THOTH
A Catastrophics Newsletter

VOL IV, No 4
Feb 29, 2000

EDITOR:  Amy Acheson
PUBLISHER:  Michael Armstrong
LIST MANAGER:  Brian Stewart

CONTENTS
FINDING ATLANTIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .by Amy Acheson
THE NATURAL REFERENCES OF MYTH . . . . . . . . . . by Dave Talbott
MISLEADING NOMENCLATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . by Don Scott
THUNDERSTORMS ON JUPITER . . . . . . . . Comments by Wal Thornhill
LIGHTNING IN JUPITER'S GREAT RED SPOT. . . . . . .by Wal Thornhill

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>-----<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

FINDING ATLANTIS
By Amy Acheson

Atlantis was described only in two of Plato's works, but nearly
everyone has heard about the utopian island that supposedly sank
into the sea nearly twelve thousand years ago.  It's amazing how
many claim to know where its ruins have been (or will be) found.

Peter James, in his book, The Sunken Kingdom, reveals that "a
positively dazzling array of places have been put forward as the
'real' site of Atlantis.  North America, Ceylon, Palestine,
Mongolia and Spitzbergen (together!), Carthage, Tartessos in
Spain, Malta, central France, Nigeria, Brazil, Peru, the Caucasus
Mountains, Morocco, the Sahara Desert, the Arctic, the
Netherlands, East Prussia and the Baltic, Greenland, the South
Pacific, Mexico, Iran, Iraq, the Crimea, West Indies, Sweden, and
the British Isles have all, at times, had their advocates."

Extensive as this list is, it's not complete.  James omitted
Antarctica, the Atlantis candidate of Italian researcher, Flavio
Barbiero, and popular Canadian author, Rand Flem-Ath. James later
adds his own well-researched and well-argued choice, Tantalus in
Turkey, to the list.

The Saturn Theory predicts that Atlantis was not an earthly
location.  As with Eden and Valhalla, Atlantis was celestial,
another variation of the mythical home of the gods.  Atlantis'
concentric circles and springs, its immortal ruling family -
Poseidon, Atlas, the Pleiades -- its location beyond the pillars
of Hercules, its central mountain and its catastrophic demise all
are mythical expressions of the polar configuration, the great
conjunction of the Golden Age.

So, if the Saturn Theory is right, then none of the many Atlantis
locations here on earth will be right.

The problem is more complex than that.  The main interest, to the
point obsession, of human cultures after the collapse of the polar
configuration has been trying to recapture it.  They did this in
legends, in rituals, in art and architecture.  So every stone
circle, every fortress, every pyramid, every altar, every temple
and every cathedral built in earlier times was fashioned from the
blueprints of the memory of the polar configuration.

So, if the Saturn Theory is right, then every one of the claimed
earthly locations of Atlantis will also be right, at least in a
sense.  All of the terrestrial candidates reflect the same cosmic
symbolism and the same underlying story.

Thus it seems that among the many Atlantis theories, only the
Saturn Theory is able to solve both problems.  It provides a
location for Atlantis and it also explains why there are so many
different locations which seem to fit the description.

Amy Acheson
thoth at whidbey.com
******************************************************************

THE NATURAL REFERENCES OF MYTH
By Dave Talbott
(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, WHEN SATURN WAS KING)

The extent to which world mythology reflects natural occurrences
is an issue on which the specialists find little agreement.
Despite the many competing interpretations by the different
schools, they share a common--usually unspoken--assumption: they
assume that no fundamental changes have occurred in the celestial
order.  Wherever possible they refer the objects of ancient art
and myth to objects and events in our familiar world behaving
exactly as they do today.  The Sun, the Moon, comets, meteors, the
pole star, the Great Bear or other constellations, or more
terrestrial phenomena such as thunder and lightning, earthquakes,
hurricanes, volcanoes, or local mountains, rivers, and common
animal forms.

If the great mythical dramas do indeed reflect natural events,
then we face an inescapable paradox.  Despite many years of cross-
cultural research, the authors of this book have never found a
general mythical theme that could find an explanation in our
natural world.  There is indeed a "sun" in the ancient sky, but
when the imagery is traced to its earliest forms, it neither looks
nor behaves like the sun in our sky.  There is a crescent "moon",
but its character and movement contradict everything about our
moon today.  While the planet Venus was venerated by all ancient
cultures, the earliest memories of Venus simply defy modern
observations of the planet.  And as for other celebrated forms,
one seeks in vain for any meaningful reference at all.  Where is
the famous fountain of the sun?  Where is the ship of heaven?
Where is the world mountain, the temple of the sun, or the world
tree that spread its branches among the stars?

It is precisely such images which have fostered the modern view
equating myth with fiction.  The storytellers understood nothing
about the world in which they lived, we are told.  The possibility
that myth might reflect events no longer occurring simply does not
enter the minds of modern scholars.

Of course the skeptic will remind us that all sorts of strange and
exotic ideas have been proposed on the basis of myth.  He will
suggest that you could argue for anything under the sun if all you
have to do is select a few myths for support.  And who could
dispute this point?  Bookshelves today are filled with adventurous
hypotheses, based in large part on mutually contradictory uses of
mythical fragments.

But the answer here is to stop the selective use of myth
altogether, to apply groundrules, which do not permit the
investigator to ignore any commonly held beliefs. In the new
approach we shall propose, the inquiry rests from start to finish
on globally-recurring themes of myth, deeply-rooted ideas that
have survived thousands of years of cultural evolution and tribal
mixing.  Additionally, this approach will place the highest
emphasis on the oldest sources, those originating closest in time
to the experiences behind the myths, with the least opportunity
for distortion.

EVENT AND INTERPRETATION

The first step toward understanding the myth-making epoch is to
distinguish between the unusual and the imaginative.  The events
are unusual, while the interpretations are imaginative.  We are
not asking anyone to believe that a shining temple or city of
living "gods" once stood in the center of the sky.  We will not
claim that a great hero of flesh and blood arose to rid the world
of chaos-monsters; or that this very same hero once consorted with
a "mother goddess".  We WILL ask the reader to consider whether
these unexplained and global themes may have roots in uncommon
natural events.  In its skepticism about such global themes the
modern world forgot the elementary distinction between event and
mythical interpretation, then tossed out the entire body of
evidence.

The astonishing fact is that all of the archetypes speak for
celestial forms that are not present in our sky, and for events
that do not occur in nature today.  The resulting situation is
untenable.  Did early races, for reasons we cannot fathom, simply 
repudiate all natural experience, in order to celebrate things 
never seen?  Or did the natural world in which the myths arose
present a range of sights and sounds unlike anything known in
modern times?

THE ANCIENT STORYTELLER

It's impossible to immerse oneself in the mythical world without
realizing that the ancient storyteller himself is certain of the
reported events' occurrence, despite the obvious tendency to
project imaginative interpretations onto events.  A "story"
entails both an event and an interpretation.  No living dragon
ever flew about in the sky.  But is it possible that something
viewed imaginatively as a "dragon" _did_ appear in the sky?  To
allow this possibility is to open the door to systematic
investigation from a radically new vantage point.

The urge of ancient peoples to record and to repeat their stories
in words reflected the same fundamental impulse we see in all
other forms of reenactment and alignment in ancient ritual, art,
and architecture.  Recitation of the story momentarily transported
both the storyteller and the listener backwards to the mythical
epoch, which was experienced as more compelling, more "true" than
anything that came later.  That is why, among all early
civilizations, as noted by Mircea Eliade and others, the
prodigious events to which the myths refer provided the models for
all collective activity--

"One fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is
thought to express the absolute truth, because it narrates a
sacred history; that is, a transhuman experience revelation which
took place at the dawn of the Great Time, in the holy time of the
beginnings (in illo tempore).  Being real and sacred, the myth
becomes exemplary, and consequently repeatable, for it serves as a
model, and by the same token as a justification, for all human
actions.  In other words, a myth is a true history of what came to
pass at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern
for human behavior...Clearly, what we are dealing with here is a
complete reversal of values; whilst current language confuses the
myth with 'fables', a man of the traditional societies sees it as
the only valid revelation of reality."

It needs to be understood as well that the globally-recurring
themes appear to be as old as human writing.  All of the common
signs and symbols we shall review in these volumes appear to
precede the full flowering of civilization.  This rarely
acknowledged fact, which could be easily disproved if incorrect,
is of great significance.  If our early ancestors were habituated
to inventing experience, we should expect an endless stream of new
mythical content--new forms and personalities arising as if from
nowhere. This absence of invention in historical times forces us
to ask how the original "creativity" of myth arose: what unknown
ancient experience could have produced the massive story content
of myth, including hundreds of underlying themes that have lasted
for thousands of years?

UNIVERSAL THEMES OF MYTH

By following the comparative approach, and by concentrating on the
universal themes of myth, a researcher is enabled to focus on the
substratum.  Nothing will boost the researcher's confidence more
than discovering that the roots of myth are not only identifiable,
but coherent, each identifiable theme revealing an explicit
connection to the same taproot, while revealing verifiable links
to the other themes as well.

To illustrate this point let us consider just a few human memories
whose deep connections to each other are beyond dispute.  Though
each of the themes listed here will require extensive review and
analysis, our immediate interest is in a possibility generally
ignored in our time--the possibility of a fully integrated and
consistent substructure.

AGE OF GODS AND WONDERS

It is an interesting fact that every culture remembered a lost
"age of the gods", a wondrous epoch clearly distinguished from all
that came later.  The gods were visibly present, and they radiated
power and light--"the majestic race of the immortals", in the
account of the Greek poet Hesiod, or "the age of the primeval
gods" celebrated by the Egyptians.  The gods ruled for a time,
then faded from view, took flight, or wandered off.  And
everywhere will be found the compulsion to commemorate the
critical junctures in the biographies of the gods, to carry
forward the stories in pictures and words, to fashion replicas of
the gods in clay and stone, and to reenact these events at all
levels of collective activity.

One of the great deceptions in conventional approaches to
mythology is the pretense that this is all comprehensible in terms
of primitive ignorance and superstition.  The issue is far more
fundamental than that.  What demands explanation is the vividness,
the consistency of the images, and the extraordinary passion and
devotion with which ancient races sought to re-connect with the
gods.  Nothing meant more to the ancient world than to recover
something distinctly remembered, but lost.

There is structure to the stories.  Even a superficial review of
the world's mythical traditions will show that the different
personalities tend to fall into certain categories.  Universal
sovereign, mother goddess, ancestral warrior, chaos monster: these
personalities (as we will illustrate at length) repeatedly
expressed the same relationships to each other.  Moreover, the
age of the gods not only has a familiar ending (the gods go away)
it has a common beginning as well:

GOLDEN AGE

Certain general themes occur on every habitable continent.  One is
the deeply entrenched myth of a lost Golden Age, a period of
natural abundance and cosmic harmony, when humanity lived under
the beneficent rule of visible powers in the heavens.  In fact,
the Golden Age was universally invoked as the opening chapter in
the age of the gods, and that is just one of numerous indications
of unexplained and globally-repeated structure.

The Hindus called it the Krita Yuga or perfect age; the Chinese
the Age of Perfect Virtue, the Scandinavians the Peace of Frodhi.
For the Egyptians this was the Tep Zepi or "First Time", the
beneficent age of Re.  The Sumerians knew it as the rule of the
sovereign An, "the Days of Abundance"; Greek tradition similarly
recalled the prosperous epoch of the god Kronos, when the whole
world enjoyed peace and plenty.  The Romans celebrated this as the
Golden Age of Saturn.

In the general tradition, the Golden Age means a timeless epoch
before the fall, or before the arrival of discord and war, before
the linkage of heaven and earth was broken.  Many traditions
recall the absence of seasons or of any time-keeping references,
claiming that the land produced abundantly without any need for
human labor. Skeptics have suggested that these are simply
exaggerated local memories of "the good old days".  But that claim
is answered by comparative study.  The theme of the Golden Age
cannot be separated from other themes for which such "explanations" 
are entirely inadequate

KING OF THE WORLD

Why, for example, did all of the early cultures connect the Golden
Age with the rule of a figure remembered as the Universal
Monarch--a prototype of kings ruling in the sky before any king
ruled on earth?

This is hardly a frivolous connection.  The Egyptian Atum-Re, the
central luminary of the sky, was the founder of the idyllic age,
to which every later king or pharaoh traced his lineage.  It was
the Sumerian An, the Akkadian Anu, who inaugurated the "years of
abundance", and from whom the very institution of kingship
descended.  Similarly, the Hindu Yama, Persian Yima, Norse Frodhi,
Chinese Huang-ti, and Mexican Quetzalcoatl are all distinguished
as founding kings, the first in a line of kings, and models of the
good king.  What defined the ideal was the harmonious existence
and natural abundance, which marked the god's rule.  Hence, human
memories of the Golden Age and of the exemplary king are
inextricably entwined, implying a substructure we cannot afford to
ignore.

DOOMSDAY

The fear of doomsday, of the orderly world going out of control,
ranks perhaps as the deepest of human fears.

>From the first glimmerings of civilization, every ancient nation
kept alive its own tale of universal catastrophe, and if anything
deserves to be called a collective memory it is this idea.  But
how are we to understand it?  Various accounts describe the world-
ending disaster so differently as to leave mythologists groping
for a consensus.  In one account a great deluge submerges the
race; in another a fiery conflagration, while many myths say a
celestial dragon's assault upon the world brought universal
darkness.

Such divergent story elements make it all too easy to overlook an
overarching principle revealed by comparative analysis.  The
"mother of all catastrophes"--the event which ancient races feared
above all else--was that which brought the Golden Age to its
violent conclusion.  Whether it is the ancestral rule of Re, or
the universal kingship of An, or the Golden Age of Kronos (not to
mention the numerous variations), the story culminates in earth-
shaking catastrophe.

But only rarely do psychologists or historians ask whether this
pervasive fear might have roots in natural experience as well--a
time when the world _did_ slip out of control, the stars _did_
fall from the sky, and the rain of fire and brimstone _did_
overwhelm the world. The Doomsday theme is not an isolated memory,
but an integral component in a more complete and unified memory.
Indeed, comparative analysis reveals numerous additional points of
agreement, including the fate of the Universal Monarch himself--

DYING OR DISPLACED GOD

The Buddhists tell of the primeval king, during whose prosperous
reign a vast wheel turned in the sky, remaining in one spot.  This
ancient and benevolent ruler was himself "the wheel turning king".
But eventually the wheel fell from its established place, the king
died, and this golden age was lost.

The Zoroastrians spoke of the great cosmic wheel called the Spihr,
symbol of the god Zurvan, "Lord of the Long Dominion."  It too
stood in one place, ever turning.  And it was the fall or
destruction of this cosmic wheel, which terminated the god's
prosperous rule.

In whatever terms the local accounts might present the Doomsday
story, the consistent result is the death, flight, or displacement
of the original sovereign power.  The Egyptian Re grows weary and
departs the human realm.  The Sumerian An flees the scene as chaos
overtakes the world.  The Greek Kronos is forced from his throne,
ending the Golden Age and plunging the world into darkness and
discord.  For the Romans the fabled Golden age of Saturn ended
when, in the words of poet Ovid, "Old Saturn fell to death's dark
country."  In such fashion did the ancient Paradise give way to
cosmic turmoil.

And here, too, one aspect of the story invariably merges with
another:

WARS OF THE GODS

As a mythical archetype, the Doomsday catastrophe is not merely a
terrestrial disturbance, it is the story of celestial upheaval.
The gods themselves battle in the sky so violently as to rearrange
the heavens.  Their weapons include thunderbolts and stone,
flaming "arrows", fire-breathing dragons, and all-consuming wind
and flood.  The tale is most familiar to us, perhaps, as the
famous clash of the Titans, recounted by Hesiod and other Greek
poets.  This was the catastrophic aftermath of the Golden Age of
Kronos, when "wide heaven was shaken and groaned, and high Olympos
reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying
gods...So, then, they launched their grievous shafts upon one
another, and the cry of both armies as they shouted reached to
starry heaven; and they met together with a great battle-cry.
Then Zeus...showed forth all his strength.  From Heaven and from
Olympos, he came forthwith, hurling his lightning; and the bolts
flew thick and fast from his strong hand together with thunder and
lightning, whirling an awesome flame".

Such images are so common and occur on such a grand scale that
historians rarely give them a second look.  What do these
"exaggerated" tales have to do with real history?  In the Norse
cataclysm of Ragnarok, the wars of the gods bring an idyllic age
to an end, and this is surely one of the keys to understanding the
archetype.  The wars of the gods occur during, or as, the "break"
that separates the Golden Age from the subsequent epoch.  Witness,
for example, the celestial conflagration of Aztec thought, the
catastrophic interlude between world ages.  So too in Hindu myth-
the universe dissolves in flames, to be regenerated under a new
world age.  To the same category belong the great conflagrations
separating the original rule of the Egyptian Re from the epoch
that followed.

Typically, scholars will "explain" the cosmic catastrophe theme
through more familiar or ordinary events, an eclipse of the Sun or
Moon, a local hurricane, earthquake, or volcano.  Such
"explanations" can only discourage close examination of the
stories, with the result that vital, repeated elements are missed.
But it is the full complex of themes that must be explained.  A
final example:

DRAGON OF DARKNESS

Nothing could be further removed from our familiar experience than
a flying serpent or dragon.  And yet it was not long ago that
every race on earth remembered the fire-breathing dragon moving
among the stars, disturbing the motions of the planets, and
threatening to destroy the world.  Such was the character of the
Babylonian dragon Tiamat, whose attack caused even the gods
themselves to flee.  The Egyptian counterpart was the raging
Uraeus serpent; or Apep, the dragon of darkness.  For the Greeks,
it was the Python serpent whom Apollo defeated in an earth-shaking
encounter, or the great dragon Typhon, under whose attack the
heavens reeled.

How did it happen that so many diverse cultures recalled--in such
vivid and similar terms--a biologically impossible monster?  The
cosmic serpent or dragon cries out for an explanation, and an
explanation must be possible, even if we have missed it.

>From one land to another such monsters were celebrated as visible
forms in the sky.  If there is an inherent, irrational tendency of
the primitive mind to conjure dragon-like beasts out of nothing,
then one must wonder how this irrationality produced such
surprising parallels from one land to another--fiery serpents,
longhaired or bearded serpents, feathered serpents.  The globally-
repeated attributes are both impossible and absurd, and nothing in
familiar human experience can even begin to account for them.

The celestial serpent-dragon takes the form of a great storm or
whirlwind, breathes fire and smoke, battles against the gods, and
ushers in a period of universal darkness.  But these are only a
few of the pervasive themes.  When, for example, did this chaos
monster appear in the sky?  It appeared specifically during the
break between world ages--following the death or departure of the
Universal Monarch, when the Golden Age collapsed--and prior to the
renewal of the world.  Appearance of the Babylonian Tiamat is
synonymous with the flight of the original sovereign An.  The
Uraeus serpent rages in the sky as a symbol of Re's loss of power.
The dethroning of Kronos, founder of the Golden Age, immediately
precedes the attack of Typhon.

CONNECTIONS

With this brief listing of connected memories, we wish to drive
home the principles of substructure and integrity.  In considering
the serpent-dragon, for example, we do not just find an improbable
monster, but a monster figuring in a particular story in a
particular way, with clearly defined relationships to other
personalities.  It is simply not useful to examine a mythical
theme as if that theme stands on its own. What needs to be
explained is the full complex of ideas embedded within a theme,
and that will invariably involve repeated and unexplained
connections to a larger story.

Dave Talbott
******************************************************************

MISLEADING NOMENCLATURE
By Don Scott

>From JPL:

Galileo Millennium Mission Status
February 25, 2000

NASA's Galileo spacecraft has begun beaming volcano pictures
and other science data to Earth, now that it has successfully
completed its third and closest-ever flyby of Jupiter's fiery
moon Io.

Despite intense radiation near Io, the spacecraft completed
all its planned activities during the flyby at 6:32 a.m. Pacific
Standard Time on Tuesday, Feb. 22, at an altitude of 198
kilometers (124 miles).

***(snip)***

Don Scott comments:
Here we have another one of those (intentionally?) misleading
words: "radiation".

The Galileo probe almost certainly passed through a region
where there is a strong electrical current. It, therefore,
experienced a shower of electrons and/or positive ions, which gave
fits to the onboard computer.  To use the word "radiation" to
describe this is not technically wrong - but it certainly is
misleading to the general public. Most people strongly associate
the word "radiation" to "radioactivity" (the emission of alpha,
beta or gamma streams, as from radium or uranium).  This process
occurs without the presence of an electric field. Radioactive
"radiation" consists of streams of either completely ionized
helium nuclei (alpha) which have double positive charge, electrons
(beta) which have single negative charge, and/or photons (gamma)
which are electrically neutral - all leaving the source and
flowing outward in the same direction.
A plasma discharge, on the other hand, contains electrons
moving in one direction and positive ions moving in the other
direction, both in response to the presence of an electric field.
Sloppy nomenclature NASA, sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

Don Scott
******************************************************************

THUNDERSTORMS ON JUPITER
Summary from "Nature" magazine
Comments by Wal Thornhill

Jupiter's massive storms resemble Earth's but are powered by the
planet itself, not the sun, Cornell astronomers say

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Anvil clouds tower more than 30 miles high,
casting a pall over a hazy sky.  Amid the gathering gloom, 100 mph
winds whip clouds across the sky, while lightning punctuates the
tumult repeatedly. Meanwhile, clouds from yet another giant storm
dump several inches of rain daily over an area more than 600 miles
on one side. Given that severity, and thunderheads three times as
high as we see in North America, this storm is obviously not on
Earth, although the storms have similarities to terrestrial
weather systems.  This is Jupiter.

Astronomers from Cornell University, the California Institute of
Technology and the NASA Galileo Imaging Team at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have discovered that some
thunderstorms on Jupiter closely resemble clusters of
thunderstorms, called mesoscale convective complexes (MCCs), found
on Earth. Contrary to previous belief, these MCCs develop from the
intense heat emanating from Jupiter's core rather than from the
sun.  And these MCC's drive the planet's weather system.  The
findings appear in the latest issue (Feb. 10) of the journal
"Nature".

Wal comments:

These statements about the energy coming from Jupiter's core are
made as if they are a fact when they are conjecture. It gives the
impression we know all about what causes storms on Earth,
especially when a technical sounding term like "mesoscale
convective complexes" is used. Nothing could be further from the
truth. If the storms on Jupiter are created by the planet's
internal heat, what causes the most powerful winds in the solar
system on Neptune, which doesn't seem to have the internal heat to
drive them? Neptune has 1,000 mph winds and only 5% of the heat
input of Jupiter. Will we need another ad hoc theory for every
planet?

The report continues:

"There is a lot of activity we see on Jupiter that we see on
Earth," says Peter J. Gierasch, Cornell professor of astronomy and
a lead author on a letter to "Nature" detailing the team's
findings.  "We see jet streams, large cyclonic elements, large
anti-cyclonic elements and many elements of unpredictability and
turbulence."

Of all the tempest-tossed storms in the solar system, the
astronomers chose to examine an area west of the giant planet's
great red spot, in a region known as the south equatorial belt.
The scientists studied images taken by the NASA Galileo spacecraft
when it orbited Jupiter on May 4, 1999.  The images were part of a
planned effort to search for and study local convection.

What is remarkable about the Jovian MCCs, says Gierasch, is that
they have the same physics as thunderstorm clusters on Earth, but
the heat source to generate these events is completely different.
Generally, thunderstorms on Earth are small cells of cumulonimbus
clouds, singular in nature, and caused by summertime heat from the
sun.  An MCC, or cluster of many cells of thunderstorms of the
type that commonly strikes the midwestern United States, also is
formed by intense summertime heat.

Wal comments:

It is not known what causes a thunderstorm. The origin of
lightning on Earth is unknown. The Electric Universe model
proposes an electrical input from space to the weather systems on
all planets so we might expect to see similar activity on other
planets to that seen on Earth. Even the Sun has weather! It
explains with one common theory the intense winds on Neptune, the
superbolts and intense lightning on Venus (which has no clouds but
rather a planet-wide smog), the planet-wide dust storms and large
dust devils on Mars, and the Sun's weather. Heat alone is not
sufficient to create thunderstorms on Earth, Jupiter or Neptune.
It requires electrical energy to be input too.

The report continues:

The difference between the formation of an MCC and that of a
hurricane or cyclone is where the system gets its fuel.
Hurricanes and cyclones on Earth are fueled by the warm ocean.
MCCs develop because of atmospheric instability.  Where it is warm
near the Earth's surface in the summer and cooler aloft,
condensation rises and forms many cells of intense thunderclouds
over a vast area. These summertime giants can last for hours, even
days, and dump unusually large amounts of rain.  On Jupiter, they
can also last from about 12 hours to several Earth days, producing
huge quantities of rain.

Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, is about 480
million miles from the sun, compared with Earth's distance of 93
million miles.  The giant planet generally is thought to have been
developed some 5 billion years ago, and it is perpetually shrouded
by swirling clouds of water and ammonia ice.  But because of the
heat reservoir of highly compressed hydrogen in the planet's
center, this gaseous giant emits nearly 70 percent more heat than
it absorbs from the sun. This is what leads these astronomers to
suggest that the source of the stormy turbulence on Jupiter seems
to be the planet itself.

Wal comments:

So it is conjecture piled upon conjecture. The planet's age is
unknown. How it formed and from what elements we don't know. The
internal composition, structure and temperature of the planet is
unknown. Some, or even all, of the excess heat may well be due to
the high level of electrical energy input to Jupiter as evidenced
by its powerful auroras and lightning storms. That has not been
considered.

The report continues:

Gierasch explains that, interestingly, the physical attributes of
Jupiter's vast thunderstorms are the same as those on Earth,
except Earth's storms develop because of the sun's heat and
Jupiter's storms develop from its own internal heat source.
Jupiter's core still retains heat from the planet's original
formation by collapse and compression.  "It is in the process of
cooling, and it will likely continue to cool for at least another
five billion years," Gierasch says.

Wal comments:

The same effects can be expected from the same cause/s. The
problem is to identify the real cause/s. That hasn't even been
accomplished here on Earth. Heat alone is not sufficient.  All
models of gravitational collapse and compression are seriously
flawed because they don't consider atomic dipolar electrical
forces which resist compression. In addition, it is generally
assumed that the compression takes place without much heat loss -
which is a very special condition to impose on the model. Finally,
we have no evidence that planets form by accretion in the first
place. The result is that any pronouncements about the history of
Jupiter and the origin of its excess heat and weather are just hot
air.

The report continues:

An almost-continuous cycle drives the Jovian weather, he explains.
The storms develop, drop precipitation, the precipitation
evaporates prior to reaching Jupiter's core heat-source and the
condensation rises again. Galileo's instruments are not able to
detect lightning on the planet's sunlit side.  But once the storm
crosses into the dark side, astronomers are able to see the
lightning and confirm the existence of MCCs.

One part of these Jovian storm systems that dwarfs anything on
Earth, says Gierasch, are the lightning bolts. According to
research published by his colleagues, Andrew. P Ingersoll of the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, Calif.,
and Blaine Little of ITRES Research, Calgary, Canada, in the
planetary science journal "Icarus"  (December 1999), the lighting
bolts are as many as several times the size of the largest
terrestrial bolts.  With lightning strikes much larger than those
found on Earth, "I wouldn't want to fly through that storm," says
Gierasch.

Wal comments:

At the very least it might shake up their ideas.  :-)

Wal Thornhill
*************************************************************

LIGHTNING IN JUPITER'S GREAT RED SPOT
By Wal Thornhill

I wrote on the 5th June 1997:

"I would even hazard a guess that the Great Red Spot (GRS) on
Jupiter is, for reasons as yet unknown, the continual focus of a
powerful ionospheric discharge. I deduce this from an example of
the same effect on a much smaller scale on Earth in the reported
glow discharge seen from space above tornadic storms on Earth. It
would be of interest to know if Jupiter's ionosphere is the site
of diffuse electrical discharges above the GRS."

And more expansively on 2nd September 1997:

"The Great Red Spot (GRS) and white spots on Jupiter may have
something in common with sunspots. All are probably the point of
connection of a Birkeland current rope from the plasmoid
surrounding the planet/sun. The strong vertical magnetic field in
sunspots suggests this is so in their case. (Birkeland currents
flow along magnetic field lines in a force-free fashion). The
long-lived GRS on Jupiter may be associated with some underlying
electrical inhomogeneity in the planet resulting from the
catastrophic breakup of the Saturnian system. The many reports of
Jovian thunderbolts attest to the probability that the giant
planet may bear hidden electrical scars. Of course, the standard
picture of the structure of Jupiter does not allow for a solid
surface under the clouds to bear scars. But it must be remembered
that the Electrical Universe requires a completely new estimation
of what a "gas giant" really is. Calculations of both the density,
composition and the internal heat budget will need to be
reassessed, with the good possibility that there is a solid
surface under the clouds. If so, it would allow for the simplest
electrical inhomogeneity - a high point on the solid surface - to
act as a giant lightning conductor. It was actually calculated
back in 1982 that a mountain only a few thousand feet high on
Jupiter could create an effect like the GRS in Jupiter's
atmosphere."

And again in  THOTH VOL II, No. 7 April 15, 1998:

"It is very interesting to note the structure in the Great Red
Spot - "a tangle of spiral arms". A short time ago I posted the
view that the GRS is the site of a continual diffuse discharge
from the ionosphere into Jupiter's atmosphere. A tangle of spiral
arms could have been predicted on this basis if the electric
currents flowing into the vortex were made manifest by some
electrical action on Jupiter's atmospheric gases. Once again, the
red colouration could be partly due to low-energy nuclear
transformations of gases in the spiral arms."

In the following report from NASA you will notice the fixation on
the ideas that the energy for Jupiter's weather comes from below
the clouds and that lightning can only occur where water droplets
are in violent motion. One would think that the discovery of
powerful lightning in Venus' dry smog would have put paid to that
theory. It only reinforces that "what you know aint so" is a
powerful deterrent to innovation in science.

Wal Thornhill

Caltech

February 9, 2000

Thunderstorms found to be an energy source for Jupiter's Great Red
Spot, other large features

PASADENA -- Using data from the Galileo spacecraft currently in
orbit around Jupiter, scientists have discovered that
thunderstorms beneath the upper cloud cover are supplying energy
to the planet's colorful large-scale weather patterns -- including
the 300-year-old Great Red Spot.

In two articles in the February 10 issue of the British journal
Nature and an article in the current issue of the journal Icarus,
Caltech planetary science professor Andrew Ingersoll and his
colleagues from Cornell, NASA, and UCLA write that lightning
storms on the giant planet are clearly associated with the eddies
that supply energy to the large-scale weather patterns.

Their conclusion is possible because Galileo can provide daytime
photos of the cloud structure when lightning is not visible, and
nighttime photos of the same area a couple of hours later clearly
showing the lightning.

"You don't usually see the thunderstorms or the lightning strikes
because the ammonia clouds in the upper atmosphere obscure them,"
says Ingersoll.

"But when Galileo passes over the night side, you can see bright
flashes that let you infer the depth and the intensity of the
lightning bolts."

Especially fortuitous are the Jovian nights when there is a bit of
moonshine from one of the large moons such as Io, says Ingersoll.
When there is no moonshine, the Galileo images show small blobs of
glow from the lightning flashes, but nothing else. But when the
upper cloud covers are illuminated at night by moonshine, the
pictures show both the glow from the lightning some 100 kilometers
below as well as eddies being roiled by the turbulence of the
thunderclouds.

The association of the eddies with lightning is especially
noteworthy in the new papers, Ingersoll says. Planetary scientists
have known for some years that Jupiter had lightning; and in fact
they have known since the Voyager flyby that the zonal jets and
long-lived storms are kept alive by soaking up the energy of
smaller eddies. But they did not know until now that the eddies
themselves were fed by thunderstorms below.

"The lightning indicates that there's water down there, because
nothing else can condense at a depth of 80 or 100 kilometers," he
says. "So we can use lightning as a beacon that points to the
place where there are rapidly falling raindrops and rapidly rising
air columns -- a source of energy for the eddies.

"The eddies, in turn, get pulled apart by shear flow and give up
their energy to these large-scale features. So ultimately, the
Great Red Spot gets its energy and stays alive by eating these
eddies."

Adding credence to the interpretation is the fact that the
anticyclonic rotation (clockwise in the northern hemisphere and
counterclockwise in the southern) of the eddies is consistent with
the outflow from a convective thunderstorm. Their poleward drift
is consistent with anticyclones being sucked into Jupiter's
powerful westward jets.

Ingersoll is lead author of the Nature paper that interprets the
new Galileo data. The other authors are Peter Gierasch and Don
Banfield of Cornell University; and Ashwin Vasavada of UCLA.
(Banfield and Vasavada are Ingersoll's former doctoral students at
Caltech).

Gierasch is lead author of the other Nature paper, which announces
the discovery of moist convection on Jupiter. The other authors
are Ingersoll; Banfield; Vasavada; Shawn Ewald of Caltech; Paul
Helfenstein and Amy Simon-Miller, both of Cornell; and Herb
Breneman and David Senske, both of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL).

The authors of the Icarus paper are Ingersoll; Vasavada; Senske;
Breneman; William Borucki of NASA Ames Research Center; Blane
Little and Clifford Anger, both of ITRES Research in Calgary,
Alberta; and the Galileo SSI Team.

Report ends.

~Wal Thornhill
See the home of The Electric Universe
at http://www.holoscience.com
**************************************************************

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