On the Rapid, Electrical Formation of Concretions Containing Soft-Bodied Fossils
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | On the Rapid, Electrical Formation of Concretions Containing Soft-Bodied Fossils |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Paulina West |
| Keywords | fossilization, concretions, fulgurites, electrical scarring, lab generated spherules, catastrophism |
| Published | 2012 |
| No. of pages | 20 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
In July of 2004 Plasma Physicists Dr. CJ Ransom and Wal Thornhill published results from experiments in which they created stone spheres using electric arcs of varying power and duration on a wide variety of minerals in the laboratory. The observed types of the lab-created spherules included both hollow and solid spheres, single spheres, and also fused pairs and multiples. These are very common morphologies for concretions found in nature. Many other features of the lab created spherules are found in naturally occurring concretions as well. Geologists define a concretion as a discrete stone sphere that formed around a nucleus such as plant or animal which has been fossilized - including soft bodied animals like annelids, crustaceans, and medusa. Though it is often said that three-dimensional soft-bodied fossils are rare, in fact there are excellent examples of soft-bodied fossils on every continent, and they quite often appear inside of concretions and nodules.
Soft-bodied fossils found within concretions from various sites around the world show very little or no breakdown or decomposition, leading some paleontologists to admit that preservation in these cases was a quick process. The exquisite preservation and the life-like positions of the soft-bodied fossils also agree to a near instantaneous formation.
There is now enough observational and experimental evidence to suggest that concretions are rapidly, electrically formed around the nucleus of a living creature, and that the fossilization is the result of electrical transmutation of the elements. Transmutation, like the electrical creation of stone spherules, is a process which has been observed in experimental lab work from around the world. Recent experiments by Andrea Rossi using powdered nickel to obtain a stable fusion reaction at low temperatures result in the transmutation of nickel into copper, in the presence of catalysts and hydrogen atoms. The use of granulated nickel and common gases are much closer to the natural conditions in which fossilization has taken place than all previous experiments.
In this paper, broad evidence for the electrical formation of fossiliferous concretions is gathered from electrical experiments, plasma physics, and microscopic analysis; from Anthony Peratt's study of worldwide ancient petroglyphs in comparison with extremely high energy plasma instabilities; and from common themes of lightning bolts petrifying creatures in native mythology (eg Zeus, Thunderbirds) on at least 4 continents. Fossiliferous concretions from 5 locations are discussed, and the surrounding areas are also examined for evidence of high temperature, electrical sculpting.
Overview
Paulina West takes an experimental result from the Electric Universe research programme — that electric arcs discharged onto mineral powders produce small stone spherules — and asks whether it can be extended to explain fossiliferous concretions, the stone nodules that so often enclose exceptionally preserved soft-bodied fossils. The paper is explicitly labelled "End of Part 1"; it is a statement of case and method rather than a report of completed fieldwork, and West is candid that several observations will be recorded "without explanation at this time."
The departure from the mainstream account is total, and West says so. Conventional geology explains concretions as slow chemical cementation: mineral-saturated pore fluids precipitate carbonate or siderite around a decaying organic nucleus over long intervals, within a framework in which present-day processes acting over deep time account for the landscape. West argues that this framework has an omitted variable — electricity at cosmic scale, driven by mega-ampere plasma events in the space environment of the Earth. On her account concretions are formed rapidly around a living creature by electric discharge, and fossilization itself is "the result of electrical transmutation of the elements". She frames this as catastrophist inquiry rather than geology in the modern sense, "because it is not limited exclusively to those inputs and variables."
The argument
The laboratory result
The foundation is work by C J Ransom and Wallace Thornhill at Vemasat Laboratories, published from 2004 in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science and elsewhere. Discharging arcs onto mineral powders produced round craters — including flat-bottomed craters "so mysteriously free of fallback debris" — and, alongside them, small spherules. The materials tested were chosen to be common on rocky planetary surfaces: silicon dioxide, iron oxide, talc, calcium carbonate, lava sand and hematite. The result West emphasizes most is the 1 mm blue hematite spherules, which matched the "blueberries" then being imaged on Mars by the rover Opportunity.
Ransom's apparatus is quoted in detail: a movable discharge probe 1–30 cm above samples of 4–12 mm, on metal or non-conducting trays, samples switchable as cathode or anode, discharges of 1–20 seconds, mostly from a 12,000 V / 120 mA supply with a voltage doubler, with smaller supplies and a 100,000 V microamp coil used to vary the plasma.
Scalability
The bridge from centimetre-scale laboratory craters to planetary features is the standard plasma-physics scaling argument, which West quotes from Ransom: Alfvén held that laboratory results extrapolate over twenty orders of magnitude to deep-space effects, and Peratt that plasma effects scale over fourteen. Combined with the consistency of spherule production across many materials — "specific materials and conditions always produced spherules" — this is taken to license comparison with natural concretions ranging from microscopic to the twenty-foot examples at tourist sites.
The morphology comparison
The paper's central evidence is a table (Table 1) matching features of laboratory spheres against features of natural concretions: solid, hollow, fused pairs, fused multiples, hemispheres with a flat plane, distinct poles, polar markings, equatorial bands and bulges, radial layering, a round outer scar, smooth surfaces, and smooth/rough hemispheric differences. Stephen Smith's mechanism is quoted for why discharge should produce this geometry: "Electric discharge tends to produce spherical layering and a distinct equator and pole, because the electromagnetic force 'squeezes' perpendicular to the current that creates it." West adds that laboratory spheres form both above and below the surface, appear in crown-like arrangements around craters, and sometimes sit in discrete depressions — and that laboratory work has begun, preliminarily, to reproduce the progressive morphology (round → obloid → flattened → log-like) documented by the North Dakota Geological Survey.
The fossil inventory
A survey establishes that three-dimensionally preserved soft-bodied fossils in concretions are not rare but global: the Fezouata Formation in Morocco; the Gogo Formation in Western Australia; Montceau-les-Mines in France; Chinese sites including the Chengjiang biota, where soft tissues survive as mineralized films of iron oxide and pyrite microspherules; Mazon Creek in Illinois with over 400 plant and 320 animal species; the Santana Formation in Brazil; concretions from 5 to 244 cm on James Ross Island in Antarctica; and manganese nodules covering up to 70% of some abyssal plains, frequently nucleated on biological material including sponges, radiolarians and foraminifera. She cites Hagadorn on Bear Gulch, where veins, skin and organ pigments, gut contents and sexual organs are preserved and muscles are occasionally phosphatized. The argument from this inventory is that the quality and life-like posture of preservation imply speed.
Fulgurites as the natural analogue
Because lightning strikes happen in real time and are reproducible, West treats fulgurites as the closest thing to a controlled experiment on the Earth's own surface. Sand fulgurites are hollow branching tubes with glassy interiors and grain-fused exteriors, with radial gradations attributed to falling temperature from the centre. Rock fulgurites — noted by Humboldt and by Diller, and catalogued by Christopher Libby on Cascade and Sierra Nevada peaks — appear as black, green or white bubbly crusts confined to roughly the top two metres of summits. For soil, she uses the Denton, Texas event of 20 April 2002, where a downed line sparked for thirty minutes across sixty feet of lawn, cutting a glassy trench and liquefying part of a concrete curb; George Maxey's paper on it observed that such structures have "vitreous interiors... igneous in origin while their crusty exteriors are contact metamorphic". Soil around the burn scar contained hollow stone spheres of 1–6 mm. She tabulates melting points — clay soil 1000 °C, calcium carbonate 825 °C, hematite 1566 °C, silica sand 1600–1725 °C — for later comparison.
Transmutation at low temperature
The most consequential step is the claim that fossilization is elemental transmutation. West reviews low-energy nuclear reaction work — the 2009 US Navy announcement, and results by Mizuno and Takahashi reporting neutrons, excess heat, X-rays and altered elemental composition (caesium on palladium transmuting to praseodymium) — and Theophanes Raptis's exploding-wire experiments, in which wires fragment symmetrically as if at harmonics along an antenna, with X-ray and neutron emission.
But packed deuterium and wires are, she notes, poor analogues for nature: "One can hardly speak of bone, shell, or tissue as 'packed' or dense." Her preferred model is Andrea Rossi's E-Cat, using powdered nickel, trace catalysts and hydrogen — granulated, like soils and silts, and nickel being common in the crust. The decisive comparison is thermal: with E-Cat operating temperatures reported at under 200 °C to 600–1000 °C, against mineral melting points of 825–1725 °C, transmutation could occur "well below the temperatures which would liquefy those minerals". This, she argues, is why concretions can look sedimentary rather than like fulgurites. Rossi is quoted directly on the product morphology: the copper "has been found in form of amorphous grains. But this is an issue still under probe."
Method
The stated method is deliberately local, to avoid "creating a new 'system' which replaces the old": define study areas by county lines (Mazon Creek and Peoria/Fulton Counties in Illinois; the San Rafael Swell in Emery County, Utah; Rock City in Ottawa County, Kansas; the mid-Pacific seamounts; the Keasey and Lincoln Creek Formations in Oregon and Washington), compare satellite imagery with lightning scars and Lichtenberg figures, visit and examine local stratigraphy for signs of high temperature, and record four features — lateral continuity or its absence, cave locations, discrete uranium layers or objects, and microspherules — without interpretation at this stage. Two further strands follow Talbott and Thornhill: documenting native fossil legends (Zeus and the Titans turned to stone by thunderbolts, at locations corresponding to Mediterranean fossil beds; North American thunderbeing myths in which lightning petrified the great creatures), following Adrienne Mayor's scholarship and Cuvier's own use of legend; and recording petroglyphs, following Peratt's 2003 IEEE paper comparing rock art worldwide to Z-pinch plasma instabilities. The equipment list is disarmingly concrete: laptop, camera, pickup truck, camper trailer, microscope, hydrochloric acid, scales, tile wet saw, sandpaper and ziplock bags.
Assessment
The genuinely strong part of this paper is the observation that motivates it. The morphological catalogue in Table 1 is not fanciful: laboratory arc discharge does produce solid and hollow spheres, fused pairs, radial layering, equatorial bulges and polar markings, and these are recurring features of natural concretions. Standard sedimentary cementation is usually invoked to explain concretionary sphericity as diffusion-limited growth about a nucleus, which does predict radial layering and roughly spherical form — but it predicts a distinct pole and equator considerably less naturally, and West is right that the discharge geometry gives a specific physical reason for that axis. Her observation that Chengjiang soft tissues are preserved as films of iron-oxide and pyrite microspherules is a real and interesting datum, and her insistence that exceptional soft-body preservation demands a fast process is not a fringe position — the paleontological literature on Konservat-Lagerstätten agrees that mineralization must begin within days to weeks. Methodologically, the decision to bound the study by county lines and to record features before interpreting them is more disciplined than most work in this genre, and the "omitted variable" framing is a fair statement of what a genuine alternative hypothesis would have to be.
The difficulties are severe. Most fundamentally, the paper's central claim — that fossilization is electrical transmutation of the elements — is asserted and never argued. Nothing in Ransom's spherule work involves transmutation; nothing in the LENR literature cited involves organic tissue; and no step connects a nickel-to-copper reaction to the replacement of chitin, calcite or collagen by silica, pyrite or siderite. The thermal comparison West makes (Tables 2 and 3) shows only that some reported LENR temperatures are below some melting points; it does not show that any transmutation occurred, still less that it produced the observed mineralogy. This matters because the mainstream account here is not merely a story: concretion carbonate carries a strongly negative δ13C signature, the isotopic fingerprint of carbon derived from bacterially decayed organic matter, and this is measured routinely in Mazon Creek and comparable siderite concretions. Transmutation from surrounding sand or iron oxide would leave no such signature. The paper does not mention isotopic evidence at all, and it is the single measurement most directly fatal to its thesis.
The keystone example is worse than unsupported. Andrea Rossi's E-Cat, which West presents as the closest laboratory analogue to natural conditions, was never independently validated; the 2011 demonstrations were conducted under Rossi's control with instrumentation he supplied, the claimed copper product was never shown to have anomalous isotopic ratios (natural-abundance copper being exactly what contamination would give), and in 2017 Rossi's own licensee Industrial Heat settled litigation asserting the technology did not work as represented. West writes in 2012 and cannot be blamed for hindsight, but she does note that publications describing the transmuted copper "are still pending" and proceeds anyway — the load-bearing element of her mechanism was, even at the time, an unreplicated commercial claim.
Several other steps are asserted rather than derived. The scalability argument is invoked as though a licence to extrapolate twenty orders of magnitude were general; in Alfvén's and Peratt's usage it applies to specific dimensionless plasma parameters, not to arbitrary morphological resemblance, and no scaling relation is offered connecting a 12 kV bench arc to the energy density needed to encase a jellyfish. The preservation-implies-speed argument is used to reach "near instantaneous", but rapid mineralization in paleontology means days to years, not seconds, and the paper never establishes that its evidence discriminates between the two. The petroglyph and mythology strands are presented as corroboration, but they are evidence about what ancient people saw or believed, not about how a Carboniferous concretion formed, and the inference from "thunderbolt myths exist near fossil beds" to "lightning made the fossils" runs the wrong way — the myths are far more economically read as ancient people encountering the fossils and explaining them, which is in fact Adrienne Mayor's own thesis in The First Fossil Hunters. Citing her work in support of the opposite reading is a misuse.
Finally, the argument as presented is incomplete by design. This is Part 1: the five field areas are named but not reported, four diagnostic features are to be recorded "without explanation at this time", and there are no measurements, no sections, no comparative analyses. The paper should therefore be read as a research prospectus — a clear statement of an unconventional hypothesis, an honest list of what would be looked at, and a frank admission of what has not yet been done. On that footing it is coherent and worth the fieldwork. As a demonstration that concretions form electrically, it does not begin.