Introduction
Many researchers of the Cosmos understood that it contains a kind of highly organized, most likely, intelligent substance, which, if it does not control natural processes, then regulates them so that they do not go beyond the permissible limits in their power, leading to the destruction of everything - to chaos. Such an anti-entropic principle is possessed by all of us known life on a carbon protein-ribonucleic basis. This life is able to regulate the processes occurring in the substance of the lithospheres, hydrospheres and atmospheres, maintaining them in a certain stable state, despite changing external factors. Much is known about such an organizing substance. Anyone who wants to can read the works of ecologists, biogeochemists and find there a lot of confirmation of these words of mine.
But is the only form of highly organized matter a substance called "life" (carbon protein-nucleic acid life)? Scientists have tried many times to come up with life on a silicon basis - a kind of living mountains and living stones on the surface of planets. However, the results of such attempts were not very convincing. Silicon is not suitable for the creation of living things.
But there is an amazing natural phenomenon observed in various parts of the Earth. So far, no one can explain its reason clearly. We are talking about the so-called Moeraki boulders, also known as the “watermelons of Elijah the Prophet”. Someone takes them for dinosaur eggs, someone - for the fruits of ancient marine plants, and some even put forward the assumption that these are the remains of UFOs.
The phenomenon is really strange. Imagine an almost perfectly shaped stone or iron ball with a diameter of ten centimeters to three meters. If someone happens to come across such an "egg" split, then inside he can find a cavity with crystalline formations on the inner surface. And in other balls of the same kind, there are no cavities - they are all-stone.
The most famous collection of these balls is located in a fishing village in New Zealand. The balls lie right on the beach. Moreover, all stones have a different structure - some of them are impeccably smooth, others - like a tortoise shell, rough. Some are chipped or huge cracks.
But in order to admire the "watermelons of Elijah the Prophet", it is not at all necessary to go to New Zealand. They are found in China, in Israel. There are the same round stones in Costa Rica, they are called "balls of the gods" there. These stones are considered man-made, they are called the "eighth wonder of the world" and they are under state protection. The largest "balls of the gods" in Costa Rica are 3 meters in diameter and weigh about 16 tons. And the smallest are no more than a child's ball, they are only 10 centimeters in diameter. The balls are arranged singly and in groups from three to fifty pieces, sometimes the collection of balls form geometric shapes.
There are similar formations in Russia (although Russian "eggs" are not considered man-made). For example, mysterious stone balls were discovered in the village of Boguchanka in the north of the Irkutsk region. Locals are sure that this is a UFO, for the reason that the balls look like they are made of metal.
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Where did this "wonder of the world" come from? The assumption that the stone balls are dinosaur eggs does not hold up. Scientists reject this assumption for the reason that even the largest dinosaurs could not have such huge eggs. The appearance of some stone balls is sometimes explained by the effect of glaciers, which supposedly carried rock fragments inside themselves, moved, dragged these fragments and gradually gave them a smooth shape. I saw a lot of glacial boulders, but I never came across spherical boulders.
The most daring hypotheses claim that this is the creation of the cosmic mind, because there are not only stone, but also "iron balls", and some are also hollow from the inside. Official science considered that this is a geological formation, and even gave it its name - geodan - a closed cavity in any sedimentary or volcanic rocks. Such geodans were formed, in the opinion of these scientists, from clots of liquid magma ejected from the vent of a volcano and, having cooled down, turned into a stone ball. But these are all just assumptions. The age of most of these formations is, according to researchers, at least 60 million years.
Stone ball
Stone balls in Turysh are destroyed as a “ falling husk ”. Notice the “ husk ” - This is the outer layer of the ball, consisting of a substance of a different composition than the core. Photo by Vasily Dyatlov and Andrey Zamakhin from the site: spletnik.ru
Deposits of stone balls
In the west of Kazakhstan, in the Caspian region, there is a poorly explored area called Turysh. Here, over several square kilometers, there is a ridge of bizarre stone formations, of which there are hundreds. The overwhelming majority of them have an almost perfect ball shape, and their sizes vary from two meters in diameter to the size of a cannonball. Hundreds of such mysterious stone balls are scattered across the deep Kazakh steppe. They appeared here about 8-9 million years ago.
It is natural for a person to see the manifestation of higher powers in everything unusual. Indeed, it is hard to believe that an unknown master did not have a hand in the creation of these unique stones. But who could it be? "Not people!" - another lover of the unknown will exclaim. However, the man did not really touch the balls. Or - almost never touched.
They try to explain the appearance of balls by the process of crystallization of rocks either in the thickness of volcanic ash or in the thickness of sand. When sand is impregnated with a solution that rises, for example, from the depths, crystallization centers appear in certain areas of the sand mass, growing like a snowball. Interacting with quartz, the solution promotes the formation of large and small round stone balls. The crystallization process spreads in all directions evenly, which gives a spherical shape to the formations. The question is: why crystallization proceeds uniformly in all directions. This hypothesis does not answer this question.
Concretions on Easter Island. Photo from the site: oceanographers.ru
Andrey Astafiev explains the origin of Kazakhstani stone balls as follows: “Local balls were formed under the influence of tidal processes in the sea. In favor of the "marine" version is the fact that they contain shell rock. Water covered the land in this area many millions of years ago, and in the Miocene (8-9 million years ago), when the Tethys Ocean retreated, large tracts of land were exposed, and bizarre rock formations remained on its surface. Over millions of years, the wind has done its job, giving the stones the correct rounded shape. Powerful wind currents so cut the surface of the balls that today it is covered with cracks."
The weak point in this hypothesis is the assumption that the wind gave the stones a rounded shape. I observed rocks in the Gobi Desert that had been exposed to wind erosion for a long time. No roundness, let alone balls, did not work out. And from erosion, the balls simply begin to collapse, which we see on some of them. In this case, the rocks collapse spontaneously as a "falling husk", that is, the outer layers of the stone formation are gradually separated, like the husk of an onion, and as a result, only a solid spherical core remains. Some large nodules are split as if they were carefully sawn in two by someone, with the cut always facing south. They look like real locators or satellite dishes! The spheres split in two look like a cutaway model of the Earth.
Ancient legends associate the appearance of stone balls with the love of the gods for the ball game. The gods amused themselves by tossing these stone balls. In those places where they competed, there were placers of these ancient "sports equipment". The most striking example in this regard is Costa Rica. It is clearly seen from the air that with the help of stone balls the ancient inhabitants of this country, with one guided purpose, laid out giant geometric figures. Why this was done is a mystery. As, in fact, a mystery and how it was possible to move heavy stones over long distances. Kazakhstani balls are lying, in all likelihood, in the same place where they once came out from under the water, and do not form regular figures.
The stone ball has a clearly layered structure, which is probably due to its formation. These layers can be the result of successive stages of crystallization of the substance from the melt. Photos from the site: vgorode.ru
The age of this ball is determined at 180 million years. Two layers are clearly distinguished here: a thick upper and a thin lower one. The cavity could have formed at the site of the dropped out nucleus. Or maybe the cavity was originally inside the ball? Photos from the site: 2012-kol.ucoz.ru
Huge stone balls have recently been found near Volgograd. Many considered them to be fossilized dinosaur eggs; many researchers were baffled by these balls. These balls were discovered by Nikolai Pekhterev, a shepherd from the village of Mokray Olkhovka. Descending into the ravine, Nikolai saw that at the very bottom of the mountain, on the side of the mountain, there were strange spherical stones - 12 balls a meter high, neatly sticking out of the clay, washed out by streams of water, in a suspiciously correct order. The distance between them was about three meters. Nikolai tried to pick off a piece from one, but nothing happened. The shepherd told about what he had seen in the village, and in the morning the whole Wet Olkhovka reached out to look at the miracle. The local tractor driver even took a sledgehammer with him: after several blows, one of the balls was split in half. To the amazement of the audience,the stone formations turned out to be hollow: in the cavity lay a petrified dark mass. The find was reported to the Kotovskiy district administration. The deputy head of the administration, Irina Mironova, went to the site to make sure that another anomaly had appeared. After thinking, the inhabitants came to the conclusion - in front of them is either a clutch of ancient dinosaurs, or something from the unknown, space.
Balls found in a ravine near Volgograd
A hollow ball found in a ravine near Volgograd
Ufologist Vasily Krutskevich explained the formation of balls as follows: stone balls are special geological formations made of sand, called nodules. They form in sedimentary rocks on the seabed as a result of the crystallization of minerals around the so-called central grain. Such formations are found in places where millions of years ago there was a sea, and after the geological rearrangement of the Earth's surface, the water moved away. If the rock where the nodule "grew" has the same permeability in all directions, then the nodule will have the shape of a ball. The sizes of such spheroids range from microscopic to three meters in diameter. These balls are considered a sight of the world scale, and it never occurs to anyone to hammer them with a sledgehammer. But in Mokra Olkhovka they simply did not know about nodules. But the fact that the stone balls are hollow inside,gives the version about nodules very doubtful.
On the inner side of the shell of the balls all over the surface there are fossilized veins, like on the hymen of an ordinary chicken egg, so the version of the dinosaur clutch has become the main one for many. However, only objective laboratory studies could give the final answer. Krutskevich handed over the fragments of the shell and the substance found inside, in the laboratory of two universities in Volgograd. Spectral analysis and research with the help of all kinds of chemical reagents made it possible to reveal the composition of the fossilized shells of "eggs". 70% of their shell consists of silicon dioxide, 0.2% of iron and magnesium were also found in it, and laboratory tests could not determine the rest of almost 30%. Experts from these laboratories stated that the substance was of unknown origin. The insides of the “eggs” were unambiguously identified as caked organic matter.
Stone balls in the Volgograd steppe
The researchers were puzzled. In favor of the version of eggs, the shell speaks with signs indicating that it is a shell, and the remains of organic matter inside. It looks like the organics were exposed to intense heat and the giant dinosaur embryos died. Maybe there was some kind of fault here and magma suddenly "spat" out of it? Geologists could answer this question if they were interested in the find, but, unfortunately, they were not very interested.
Dinosaur eggs
However, all experts who deal with ancient lizards agree that the balls are too large for dinosaur eggs. A six-year-old boy from Mokra Olkhovka easily fit into the broken egg. What kind of animal must have been to lay such eggs? Indeed, until now, the largest dinosaur egg known to science was found in China, its diameter is 46 cm. It was the size of a large melon, but not a meter in size. In addition, sometimes fossilized shells fall into the shells of stone balls. It is difficult to imagine that in the shell of dinosaur eggs there were such distinct imprints of shells of sea mollusks.
I happened to see real fossilized dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. They even have a drawing that was on the top of the shell. The size of these eggs: length about 20-30 cm, width - about 10-15 cm.
A petrified dinosaur egg from the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. Photo by A. V. Galanin from the site: ukhtoma.ru
Fossilized dinosaur eggs from Bayanzag Canyon. Photos from the site: ikh-barula.livejournal.com
Basically, stone nodule balls can be confused with fossilized dinosaur eggs. But dinosaur eggs are not so round or so huge. In addition, where fossilized eggs are found, dinosaur bones are also found.
Dinosaur eggs found in China. Photos from the site: gizmod.ru
Fossilized dinosaur eggs, found in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France in 1859 by an amateur priest and geologist John Jacques Nouchet. Photo from the site: stonecompany.com
Dinosaur eggs had very strong shells and were no different from bird eggs or other reptile eggs. Many dinosaurs themselves created nests in order to hatch offspring. In the Gobi Desert, dinosaur nests are shallow, mostly small pits made in the ground, or low rounded mounds with a dent in the middle. From all this it is clear that dinosaurs reproduced by laying eggs in nests and then incubating them. Females arranged eggs in nests in a semicircle; such clutches were found everywhere there.
Dinosaur eggs from China. Photo from the site: sarreg.ru
Stone balls are not the work of human hands
Volgograd stone hollow balls are about a meter or more in diameter and consist of silicon and metal. Some clearly show signs of corrosion, which confirms that they contain some kind of metal. In the cavities inside the balls there was a mixture of fine sand with granular metal. It is known that hundreds of millions of years ago there was a sea and an underwater volcano in this area. During the eruption, the volcano emitted not only steam, but also minerals insoluble in water. From the high temperature in the mouth of the volcano, they melted and combined into one, and after cooling they fell to the bottom. But this hypothesis does not explain why all objects have the same spherical shape and are in close proximity to each other. So maybe G. V. is right. Tarasenko, and these stone balls are really the products of underground ball lightning?
In the 40s of the twentieth century, in the tropical thickets of Costa Rica, workers who were cutting down dense thickets of the tropical jungle for banana plantations, unexpectedly stumbled upon giant stone statues of the correct spherical shape. The largest ones reached three meters in diameter and weighed about 16 tons. And the smallest were no more than a children's ball, only 10 cm in diameter. The balls were arranged singly and in groups of three to fifty pieces, sometimes groups of stone balls formed geometric shapes. Costa Rica's stone balls are composed of gabbro, limestone or sandstone.
In 1967, an engineer and lover of history and archeology working in a silver mine in Mexico reported that he had found similar balls, but much larger, in the mines. After some time, on the Aqua Blanca plateau in Guatemala at an altitude of 2000 m above sea level. archaeologists have found hundreds of similar stone balls. Similar stone balls were found near the city of Aulaluco in Mexico, in Palma Sur in Costa Rica, in Los Alamos and in the state of New Mexico in the United States, on the coast of New Zealand, in Egypt, Romania, Germany, Brazil, Kashkadarya region. in Kazakhstan and on Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic Ocean.
Stone ball from Costa Rica. Here it is turned into an element of landscape architecture. Photo from the site: aribut.ru
Stone balls from Costa Rica. Photo from the site: aribut.ru
Some geologists attributed the appearance of stone balls to volcanic activity. But a ball of ideal round shape can form if liquid magma solidifies in zero gravity and crystallizes it uniformly in all directions. According to Elena Matveeva, Candidate of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, the balls could emerge from the sedimentary strata as a result of the so-called exofolization - weathering in areas with large daily temperature drops. In the same place, where the temperature is more stable, they find similar balls, but already underground. I must say that this explanation is also very dubious.
Stone ball from Costa Rica
In addition, the ancient volcanoes could not correctly position the balls in the form of certain shapes, besides, some balls have obvious traces of grinding on the surface! And although a significant part of such balls, it seems, really have a purely natural origin, some specimens, for example, balls of Costa Rica, do not fit into the framework of this theory in any way, since they have obvious traces of alignment and grinding. More than 300 stone spheres have now been found in Costa Rica.
In my opinion, natural stone balls could have been polished. They could have been used for aesthetic or ritual purposes in the ancient states of Mesoamerica. These balls could be taken to places of worship and arranged in accordance with the legends or cosmogonic ideas of these peoples. They could be worshiped as messengers of the gods. For ritual or astronomical purposes, the balls were arranged in groups in the form of geometric figures corresponding to constellations in the sky, or some other structures. But how were such heavy objects moved? There were no horses or oxen in Mesoamerica, and they did not use the wheel. Most likely, the balls were rolled on a specially arranged solid surface.
Extremely ancient metal spheres are occasionally excavated in South African mines near the town of Ottosdal in the Western Transval. The rock strata from which these spheres are extracted are approximately 2.8 billion years old. Archaeologists who have studied the finds do not doubt their artificial origin, but geologists do not agree with them.
Klerksdorp balls, according to geologists, are of natural origin. The results of petrographic and X-ray structural analysis of these objects showed that they consist of either hematite or wollastonite with a small amount of hematite impurities, and many of the ones extracted from unaltered pyrophyllite layers are formed by pyrite. These are natural pyrite nodules that have undergone various degrees of natural weathering and oxidation. During the formation of these balls, there was no oxygen atmosphere on Earth. Making balls by people is absolutely out of the question.
Klerksdorp balls. Most likely, ball lightning was involved in the formation of Klerksdorp balls, which also took place in an oxygen-free atmosphere billions of years ago. Confused only by the scars encircling these bodies in the middle. shkval.at.ua
It is believed that the stone balls were formed under the influence of the glaciers of the Great Glaciation. Moving, these glaciers dragged rock fragments in their thickness, turned them and polished them, giving them a perfectly round shape. Absolutely round boulders are also found in the folds of the stone bed of mountain rivers, where the fast current, rotating the stones, supposedly turns them into spheres over time. But, in my opinion, so far this is also one of the unconvincing versions. The probability of the formation of balls during these processes is very small, and many stone balls are found.
When they discovered stone balls in Costa Rica, they considered them to be the undoubted work of human hands. Therefore, it was archaeologists who began to study them. The first scientific study of Costa Rican balls was undertaken by Doris Stone in 1943, when it was published in American Antiquity, the leading academic journal on archeology. Archaeologist Samuel Lothrop from Harvard University conducted a study of the balls in 1948. A final report on the results of his research was published by the Museum in 1963. It provides detailed descriptions of the pottery and metal objects found near the balls, contains many photographs, drawings of balls, results their measurements, their relative position and stratigraphic contexts. In the 1980s. the areas with balls were investigated and described by Robert Drolet in the course of his excavations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s. Claude Baudez and his students from the University of Paris returned to the Lothrop excavation to undertake a more thorough analysis of the pottery and to obtain a more accurate dating of the ball layers. This study was published in 1993. In the early 1990s. Enrico Dala Lagoa defended his dissertation on the topic of stone balls. In 1990-1995. The stone balls were studied by the archaeologist Iphigenia Quintanilla under the auspices of the National Museum of Costa Rica. She was able to excavate several balls in their initial (natural) state. Enrico Dala Lagoa defended his dissertation on the topic of stone balls. In 1990-1995. The stone balls were studied by the archaeologist Iphigenia Quintanilla under the auspices of the National Museum of Costa Rica. She was able to excavate several balls in their initial (natural) state. Enrico Dala Lagoa defended his dissertation on the topic of stone balls. In 1990-1995. The stone balls were studied by the archaeologist Iphigenia Quintanilla under the auspices of the National Museum of Costa Rica. She was able to excavate several balls in their initial (natural) state.
However, when stone balls were discovered in many regions of the globe and in considerable quantities, the hypothesis of their artificial origin began to quickly lose supporters.
Stone balls from the land of Frans Joseph
Champa Island is one of the many islands of the Arctic archipelago Franz Josef Land, which belongs to the most remote corners of Russia and is little studied. The territory of this island is relatively small (only 375 sq. Km) and is attractive not so much for its picturesque, untouched by civilization, Arctic landscapes, as for mysterious stone balls of rather impressive size and perfectly round shape. It is hard to imagine that someone here once carved these stone balls out of boulders.
The central core of these balls has a lighter color: it is obviously of a different composition and density. It is clear that stone balls should be investigated not so much by archaeologists as by geologists in order to obtain information about the processes taking place inside our planet in order to improve the model of the Earth's internal structure.
Such balls could form only under conditions of insignificant gravity or even under full weightlessness, i.e. in conditions completely different from those in which they are now.
Stone ball on Champa Island in Franz Josef Land
Spherolites of Champa Island are stones of densely compressed and fused sand. They are clearly not of volcanic origin, and in some of them even the teeth of ancient sharks have been found. The dimensions of many balls reach several meters (some of them are difficult to cover completely even for three people), although there are also stone balls of perfectly round shape from several centimeters in diameter. Some balls seem to be dug in the ground, others just stand on the surface. There are also many stones that look more like cobblestones. Perhaps, under the influence of wind, water and cold, they lost their ideal original roundness.
Stone balls on Champa Island in Franz Josef Land
There is a version that the stone balls are the result of washing ordinary stones with water, which long-term washing gave them such an ideal rounded shape. But if with stones of small sizes this version still sounds at least somewhat believable, then in the case of three-meter balls it is, to put it mildly, not very convincing.
Some are inclined to consider these balls the result of the activities of an extraterrestrial civilization or the mythical civilization of the Hyperboreans. But that doesn't sound very convincing either. Why on earth would a civilization that significantly outstripped ours in its development, hew the rocks, making a stone ball out of them? To convince earthlings of their power and at the same time stupidity?
Stone balls on Champa Island in Franz Josef Land
You might think that there is a whole garden of stone balls on Champa Island, that the island is literally dotted with them. But this is not the case. Most of the stone balls are located along the coast, and not a single one is found in the center of the island. This gives rise to another riddle to which there is no answer yet.
It is also surprising that among all the other Arctic islands, stone balls have not been found anywhere. Or maybe not found yet?
Why are the stone balls concentrated on Champa Island, where did they come from here? There are many questions, but the answers to them have not been found so far.
Broken stone ball on Champa Island. Photos from the site: rgo.ru
I believe that the stone balls on Champa Island were swept away for a long time by a glacier that flowed from the mountains to the coast, i.e. top down. It was he who "collected" the stone balls on the coast. Here the balls, melting from the glacier, simply fell out of it. Perhaps some of the balls inside the breaking away icebergs floated into the sea, and there, over time, stone balls will also be found at the bottom.
When the glacier dragged stone balls, it often destroyed them, as can be concluded from this photograph. But in the photo above, we can also see one ball split in half.
But that's why underground lightning, including ball lightning, raged on Champa Island? After all, there are no stone balls on other islands of this archipelago. Therefore, underground lightning is not enough for the appearance of stone balls. Some other special conditions are needed so that underground ball lightning can give its energy to stone or sand and, "dying", can themselves "generate" stone balls. In other words, stone balls are fossilized underground fireballs.
Stone balls in the Kirov region
Hunter Anatoly Fokin recently in a remote and deserted area in the Kirov region came across stone balls, it is not clear where they came from here far from mountain structures. The balls with a diameter of one to one and a half meters are stacked in heaps, similar to the clutches of fossilized eggs of prehistoric giantosaurs. Not far from the place of discovery, there is also a dinosaur cemetery, where every year a river flood washes away their bones. But A. Fokin believes that these stones most likely have a natural geological origin and are not dinosaur eggs. According to his version, the glacier rolled them in this way, while dragging the boulders from Scandinavia to Vyatka.
Geologists immediately went to the place where the strange stones were found, measured, photographed and spoke with knowledge of the matter that in Europe there is something similar only in a single place - on Franz Josef Land. But the round ones there are much smaller. But if Franz Josef Land is solid bedrock, then the appearance of stone balls on the Vyatka plain put scientists in a dead end. And with the glacier, not everything is as A. Fokin believes: the Scandinavian glacier did not reach the Kirov region. I think that these stone balls could have sailed to Vyatka in the thickness of icebergs, which could well have broken off from the glacier on the Franz Josef Islands. At that time, on the site of the Russian Plain, there was a shallow sea, into which icebergs from the Arctic Ocean could well swim.
About stone balls at the bottom of the World Ocean, which are ferromanganese nodules (FMN) - see new material by V. V. Kruglyakov.
The internal structure of the globe
To understand the nature of underground linear and ball lightning, one will have to turn to the model of the inner structure of the Earth. Passing from the crust to the mantle, seismic waves noticeably increase their speed: longitudinal - from 6.3 to 7.8 km / s, and transverse - from 3.7 to 4.3 km / s. This phenomenon is associated with a sharp increase in the density of matter at the boundary of the crust and mantle. During the transition of longitudinal seismic waves from the mantle to the core, their speed sharply decreases - from 13.6 to 8 km / sec. Until now, it has not been possible to detect the passage of transverse seismic waves through the core, since the core dampens them. This is one of the many mysteries that make up the earth's core.
Supposed internal structure of the Earth. Scheme from the site: iznedr.ru
The average density of the earth's crust is 2.7 grams / cm3; at the border of the mantle it increases to 3.3 g / cm3; inside the mantle increases to 6 grams / cm3, and is captured by several small jumps. At the core boundary, the density reaches 8 grams / cm3, and in the central region of the nucleus, apparently, increases to 11 grams / cm3 and even more.
If we consider pressure as the weight of a column of overlying substance, then at a depth of 100 km from the surface it should be 20,000 atm, that is, 20 tons per square centimeter. At a depth of 600 km from the earth's surface, the pressure probably already reaches 200,000 atm. Such pressures are obtained in laboratories; therefore, it can be assumed how the substance should behave at the base of the earth's crust and even under the crust - in the upper layers of the mantle. But at a depth of 3200 km, that is, approximately at half the earth's radius, the pressure should reach 1500 tons per square centimeter, and at the center of the Earth, the pressure, apparently, exceeds 3 million atm., Or 3000 tons per square centimeter.
How can an increase in pressure affect the properties of the subsoil matter? At high pressures and normal temperatures, the density, strength and, at the same time, plasticity of many substances increase. Recently, pressures of 200,000 atm were obtained at a temperature of about 4000 ° C. X-ray exposure of various substances under high pressure showed that when a certain pressure is reached, a sudden change in their structure occurs. The atoms are rearranged into a new crystalline structure with a higher density and higher binding energy between atoms. In the case of an increase in temperature, this rearrangement can take place at a lower pressure.
As the pressure increases, the distances between the atoms first decrease, and then there is a "deformation" of the atoms themselves, more precisely, the "deformation" of their outer electron shells. At a certain pressure, a transition of electrons inside the atom from one level to another is observed. The approach of electrons to the atomic nucleus leads to a sharp abrupt increase in the electrical conductivity of the substance, since in this case some of the electrons lose their connection with specific nuclei and turn into an "electron fog", which is impregnated with the substance at high pressure and high temperature. Many chemical elements, which under normal conditions do not conduct electric current, at high pressure acquire the properties of semiconductors, and semiconductors can go into the state of conductors - i.e. acquire the property of metal. Calculations showthat at a pressure of more than 2,000,000 atm, even hydrogen can be "metallized".
The substance of the earth's core is in a "metallized" state. The orbits of the outer electrons of the atoms are strongly "deformed", the nuclei of the atoms are brought together, and this explains the high density of matter in the deep interior. The substance of the planet's core is saturated with an electron fog, consisting of free electrons. A decrease in the external pressure must inevitably lead to the transition of the "metallized" state of matter to another - to the one in which the mantle material is located. This transition must be accompanied by the release of a significant amount of energy. Perhaps, one of the energy sources of the deep bowels of our planet lies in the abrupt changes in the structure of matter at the boundary of the mantle and the core. Free electrons from the core should diffuse into the mantle, since the planet's gravitational field is not enough to hold electrons with negligible mass.
With the deepening into the bowels of the Earth, the temperature increases. However, this growth is uneven. The distance, with a deepening by which the temperature rises by one degree, geologists called a geothermal step. In the Phlegrean fields of Italy, the geothermal step in places is only 0.7 m. In other regions it is much higher. On average, for the continents, it is 33 m, and in some places it increases to 100 m and more. But everywhere the temperature rises with depth.
What is in the Earth's mantle - molten plastic magma from which igneous rocks crystallize, or superhard matter? Is the earth's interior heated to temperatures of thousands and tens of thousands of degrees, or are they frozen in cold at temperatures close to absolute zero? This is one of the greatest mysteries of the Earth. There are supporters of both one and the other extreme points of view.
Academician O. Yu. Schmidt believed that the temperature increases with deepening into the bowels only in the outer zone of the planet. And at a depth of about 100 km from the surface, it reaches a maximum - values of 1500–2000 ° C, and deeper the temperature remains constant or even decreases. In this case, in the superdense core of the Earth, the cold of outer space can really reign. So far, it has been possible to observe changes in temperature when deepening into the ground on a negligible segment of the earth's radius, within the length of the deepest borehole (about 13 km) on the Kola Peninsula. O. Yu. Schmidt considered the earth's crust to be stone, the mantle - stone-metal, and the core - metal - an alloy of iron and nickel.
So far, one thing is clear: in the earth's crust, the temperature rises with depth, and at some distance from the surface there are or from time to time there are centers of melting. Molten material from the crust or mantle erupts to the surface through the vents of volcanoes. On the surface, the temperature of liquid lava reaches 1000 ° C, and in a volcanic chamber the temperature of magma is several hundred degrees higher.
How do the properties of substances change with a simultaneous increase in temperature and pressure? It turns out that with increasing pressure, the melting point of various substances first rises sharply, then this growth slows down, and after the pressure reaches a certain "critical value", the melting point suddenly begins to decrease. Crystalline substances, and, consequently, crystalline rocks of the earth's crust, with an increase in temperature and pressure, become plastic, and then acquire the property of fluidity. Upon reaching a certain temperature and pressure, the crystalline state of the substance becomes unstable and transforms into an amorphous glassy state. In the glassy state, as the pressure increases, the substance acquires the property of compressibility and greater plasticity and fluidity.
At a depth of several tens of kilometers from the surface, in a zone of sufficiently high temperatures and pressures, sedimentary and igneous rocks turn into metamorphic ones, and in areas and zones where pressure decreases, they may melt. Such melting can give rise to individual magma chambers within the earth's crust. At greater depths - at the base of the earth's crust - the crystalline substance passes into a glassy state, acquires greater plasticity. How does modern science imagine the emergence of magma? A few decades ago, most scientists believed that the deep parts of the Earth were completely melted and only from above were covered by a solid earth crust several tens of kilometers thick.
However, studies have shown that there is no continuous liquid layer at depth. Our planet behaves like a solid body. Moreover, its average hardness exceeds that of steel. Pockets of molten material arise only when the pressure in the hearth decreases, or when the temperature rises without changing the pressure. Already at a depth of 40–50 km, the temperature of matter in the bowels should exceed the melting point of many igneous rocks at normal pressure. However, in the bowels of the Earth, matter is under pressure from the overlying strata, and this increases the melting point. Only if a deep fault is formed in the earth's crust, then the pressure near it drops sharply, while the superheated substance of the interior melts and turns into magma. Dynamically, magma is always unstable and tends to move in the direction of lower pressure - that is, upward. Over time, the magma chamber cools down and finally solidifies again - dies off. The correctness of this explanation of the formation of magmas is confirmed by the constant presence of igneous rocks in deep faults of the earth's crust and by the fact that periods of volcanic activity are replaced by periods of cessation of eruption, sometimes for hundreds and thousands of years.
In recent years, it was found that the development of magmatic activity, along with a drop in pressure and radioactivity, is influenced by the low thermal conductivity of sedimentary rocks. It is on average about 2–3 times less than the thermal conductivity of igneous rocks. This means that the cover of sedimentary rocks, almost completely enveloping the deeper zones of the earth's crust, is a reliable heat insulator. Heat accumulates underneath. It is assumed that in the absence of such a cover or its low thickness, magmas arise at great depths, and with a significant thickness of the sedimentary cover - at smaller ones. Some scientists believe that with the accumulation of large layers of sedimentary rocks, magma chambers approach the earth's surface and even move from the mantle to the earth's crust.
There is another explanation for the phenomena of local heating of the Earth's interior. Mantle material can gradually lose gases. Degassing of the mantle leads to the formation of water in the bowels of the planet through the synthesis of water molecules from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Scientists believe that this reaction has a chain character and occurs with an explosion and the release of a significant amount of heat.
The third assumption links the appearance of magma chambers with the release of highly heated gases of deep origin. Rising from the Earth's mantle, gases partly process, partly melt solid masses on their way. This process appears to be slow and in several stages. First, droplets of the melt appear in the solid material, then it becomes more and more, a mixture of the melt and the solid material abundantly impregnated with it is obtained. The amount of melt increases and eventually magma appears.
It would seem that everything is clear, but where do the "strongly heated gases" come from? Their source is deep bowels: the lower part of the mantle, maybe even the core of the planet. They are born in the process of transformation of the substance of deep geospheres. Perhaps they are products of nuclear reactions occurring at unknown depths. Maybe they are born with some kind of chemical reaction. Here, as before, we are faced with one of the many mysteries of the planet.
Geologists believe that all the variety of magmas can be reduced to three types: acidic, basic and ultrabasic. The acidity of magma is determined by its silica content. It is abundant in felsic magmas (more than 65%); upon cooling, granites, granodiorites and some other rocks are formed from them. The basic magmas contain 40 to 55% silica; the most common basic rocks are basalts. Finally, ultrabasic magma is characterized by a very low silica content - no more than 40%. As this magma cools, peridotites, dunites, and other ultrabasic rocks are formed.
Large magma reservoirs can form at a depth of 50–70 km, that is, directly under the earth's crust. But magma, apparently, can originate at great depths, as well as form closer to the earth's surface. In 1963, the magma chamber of the Avachinskaya group of volcanoes was located only at a depth of 3-4 km. The subcrustal substance here has penetrated almost to the very surface, and it is possible to "reach" it with a borehole. The least "deep" is granite magma: it is probably formed due to the melting of the lower horizons of the granite shell of the earth's crust - at a depth of about 40 km or less. Fiery blood of the Earth - magma pulsates in the veins of the planet; appearing and disappearing in different places, she lives her unusually complicated, largely unsolved life. Its mysteries are closely intertwined with other mysteries of the Earth's interior - the interior,a part and a product of which it is.
Underground thunderstorms and underground plasmoids
The original hypothesis "Formation of the dynamo effect and its role in the structure of the planet Earth" was developed by G. V. Tarasenko from Aktau University, according to G. V. Tarasenko, is associated with electrical discharges in the earth's crust and mantle in zones of active tectonic faults. These discharges are similar to lightning discharges in the atmosphere, with lightning tens of kilometers long. At the end of linear lightning, their closest relatives, ball lightning, also appear. The bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the mid-oceanic ridges is strewn with iron-manganese nodules, which allows us to speak of their origin due to ball lightning in the earth's mantle. During the occurrence of ball lightning, consisting of plasma, the rocks of the geological layer enclosing it are transformed and melted. As a result, spherical layers of melt build up in the body of ball lightning and around it. When this spherical molten formation cools, spherical, cylindrical, ellipsoid, almond-shaped and other nodules are formed.
Electric charges of opposite signs accumulate in the core and geospheres of the Earth. Electrons not associated with the nuclei of deformed atoms diffuse from the earth's core into the mantle, and from it into the earth's crust. A deficit of electrons in the Earth's core creates a positive electric charge in it due to an excess of protons, and an excess of electrons in the mantle and crust creates a negative electric charge in these spheres. This is how the earth's electrical capacitor appears, which accumulates a huge amount of electrical energy. Periodically, this capacitor breaks through, and electric arcs - underground lightning - appear in the bowels of the planet. Sometimes at the ends of these lightning balls are formed - round plasmoids. Plasma in these plasmoids is confined by a strong, closed magnetic field. These spherical magnetic fields in tectonic faults,filled with fluid and crushed (crushed) rock, which is attracted by the electromagnetic field, and create stone balls.
Ball lightning in the earth's firmament form ball nodules, while the hot plasma of ball lightning is replaced by mineral formations, and they are preserved in reservoir strata. In spreading zones, spherical nodules fly out of faults and, losing energy, settle to the ocean floor. Submarines in the ocean have repeatedly observed spherical glow, which confirms the electrical phenomena in the oceans.
Underground thunderstorms were also recorded at the Kola Superdeep Borehole, where the inventors and journalists counted them as groans and cries of sinners from the underworld. And on the coast of Ladoga in Karelia in 1996, the earth was, as it were, blown up from the inside, thus forming a smooth, shallow trench. The trees that used to grow in this place were uprooted and thrown aside, and the roots of many of them were charred and smoked. It turned out that the fire scorched them from below, i.e. out of the ground.
Volcanic lightning
A hundred years ago, geophysicists would have easily explained the sounds at a superdeep well and the explosion in Karelia as a consequence of an underground thunderstorm. "Earth's electricity produces storms that destroy the inner structure of our planet, just as storms in the atmosphere mess up airspace," wrote Georges Dary in 1903 in his book Electricity in All Its Applications.
The earth is electrified, and strong electric currents incessantly run through it. If the air is dry and hot, or is already so saturated with electricity that it cannot accept the excess of it released by the earth, if the deposits of chalk and siliceous soils are located near places rich in metals, then the accumulation of electricity ultimately leads to a discharge - just like that. the same as happens during an atmospheric thunderstorm. You can imagine what kind of destruction an underground thunderstorm can lead when it is discharged over an area of several square kilometers through various deposits, crevices, depressions, etc. Such discharges are given off by shaking the soil at a distance of hundreds of kilometers. This hypothesis, based on irrefutable facts, was developed back in 1885.
But some time passed, and the hypothesis of an underground thunderstorm by Georges Dary was forgotten by scientists. Now geophysicists are trying to explain light flashes by the ignition of gas escaping from the bowels. However, a light flash during the powerful Tien Shan earthquake in 1976 was visible hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter.
At the beginning of the 70s, professor of the Tomsk Polytechnic Institute A. A. dared to revive the hypothesis of an underground thunderstorm. Vorobiev. Gathering a group of like-minded young employees, he began experiments in different regions of the country. Vorobyov and his colleagues expressed the idea that radio waves should be generated during an underground thunderstorm, and if you try to register them, they can become the same harbingers of earthquakes, just as radio waves in the atmosphere are harbingers of ordinary thunderstorms. The researchers actually managed to record the increase in the intensity of the underground radio telephone immediately before the earthquakes.
But A. A. Vorobyov to submit the results of this important work to a scientific journal - "Reports of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR" - encountered resistance from opponents from the Institute of Physics of the Earth of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Having smashed Vorobyov's idea to smithereens, they themselves conducted similar experiments, and after a couple of years articles on similar topics began to appear regularly in the "Reports", of course, without references to their predecessor.
Then A. A. Vorobyov and his colleagues tested another idea: ordinary lightning generates a lot of ozone, which means that before an underground earthquake, free ozone should come out of the ground. This idea has also been confirmed by practical experiments. But, unfortunately, the early death of Professor A. A. Vorobyova actually put an end to his work.
Interesting experimental data were obtained at the Institute of Physics. Kurchatov under the leadership of Leonid Urutskoyev. The "Urutskoyev effect" is an incomprehensible phenomenon of a plasma object, similar to ball lightning, which appears when wires are exploded in distilled water. The researchers faced this phenomenon while simulating an underwater electrical explosion. It is possible that during tectonic movements in the layers of the earth's crust, electrical energy accumulates, forming similar electrical explosions.
Shortly before the earthquake, "strange changes" occur in the earth, causing strong electrical emissions, according to Tom Blair, a satellite communications engineer and Quake Finder. “These emissions are enormous, roughly 100,000 amperes in a 6.0 magnitude earthquake and on the order of a million amperes in a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. It's like lightning, only underground,”Blair said. To measure these emissions, Blair and his team spent millions of dollars placing magnetometers along geological fault lines in California, Peru, Taiwan and Greece. This equipment is sensitive enough to record magnetic pulses from electrical discharges at a distance of up to 16 kilometers. On a typical day at the San Andreas Fault in California, you can detect up to 10 impulses per day. The rift is constantly moving, changing. According to Blair,Before an earthquake, background levels of static electricity should rise sharply. He claims that this is what he saw shortly before the six earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 and 6.0, which he was able to observe. “The number of pulses increases to 150-200 per day,” Blair said. He added that the ripple starts to build up about 2 weeks before the quake and then abruptly returns to baseline just before the shift.that the ripple begins to build up about 2 weeks before the quake and then abruptly returns to its original level just before the shift.that the ripple begins to build up about 2 weeks before the quake and then abruptly returns to its original level just before the shift.
ConclusionThe formation of stone balls by underground ball lightning is a hypothesis, at first glance, very extravagant. Plasmoids, practically weightless and floating freely in the Earth's gravitational field, and heavy stone balls in the thickness of the earth's crust seem to be incompatible with each other. The hypothesis is very strange, but only at first glance. Not so long ago, claims that the earth was round also seemed ridiculous. Catholic Christians burned Giordano Bruno alive at the stake for claiming that the stars are distant suns. However, if we take as a basis the hypothesis of the superdense state of the earth's core matter, measure the flow of electrons from the earth's interior to the surface, measure the potential difference on the "plates" of the natural earth's capacitor, carefully listen to the sounds from the "underworld" and sounds from the depths of the ocean (Quakers),then the hypothesis of the formation of stone balls by ball lightning in the earth's firmament does not seem so extravagant. One thing is clear, stone balls are not the work of human hands and these are not the works of aliens. It is necessary to study their morphology, mineralogical and chemical composition, the nature of the host rocks, confinement to tectonic faults, volcanoes, to determine the absolute age, remanent magnetization. I hope there will be young researchers who are not yet burdened with the burden of generally accepted theories, courageous enough to contradict their official leaders and opponents, who are ready to resist the devastating reviews of the reviewers of leading journals. I believe that there are still young scientists for whom the truth is dearer than the recognition of their contemporaries. I would like to wish such researchers success and recognition at least at the end of their lives,but if confessions are not at the end of life, then at least posthumously. T. I. Tanashchuk