Thunderbolts this month also has a piece by one Andrew Hall, described as an engineer and writer. He is clearly somebody with his feet on the ground.
At www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2015/08/10/did-van-gogh-paint-this/ … he homes in on the idea that in the early solar system period there were an inordinate number of collisions and meteor impacts. One reason for this is that there are so many craters as viewed by spacecraft searching the solar system. On earth such cratering is subject to erosion and plant growth – and tectonic forces tend to wipe out much of the cratering from the early solar system. It seems that Worlds in Collision is acceptable if it is dated billions of years ago.
High energy impacts, he says, generally form a crater at almost any angle due to shock waves. The crater is usually much larger in diameter than the meteor that struck the surface, as much as ten times bigger. He then says the shape of the crater is revealing as it should be a relic of the shock of the impact. However, he also goes on to criticise electric universe people when they attribute almost all cratering to electric discharges – when this is probably not true. Meteor impacts do create circular craters contrary to what some people have written. Meteor shock waves have been tested in the laboratory and quite a lot is known about them. The difference between impact and discharge is somewhat subtle, he adds, and then sets about exploring craters in more detail. For example, shock waves of a meteor cause the ground to take on the structure of a suet pudding where a weight, or just a finger, can make a depression – circular in form. Below the bottom layer of an impact crater there will be fractured substrata, whereas electrical discharge cratering will remove material without fracturing on the bottom. To prove electrical discharge all one might do is prod around the bottom of a crater – or better still, take a core.
Andrew Hall therefore brings the issue of cratering back to a common sense position. It is not productive to go the whole hog and attribute most of the cratering to electrical effects. Not only that, most people now know stones fall out of the sky. Velikovsky came up with scenarios where Earth was bombarded by streams of gravel and stones – and he visualised them hitting the ground. Andrew Hal has therefore introduced a breath of fresh air into the subject – and to get a flavour of how some people over emphasize discharges go to www.ncgt.org and the latest issue where there is an article on electric cratering (posted some weeks ago). The article did concentrate the mind on the shape of craters and Andrew Hall does something similar. Let's face facts, ancient texts associate meteor phenomena with explosions in the atmosphere that rained fire upon the surface of the Earth (which may not involve cratering at all but may instead cause a different kind of geological phenomenon which is normally attributed to tectonics). The Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013 is a case in point. The stoney object exploded high in the atmosphere (it was quite small and fire from the sky was not produced but instead there was an enormous flash and lots of little bits rained down and some of these were later picked up). Iron meteorites would differ – hitting the ground, and these were also recorded in the ancient world (the metal was used as a resource). Velikovsky mentioned iron meteorites.
Andrew Hall then goes on to describe some of the differences in shape and form between electrical discharge and shock impact cratering. They may have a hexagonal or polygonal shape (which was a feature of the NCTG article also) and he sets out to describe what happens when plasma discharge strikes the surface of a planet or moon. This is one to keep for future reference when mainstream is claiming this or that about cratering.