mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== 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. 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