Astronomers once considered Mars to be a long barren and geologically dead rock in space.

But since the arrival of our probes beginning in the 1960s,

the planet has come alive for us.

It does not reveal the inactive and worn down landscape

astronomers and planetary scientists had expected.

Nevertheless, investigators continued to apply geologic concepts

based on their understanding of the Earth and the Moon.

They could only see volcanism, erosion, surface movement and surface collapse,

all punctuated by episodic impacts from space over billions of years.

What force created the sharply cut gouges and depressions across the surface of Mars,

looking as if a giant trowel descended to scoop out material,

at radically different and irreconcilable depths.

Running north to south, we see massive interwoven scratches or grooves

extending hundreds of miles.

And how remarkable that a planet only half the diameter of Earth

exhibits canyons on a scale dwarfing anything seen on our own planet.

And mountains that would tower over Mount Everest.

Today, no planet outside the Earth has received more attention than Mars,

but the mysteries and theoretical contradictions have grown spectacularly.

For decades now, investigators have wondered

why the two hemispheres of Mars look as if they were formed in different worlds.

A southern hemisphere dominated by craters,

a northern hemisphere with only sparsely scattered craters.

And note, the contrasting crustal depths of the two hemispheres.

Shallow crust in the North, much thicker crust in the South.

Why would a planet evolving in isolation display such a profound dichotomy?

It's as if, some unknown force excavated the northern crust miles deep.

The hemispheric removal of crustal material

requires a force external to Mars, acting on the planet.

But when it comes to external events

scientific convention has only one thing to work with:

random collisions.

Could a planetoid or huge asteroid crashing into Mars

have removed millions of cubic miles of crust?

A shattering impact

is all that theory would allow.

But what would Martian history look like

were we to include electrical events?

Events on a scale sufficient to sculpt the surface of the Red Planet from pole to pole.

Of all the enigmatic features in the solar system

perhaps none provokes greater amazement

than Valles Marineris.

The largest canyon on any planet or moon,

the deep trench complex stretches a third of the way around the planet,

hundreds of times larger than the Grand Canyon.

It would reach from San Francisco to New York and beyond.

Prior theory of planet formation had never anticipated such a chasm on a small planet.

What natural force excavated this colossal trench?

With the arrival of the Mariner probes,

NASA scientists thought the chasm could have been cut by water erosion,

though nothing even close was ever achieved by water on the known watery planet Earth.

In any erosional hypothesis, three million cubic miles of material were removed.

3,000,000 cubic miles! And it had to go somewhere.

Neither the means of fluid drainage, nor the vast outflow required are in evidence.

Now, we know that Valles Marineris reaches to a greater depth

than any outflow channel originally envisioned.

And the tributaries imagined by some

turned out to be cleanly cut alcoves and stubby depressions.

They are not connected to feeder streams at all.

One portion of the Valles Marineris system, in particular, underscores our point here.

Planetary scientists acknowledge that Hebes Canyon,

much larger than our Grand Canyon, is an inseparable part of Valles Marineris.

The scientists have now acknowledged it was certainly not created by water.

Hebes Chasma: "a fairly large canyon in the Valles Marineris complex that has absolutely no inlet or outlet on the surface."

Nor is it plausible to suggest that surface spreading

created the massive caisson of Valles Marineris

with its repeated morphology of sharply scalloped walls.

The surface was not torn, it was carved

and the detailed images imply a removal of material

along the entire length of the chasm,

a process clearly illustrated by the neatly machined so-called tributaries

all the way up to their rounded, cleanly cut terminations.

Whatever formed the canyon complex could not stop at the margins of the primary channel,

but added irregular craters and crater chains, and surface grooves and gouges.

So, the question can not be escaped.

Is there anything known to science today

that can account for the extraordinary profile

of Valles Marineris?

There is an explanation well-known to science

though it's never entered the geologist's lexicon.

Lightning!

In the plasma laboratory, it's power is demonstrated

in electric discharge experiments.

But the form unfamiliar to conventional science today is the cosmic thunderbolt.

It was the brilliant engineer Ralph Juergens, who first suggested decades ago,

that cosmic thunderbolts carved Valles Marineris.

"..This entire region resembles nothing so much as an area zapped by a powerful electric arc advancing unsteadily across the surface..."

With the benefit of more recent data,

electrical theorist Wallace Thornhill returned to this extraordinary possibility.

"Valles Marineris was created within minutes by a giant electric arc sweeping across the surface of Mars...

...Rock and soil were lifted into space and some fell back to create the great, strewn fields of boulders first seen by the Viking and Pathfinder landers."

Yes, the electric hypothesis will unnerve many scientists

but it is the only hypothesis that meets the test of direct observation.

Here is a scar left by an electric arc on a piece of wet wood.

Electric discharge provides a direct and complete explanation for the Valles Marineris.

The so-called tributaries of the valley were cut by secondary streamers of the discharge.

That is a typical signature of an electric arc when it cuts a surface channel.

And here is the scar from electric discharge to an insulator.

Notice in particular the network of secondary streamers to the left;

a perfect counterpart to the western edge of Valles Marineris.

It was long held that this remarkable region on Mars

was the result of uplift, fracturing and spreading.

And from a distance, it did look like fracturing.

But with a closer view in front of us, it is simply irrational to cling to that interpretation.

Material has been cleanly removed, exactly as in the discharging to the insulator.

The evidence now available demands a new perspective,

a larger field of view.

In Thornhill's interpretation,

the discharge took the form of a plasmoid,

not unlike the plasmoid from which the spiral galaxy is formed.

Plasmoid simulation

On his website, Thornhill noted how the discharge effect

spiraled upward to the East and downward to the West,

an effect that shows up quite clearly on the elevation map given on his website.

In fact, if we extend the view of the elevation map,

we see an even larger effect.

It seems that the spiraling trails to the East and West nearly completed two circles

as they swung back to the trench itself.

But one difference between the northern and the southern extension stands out.

The northern extension is entirely constituted of ravines and depressions,

while the southern extension consists of ridges and mountainous terrain.

For this unusual contrast, electrical experiments offer a startling explanation.

It was George Christoph Lichtenberg who in the 18th century first showed

that electric arcs create ravine networks on more negatively charged surfaces

and elevated ridges on more positively charged surfaces.

Could it be that simple?

...that a cosmic thunderbolt carving Valles Marineris

acted on two regions of different charge, negative to the north and positive to the south?

If such was the case, the only plausible cause of the charge differential

would be an electrical exchange between Mars and other charged bodies in the past.

And what was the relationship of these events to the hemispheric dichotomies,

the removal of crustal material to the North and the densely cratered southern hemisphere?

In the electrical interpretation, the violent excavation of the surface to create Valles Marineris

would have created immense deposits of sediment on surrounding topography.

And indeed, we see that previous craters in the region were completely buried,

with only the largest craters appearing as outlines penetrating through the deep deposits.

It's apparent that the released material had a net drift to the West,

since the blanket of deposited sediment stretches all the way to the eastern flank

of the towering Olympus Mons.

Keep in mind as well that an electric discharge

at energies necessary to create the chasms of Valles Marineris

would have ejected great volumes of rocky material into space.

Much of the rocky debris would have fallen back to litter the Martian landscape.

And indeed, shattered rock of all sizes across the surface of Mars is a long-standing mystery.

And the mystery is resolved by electrical events on a continental and even hemispheric scale.

Given the energies of the events

considerable volumes of material would have surely escaped the planet altogether.

And what might this tell us about the Mars-Earth connection

in our reconstruction of ancient events?

Or the surprising discovery that rocks from Mars have fallen on our own planet?

When Meteorites Fell from Mars

One of the great surprises of the Space Age

was the discovery that certain meteorites had arrived from the planet Mars!

Initially, most scientists rejected the idea outright.

For rock to escape Martian gravity,

they could only imagine an asteroidal impact

blasting rock into space at more than three miles per second!

That is five times the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle.

The energies would either pulverize or vaporize the rock.

But the question was eventually settled by gases trapped inside a suspect meteorite.

The gases bore the atmospheric signature of Mars.

Martian meteorite

"The trapped gases match these that Viking measured in the martian atmosphere."

By 2003, at least 30 meteorites had been identified as Martian.

But how could