Catastrophic events during the past account for many of the surface features which defy conventional explanations. During periods of upheaval and instability, planetary orbits may have been perturbed, and when coming into relatively close contact, their plasma sheathes would have interacted. Any electrical differentials naturally tried to establish equilibium.

To begin with, electrical atmospheric phenomena would have intensified (auroras and lightning), and before long violent discharges, aka huge sparks, resulted. Hence the 'Thunderbolts of The Gods'. Things got a little bit hairy, to say the least. Significant planets are unlikely to have actually collided, of course, as electrical forces are both attractive and repulsive.

Furthermore, electrical phenomena are scaleable over at least 14 scales of magnitude. Effects which are measured in millimetres in the laboratory can therefore measure vast distances across space and on the surface of planets.

Today we see these phenomena on a far less violent scale, and they are referred to as EDM -- Electrical Discharge Machining. The theory actually suffers from an embarrasment of riches, and many enigmatic planetary features can and have been produced in the laboratory.

Scars very similar to those pictured in the right hand column of this page appear on a number of different planets. Such scars tend to defy traditional explanations. For example.

Many craters tend to be almost perfectly spherical. Impact craters very rarely achieve this.
Some of the craters exhibit internal spiral patterns. Impact craters don't do this.
Crater chains often appear in straight lines. The chances of this happening are close to zero.
Channels begin and end out of nowhere.
Channels tend to be predominantly flat floored, ending with steep walls.
Channels often criss-cross, ignoring pre-existing channels. Liquids don't do this.
Channels often run up hill. Again, liquids do not tend to do this.
Many planetary rilles run for thousands of miles in almost straight lines or wave like patterns.
Missing debris. Assuming some of the features are produced by traditional methods, where did the material that has been removed go to?

Most of these electrical features are reproducible in the lab.

Sometimes these features are explained away as lava flows, or collapsed lave tubes, even where there is little evidence for any other volcanic activity. Wind and water may also be cited, but typically the planets concerned are supposed to be dry, or at least have been for many millions of years.

It is also interesting to note that many meteorites hit the earth without producing craters, and that we find many craters with no evidence of any impact!

Fulgamites are a form of lightning blister. Olympus Mons on Mars, pictured right, is often called the biggest volcanoe in the solar system, although it defies being categorised as such. It's taller than three Mount Everest's and extremely wide. The trouble is, it's almost as flat as a pancake, and its edges end abruptly.

Lightning on Earth normally consists of a number of strokes in quick succession that follow the same ionized path. The discharge is often followed by successive lesser strokes that can excavate overlapping pits on the top of the fulgamite. This pattern is clearly seen as the six overlapping circular craters at the summit of Olympus Mons.

The chances of an impacting body breaking up to form a neat line of craters is very slim. The chances of this happening with the frequency that we see is practically zero. The crater chain pictured right is one of many that can be seen on Gannymede, a moon of Jupiter.

Crater chains result from electric arcs passing over a cathode surface. With slight variations in the current, the arc may cut a trench instead of jumping from one crater to the next. Because electrical arcs lift material from the surface, excavations are left relatively clean. The 'collapsed lava tube' explanation fails in this important respect. 'Missing debris' is just one defining characteristic that distinguishes electrical erosion from mechanical processes. These processes have been replicated in the laboratory.

These anomalous formations appear in the Arrhenius Region of Mars, some 36,000 square kilometers of terrain in the southern hemisphere. Planetary scientists have expressed wonderment over these improbable formations, and can only guess at how to account for them. The weird 'wormlike' formations have even provoked speculation about 'artificial tubes' beneath the surface, although these can safely be excluded.

The existence of these glassified ridges or fulgurites is a crucial prediction of the Electric Universe. The transverse coronal filaments of lightning, always perpendicular to the direction of a primary discharge, can form and fuse such characteristic ripples inside a primary channel.

Another moon of Jupiter, Europa, shows more interesting features that remain mysterious to the mainstream. High-resolution photographs of the surface show that the web of grooves and channels cannot possibly be the surface 'fractures' originally cited. Scientists were also surprised by the lack of craters on Europa given that Jupiter is considered the 'vacuum cleaner' of the solar system. Meteorites should have been pulled into a collision course.

Not only do many of the larger channels not look anything like fractures, they are also smoothly cut, and the force which created them has disregarded the presence of previous channels, often producing a constant channel width for more than a thousand kilometres.

These are consistent with an electrical viewpoint. An electrical discharge, flowing across the surface, has an associated magnetic field which 'pinches' into a narrow filament and tends to draw concurrent filaments into parallel alignment.

They have been identified as 'hematite concretions', an iron-rich mineral which is the primary constituent of the soil surrounding them. A Plasma physicist, CJ Ransom of Vemasat Laboratories, has successfully reproduced them in the laboratory.

If the concretions can only be reproduced by electrical discharge, as seems likely, this could lay the foundation for a radical reassessment of planetary geology.

The prominent Tycho crater on the southern hemsiphere of our moon demonstrates some of the features described above, and it is interesting to note that the probable cause was recognised as early as 1903. In his book, The Moon, W. H. Pickering suggested that electrical effects could account for the narrow paths of Tycho’s 'rays', and he drew a direct comparison to the streamers seen in auroral displays.

Also, more than forty years ago, the British journal, Spaceflight (January 7, 1965), published the work of Brian J. Ford, an amateur astronomer, who suggested that most of the lunar craters were carved by cosmic electrical discharge. In his laboratory experiments Ford used spark-machining apparatus to reproduce some of the most puzzling lunar features, including craters with central peaks, small craters perched on the high rims of larger craters, and crater chains. He also observed that the ratio of large to small craters on the Moon matched the ratio seen in electrical arcing.

True to form, however, this evidence of electrical activity in space has been ignored because it finds no place in the curricula of astronomers and geologists. Gravitational Cosmology provides their flawed premise.

The discovery of complex dendritic networks at the south pole of Mars has left NASA scientists scrambling for answers. Yet again, they defy traditional textbook explanations, not least because they 'work against' gravity, branch radially from a center (which excludes a drainage function), and form identical shapes irrespective of the terrain. Often, a single ravine is seen moving both up and downhill, and many of the patterns occur on a consistent incline.

Common sense screams out the success of the electrical hypothesis, but planetary scientists continue to hammer square pegs into round holes! These networks show the consistent form of classical electrical discharge, the Lichtenburg figure.

There is a further problem. A number of these spiders seem to emerge and disappear seasonally. One recent study, developed in consultation with the famous sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clark, suggested that these comings and goings represent one of the most profound mysteries of planetary science, and even speculated a biological cause. NASA’s ignorance of EDM remains a continuing disservice to the public who fund them.

Pictured right is a Dust Devil etching its way across the surface of Mars. Lightning and various other electrical phenomena on our neighbouring planets have come as a huge shock to mainstream science, if you'll pardon the pun.

See electric weather for further details

This photograph, taken by the Galileo space craft, is one of many images showing plumes of plasma jetting from the surface of Jupiter's closest moon. The first to suggest that these plumes were electrical discharge in nature was Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold, whose article on the "Electric Origin of the Outburst on Io," was published in the journal Science, November 30, 1979. In 1987 Gold's interpretation was supported by plasma physicists Alex Dessler and Anthony Peratt in an article published in the journal Astrophysics and Space Science. Dessler and Peratt observed that both the filamentary penumbra and the convergence of ejecta into well-defined rings are characteristic plasma discharge effects that have no volcanic counterpart.

Furthermore, the plumes have been found to be hotter than lava on Earth and, more surprsinigly still, the alleged 'volcanoes' have moved tens of kilometers in a few years. These are all predictable features of the electric model. In fact, Io and Jupiter are now known to be connected by a 'flux tube' that contains an electric current of at least 5,000,000 amps generating trillions of watts of power!