aspect of  a super-cell thunderstorms. Coronas explain rain, downdrafts, tornadoes and lightning.  They explain cloud-to-ground lightning and positive lightning; intra-cloud lightning and inter-cloud lightning. They explain sprites, elves and gnomes – electrical discharges to space that are the Earth’s equivalent to a solar flare, caused by the same thing – coronas.

Slide4 They explain the shape of wall clouds, beaver-tails, meso-cyclones and anvils. They explain things I haven’t even heard of yet, but before this week is out I will read an article about some aspect of a thunderstorms I didn’t know, and it will explain that too.

Because this is the electric model of a thunderstorm it’s closer to the truth. It’s not that convection doesn’t occur, it does. But convection is heat transfer and that is fundamentally electric, like everything else.

Heat is atoms getting excited, which is a purely electrical thing. Add heat to a volume of atoms and they will spread out and try to cool down. They prefer a state of rest. But if you contain that volume, bottle it up so it can’t use more space, the pressure and temperature rise. Pressure is the result of the excited atoms trying to push outward, but being confined from doing so. Pressure and temperature are intimately related as physical expressions of electrodynamics.

Convection cells form like hot air balloons. Imagine big balloons of warm air with invisible envelopes all jostling together and rising. When they begin to form, electro-dynamic forces have already been at work. Solar radiation and heat from the land warmed the air in the first place. The air carries an ambient ionic charge. As they rise they ionize more as moisture in the air condenses.

It’s been known since the beginning of the twentieth century, that a fast-moving charged particle will cause sudden condensation of water along its path. In 1911, Charles Wilson used this principle to devise the cloud chamber so he could photograph the tracks of  fast-moving electrons.

In 2007, Henrik Svensmark published a theory on galactic cosmic ray influence on cloud formation, and later demonstrated his theory in a cloud chamber at Cern, demonstrating certain cloud formations are catalyzed by cosmic rays ionizing the atmosphere.

These are examples of ionization causing condensation. Let’s postulate condensation causes ionization too.

Water vapor condensing into droplets self-ionize into cations and anions. In the hugely building electric field of a thunderstorm, they ions are torn apart as they form, filling the rising air with charged species. This condensation event forms the first corona, a negative corona around the central updraft with charge density concentrated in the lower clouds where condensation first occurs.

290px-Chaparral_Supercell_2Another corona forms higher. This is the anvil top, caused by another ionization event, when the water freezes to ice. The ionic mix here is different and a positive corona is the result. It has a different shape, being a broad diameter and less dense in terms of charge density.

The coronas are the thermopile’s different current junctions, where charge bleeds out into a corona, just as it would from a power line if the insulation is damaged. Atmosphere is a leaky insulator. It’s the strength of the electric field that gives the storm it’s shape.

And once this motor gets started – the conveyor belt of wet wind in the updraft keeps rev’ing as charge density builds. The rain curtain and downdraft are the same current looping and dumping hydrolyzed charge in the form of rain at the exhaust of the updraft.

It’s a looping current from ground to atmosphere, and back to ground, in a continuously changing conductive path through several temperature regimes – a thermopile.

And so builds the strength of the corona, until it spits electrons that avalanche into lightning bolts. If conditions are right, a charged corona will lower towards the ground, abating it’s lightning to send downwards a twisting tendril of plasma, while stirring ground winds below into a vortex. A tornado is born of a corona.

Slide2Coronas develop unipolar winds. Where charge density is low, the corona can’t make lightning, but it still spits electrons that drift towards ground. The drift region of a corona creates winds as drifting electrons drag ions and neutral matter along. Downdraft, inflow and updraft winds result.

In the above diagram, a point electrode generates a corona opposed to a plate electrode connected to ground, with a gap in between. This is a similar circuit to a storm except the corona in the clouds would not have the geometry of a point electrode, but likely a flattened toroidal shape.

The region in the gap labelled drift region, channels of current are created based on the charge density of the region of corona from which it radiates. The outer edges where charge density and electric field tension are lowest, channels form electric, or unipolar winds.

Slide3Sudden and intense down-bursts are highly mysterious to atmospheric scientists and they attribute them to density bombs – pockets of dense heavy air that rapidly sink from the clouds. These violent downdrafts will slap airliners from the sky. They aren’t density bombs – they are unipolar winds.

slide2

The entire morphology of a thunderstorm is explained by a thermopile circuit with leaky insulation. But that isn’t all it is. In Electric Earth Theory, there is a more significant meaning.

The looping circuit of a super-cell is a weak form of electrical expression known as a coronal loop. Coronal loops are the result of the corona’s themselves moving relative to the plate electrode. The differential movement creates an offset between the center of charge density in the sky versus the center of charge density on the ground, distorting the electric field. It’s a dog chasing a cat that can never catch-up – negative chasing positive polarity in a wave.

Slide7

The result is it bends the current into a loop. It goes up in a flowing discharge of current and comes down, energy expended and recombined into rain. If charge builds enough, though, the loop breaks out into a fully realized discharge. The current has broken through the dielectric barrier of the atmosphere to splash charge into space. On the Sun we call them Solar Flares, and Coronal Mass Ejections. On Earth we call them Sprites, Elves and Gnomes.

So, here we are in the world of plasma. Double layers, Alfven waves, z-pinches and corona – it happens in our everyday lives as much as it does on the surface of the Sun – because it’s all the same thing.

Prominence_(PSF)So too, we have symmetry. Not the artificial symmetry of mathematical equations and categories consensus science keeps force fitting to Nature, but Nature’s true symmetry of nested fractal repetition.

Traceimage
Solar Coronal Loop

This why we can be confident it’s true. Such organization and harmonic resonance between phenomena across all orders of scale is not the result of random anything. It’s the result of electricity.

The same phenomena is found on any planetary body that carries an internal current that forms an electromagnetic field. The coronal loops are ultimately caused by the voltage between the magnetosphere and Telluric currents below Earth’s crust, just as they occur above and below the photosphere of the Sun and in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus.

As above, so below… the ancients knew what was going on and they weren’t just talking about the sky. They were talking about below the ground, too.

The electrical stress across the layers of atmosphere and crust is charge building on layers of dielectric, which is what a capacitor is. A storm is an expression of capacitor discharge. If clever technicians made a high voltage capacitor with a fluid dielectric over a grounded flat plate dielectric they would see coronal loops form, I’ll bet.

Tornadoes are a harmonic fractal repetition of the super-cell storm as a whole. They are nested coronal loops inside the bigger loop of the storm. Because they are smaller and generate from an intense charge density region of the corona, the energy is more concentrated.

Look again at the image of a solar coronal loop and see there is a smaller loop of higher intensity. This is the effect of an embedded harmonic repetition; and that is what a tornado is to the storm it’s born from. But, as always it’s more complicated than that. We’ll delve deeper into tornadoes next to complete the picture.

Trailer Park Cosmology – 2

Chapter Three – Uncle Smith

If rolling stones gather no moss, my Uncle Smith was a rock-slide. Not kinetically – he always seemed very calm – but emotionally, living the moment in a state of pure joy.

When I was a child in the sixties, Smith lived and traveled the National Parks in a Streamline travel-trailer towed behind a Dodge pick-up. He took his wife, Mildred, and a small dog.

He was a seventy-plus year-old, free-spirit, when the Beatles wore matching page-boy haircuts and suits – in other words, even when ‘rebels’ helplessly conformed more obviously than normal, Smith was authentically weird.

smith
Smith and Mildred with the road weary Streamline

He was old and retired, living on a pension from the time I could remember. I physically outgrew him before I reached puberty. Built like a wiry elf, he weighed about ninety pounds, with more hair in his ears than anywhere else.

He was blind in one eye. His wire-rimmed glasses had the bad eye fogged, but were so dirty and scratched you couldn’t tell. The eye was poked-out by a tree branch, he claimed, while chasing a bear from camp one night in the woods. He had only aspirin and cotton-balls to catch the draining fluid, while he slept in a tent until daylight. He said he slept – I don’t know how – the bear alone would have kept me up.

Smith was actually my great uncle, my Grandmother’s brother on Dad’s side. Dad was born in 1910, and I in ‘57, so there’s some generation gap at play. Lord knows when Smith was born, but he grew up at a time when pipe-organs outnumbered cars, sometime after the ‘War between the States’.

On the subject of pipe organs, that was his occupation back in the day – organ tuner. Not a cleanse-your-colon, fitness guru you’ll find if you ‘Google’ that term today, but a pipe-organ tuner.

There were not many of them even fifty years ago – Smith may have been the last. In any case, he never voluntarily retired. Pipe-organs did.

Pipe organs are the only musical instrument that can’t be taken to the shop for tuning. They need a building to hold them up, so, Smith got used to travel. Eventually, the number of vaudeville, bawdy houses and churches with pipe organs dwindled as the century ticked away. Smith got a travel-trailer and kept driving with Mildred and the dog.

He’d take the job of Camp Host in National Parks where they’d stay the season, then visit kin in the weeks between odd-jobs at the handful of Mormon temples still using pipe organs. He was always on a continuous roam, Mildred and the dog with him, or not. At some point in my youth, the dog quit showing up.

He followed the seasons through a circle of his favorite haunts that ranged the entire west. Oak Creek, Sedona and Apache Junction were favorite camps on the Arizona leg of his loop. There is a cluster of family in Tucson, a good VA hospital, and our trailer park for a place to stay, so we were on his route.

Most of his waking hours he spent at a workshop in the back of the Dodge beneath a camper shell. It was a complex and messy workshop from his days roaming the country tuning organs. Besides the carpentry and machining tools required for pipe organ maintenance, there were automotive tools, and everything for the Streamline RV. Except for food, Smith carried everything he needed with him.

Because it was what he liked to do, he spent most of his time tinkering in the workshop. One thing he made was a bellows from wood, leatherette and brass tacks, with a rolled sheet-metal nozzle and marble for a check valve. He originally made them for tuning pipe organs, because he needed a way to blow air through the pipes to get sound.

belows

The bellows also worked marvelous with a fireplace, and he continued to make them long after the last pipe organ wheezed. We got several for those chilly, sub-100 degree days we lit the fire-place in Tucson.

While Smith worked at the narrow workbench on the tailgate of his truck, work piece in a vise bolted to the bumper, I helped him. At that time in my life, adults were generally telling me to shut-up, or go away. Smith asked for my thoughts, encouraging me to join him in whatever he was doing and talk. He was always interested to listen, and interesting to listen to.

Smith’s pipe organ days must have been something. He took my Father to Chicago with him in the later days of Prohibition. Drinking establishments bloomed in Chicago like nowhere else on Earth back then, because they were illegal. Nothing makes business boom better than making it illegal, and Chicago was ground zero for illegal booze. Dad was about twenty, and while Smith tuned bawdy house organs, Dad got a job helping manage an A&P store.

I asked my Father about those days once – I mean Speakeasy’s and Al Capone – he was right there – I wanted his ‘Forest Gump’ account.

I learned more than I wanted about A&P’s. Capone and the gangsters he only remembered reading about in the papers. All he said about Speakeasy’s was, “We called them clubs”.

That’s as much as I got. But Dad had a butterfly tattooed to the inside of his right arm he never spoke about. Something so out-of-place with the straight-up Father I knew, it had to be from those days of his youth in the Chicago “clubs”.

And I think it strange it was a butterfly, given my own obsession with them now.

Smith told stories about the war. And I mean – The War: World War I. The best I heard involved him and a driver, he said, inadvertently crossing enemy lines. They were in France carrying some communication, or moving from one place to another for a reason I don’t recall, and suddenly they realized the uniforms around them were different.

He said they turned around and hauled out of there before anyone noticed their uniforms were different too.

I try to picture such a scene. It has a ‘Three Stooges’ element to it that, along with Smith’s mischief, makes the story less credible. But then, stranger things have happened.

I can’t picture Smith holding a gun in anger. Perhaps he never did, but he surely witnessed the darkest side of man. Though he never told me anything gruesome about the war, I imagine he saw things that would curdle blood. He only spoke about funny things, like the French he learned to parlez local girls. He probably didn’t want to remember the other parts. That’s sometimes how people are who have seen the darkest – they only want light shining through.

I remember most talking about the outdoors with Smith. He was the first adult who shared that passion with me; alp-en-glow in a mountain valley, bears at night, panning for gold… the adventure of wild places been, or to go.

One adventure of Smith’s nearly killed him. I was about thirteen and Smith was edging towards eighty. An older brother suggested we take a family hike. There was a miscalculation, or misread map involved somehow – I don’t remember, but the trail was well over twenty miles of rugged, steep terrain. In the mountains around here, that’s a hike better suited for two days, not one. Smith, of course, insisted on going.

The hike began beautifully. Crisp, chilly air at nine thousand feet on a bright spring morning. The creek was still sheathed in ice. As we crossed the stream on icy rocks, Smith slipped and broke through. He twisted his ankle and soaked his pants. He wouldn’t turn back though, said he was fine, just had a little limp to make him take it slow.

Of course, the pain and inflammation took awhile to build, and in the meantime we kept going.  As he slowed down more and more, the older ones stayed back with him and the younger of us went ahead. Smith seemed to be managing, so there was no reason to hold the young gun’s back. My brother and I separated from the group descending fast down switchbacks. I still remember how it burned my legs.

The sun went down miles before we reached the end of the trail. There was a fortunate full moon, because we had no flashlight. The moonlight gave an ethereal beauty to the canyon grasses shifting in the breeze. The trail from this point was easy ground, but it wound in hairpin turns through side canyons such that it took a mile of walking to advance a hundred yards.

Walking a mile to arrive at a point where you can throw a rock to the place you started is demoralizing. Mile after mile, every canyon looked the same, until we joked that we’d entered a nightmare.

“Imagine, if you will, a trail that never ends. Under a silver moon of surreal beauty, these unfortunate souls find it leads forever nowhere, because they have entered … The Twilight Zone.” That was the nature of our talk.

The final section of trail required a push over a ridge, then a long corkscrew of winding switchbacks to the end of the park road. It was such a relief to get down. Our feet were hot-irons, but my brother Rich also suffered toe-jam. It happens going downhill if your nails aren’t trimmed short. The pain is like bamboo shoots and will cause the affected toenail to turn green and eventually fall out.

Our glee at trail’s end was suddenly clouded by the realization there was no phone at the end of the road, and the Park gate was locked until morning. I think it was another four pain-filled miles to the gate and a telephone.

Sometime three, or four hours later my older brothers and sister-in-law came down, and Dad went to pick them up while I soaked in a hot shower. Smith wasn’t with them.

Still high on the mountain, he decided he needed to rest his leg, so he sat down and lit a fire. Then he decided the fire was warm and his leg was not working, and insisted on staying the night. My brothers were unsure about leaving him, but it was at a point of leave him, or spend the night with him. They gave him extra sweaters and came down.

In the morning we were at the gate when it opened and immediately set up the trail. Smith met us at the top of the switchbacks – almost down already. He was a little stiff, black-faced and dirty from crawling into the campfire coals to keep warm, but remarkably cheery.

It was below freezing that night. Not many octogenarians would have made it, or even attempted the hike. In spite of his fall, Smith knew his own capabilities and how to deal with the situation. The experience to him was of so little drama, he was embarrassed he put anyone to worry.

Had anyone suggested the following week to do the same hike again, Smith would have been the first to go. Probably by himself, because no one was making that suggestion.

Smith was unconventional. It’s the most endearing and memorable aspect of him. He lived on the fringe; happy, law-abiding and respectable, no man’s but his own. His example resonates through the family.

My take on life included a “Smithsonian” perspective forever-more. Uncle Smith’s alternative lifestyle seemed more agreeable than convention offered. Doing things mattered more than having things, to Smith. If given a mansion, I don’t think he would have known what to do with it. Anything more than what fit in his pick-up was too much.

Lifestyle isn’t the issue, though. A curious mind, empathy for the ways of others, minding ones own business and getting on with life in the fashion best suited for you is the point. Smith was a great example of those qualities.

We all have unique perspectives. From a trailer park, the perspective is closer to the edge of the lens, so to speak, and there is less distortion to reality. Layers and layers of social obligation and expectation are stripped away in a trailer park. So long as you keep the weeds down around the place, you’re socially acceptable.

Once that hurdle is met, one can do as they please. It’s classic Smithsonian. The night sky is brighter, more vivid and detailed from the top of a mountain than it is from a city. Such is the view of reality from the trailer park.

I’m actually a neoclassic Smithsonian. I lack the rigor for his austere simplicity, but ideologically I’m on the same page. It allows me a fresh take on Nature. Let’s now examine some notions about Nature from the trailer park perspective.

Chapter Four – The Chicken Hath No Egg

Everything being electric, phenomena scale infinitely, repeating fractal patterns within fractal patterns. The universe is a Mandelbrot Set of embedded repetitions. It has little to do with fancy mathematics. It’s cellular automata progression of self-same order over infinite magnitudes, producing similar effects at different scales.

The fractal forms are never exact reflections because they are modified by charge density and phase changes. Whether a hot plasma is at work, or a cold plasma we can’t see, the degree of ionization, relative polarity, charge density, electric field strength and field geometry are the things that influence most. Phase of material, whether liquid, gas, solid, or airborne water and dust; the mediums response to electromagnetic forces has relevance to the effect.

Proof of the concept is in the fractal forms that repeat over orders of magnitude in scale. To recognize the patterns becomes easy if the consensus brainwashing is ignored and a correct perspective is used.

Trailer Park Cosmology requires a change in how Earth is viewed in the first place. Our sight is limited, and therefore our perception. The “blue marble” of astonishing beauty we see in spacecraft photos only shows the reflection of visible light. Earth is much bigger, reaching all the way to the Moon with its electromagnetic sheath.

The Geomagnetic field should rightly be viewed as the boundary of the Earth. Looking at only the blue marble is like seeing the nucleus of an atom without electrons. The picture, and therefore perception of it, is incomplete.

structure_of_the_magnetosphere-en-svgThe Earth is a torus of electromagnetic energy orbiting in waves of solar wind. The blue marble spins inside, shielded from life threatening radiation by shells of magnetic field. Those shells induce current from the solar wind that emit coronal light at the poles – the aurora is a physical tell about the electricity in the Solar System that science has completely missed the significance of until recently.

The Earth is like the electromagnet inside a generator. It must be excited by current to manifest a magnetic field.

300px-schematic-of-combined-facs-and-ionospheric-current-systemsMagnetism is a consequence of electric current, it cannot come into existence on its own. It is the product of electricity flowing through dielectric matter. Mathematically, flowing a given quantity of current through a given dielectric barrier yields a given magnetic field. It’s like flowing water through a chiller to freeze it to ice. It’s phase change of energy – electricity to magnetism, like phase change of matter – water to ice, with the dielectric being the chiller that takes away heat.

That’s a simple analogy, but helps to define the relation of electricity to magnetism – that they are two sides of the same coin.

Magnetized rock and man-made magnets are the result of current that aligned the atomic dipoles of the matter into coherency, lining them up in the same direction so they are magnetically focused. The magnet keeps this focus as static, or Remanent magnetism until another electrical force changes the dipole orientation.

Man-made magnets are created by exposing ceramics to high voltage current. Natural magnetism, found in magnetite and load stones, are the result of past lightning strikes, or some similar exposure to current. Magnetic remnants of meteors were exposed to current at some point as well, perhaps as they entered Earth’s influence.

The problem with consensus scientific theory on the Earth’s magnetic field is that it’s predicated on the Earth’s core being a magnet whose spin creates the Geomagnetic field. The idea is like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. To mix metaphors, it’s not a chicken-and-egg problem, but a chicken without an egg.

For the last hundred years they’ve said the Earth’s core is like a bar magnet, yet they can’t explain how the core of the Earth became a magnet. Their models also can’t explain why, if Earth’s core is an electrically static magnet, it’s magnetic field varies so much. It acts like an electromagnet, and that requires current. Without an internal current, Earth would be a dead hulk like Mars.

This fact is only recently being contemplated and beginning to be verified by surveys. Fast streams of magma below Earth’s crust have been detected that betray the electric current. It should be intuitively obvious, but that isn’t the way of science. Reduction before deduction is the name of their game, which means trees before forests, dumb before wisdom, etc. It’s an echo chamber of bad ideas.

Current has to be flowing through the interior of the Earth from the poles. There is no verifiable physical explanation for the Geomagnetic field without accepting, as fact, there is an excitation current internal to the blue marble that causes it to act as an electromagnet.

With current internal to the blue marble, and current in the ionosphere that surrounds the atmosphere, the layers in between are like plates in a capacitor with charge on either side. These plates, the atmosphere, and crust of the blue marble, are in charge equilibrium with the internal and external flows of energy.

Because the plates are charge neutral – the atmosphere and crust of the Earth always carry charge, but the vast predominance of matter in these regions is neutral – we live in an equi-potential layer that causes us to perceive equi-potential as the norm.

It’s not. The universe is filled with charged plasma and electric current. The ‘Goldilocks zone’ we occupy is a very special place. It’s special because it’s charge neutral, and balanced, or otherwise things would fly apart. Even so, it’s not without electrical drama. We live inside an electrical circuit.

Thunderstorms and hurricanes race through the atmosphere in the tropics, discharging accumulated atmospheric charge. Volcanoes and seismic zones stripe between the poles like the spiraling seams of a baseball, betraying the flow of current beneath the crust, and discharging to surface on occasion.

Given some change in the Solar System’s electrical environment, these layers become the most energetic. A change in electric field between internal and external currents stresses the equilibrium of the dielectric plates in between. We see it in the atmosphere every day.

In the course of understanding Earth’s crust, it becomes apparent the surface of the Earth was formed by winds and arcs of electricity more closely associated with the planet Jupiter than the Earth we know today. There is evidence for atmospheric coronal discharges causing gargantuan lightning bolts, surface conductive arcs, dielectric barrier discharges, sputtering discharges and global, uni-polar winds of supersonic velocity that fed vortex storms of immense size and energy. In proportion to Earth’s size, the storms were similar to the giant storm on Jupiter known as The Great Red Spot.

It also becomes evident those same forces are at work today in Earth’s atmosphere and lithosphere, creating the same effects only far milder. Whatever events caused the continents to form was an external influence to the Earth. The Earth’s response was no different then, from how it responds to external influence now, only the magnitude has changed.

This is how Earth looks from the trailer park. It’s because I watch a lot of thunderstorms – can’t help but notice since the roof leaks. Thunderstorms are the result of Earth’s electrical currents. They are themselves coronal loops.

Thunderstorms are a consequence of the dielectric breakdown of the atmosphere as it is subjected to an intensified electric field. Since we know more about them than we know about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, or coronal storms on the Sun, they are the best place to begin understanding coronal dynamics on Earth.