Primary directory of pre2013 images
Cliff Face Dendritics, Two of a kind or not?
The images below show two dramatically different sized features which have some common aspects but are they the result of a single event
or multiple events or even entirely different processes?
From electric discharge experiments with a dust covered CRT there seems to be a clue showing that they may both occur as a consequence of electrical discharge. However, the question remains of being sculpted entirely by the primary event or forming during secondary process, or even time dependent slow-accumulation process.
This will require careful observation of features and experiment results.
Keep in mind the proximity of Olympus Mon and other blister features to the west(?). Did surface currents traverse mars
in a manner similar to CJ's sphere experiment? Does an arc which strikes at right angle travel or hold there to form an anode blister while sending out lateral surface currents with coronal signatures.
Some details just came to my attention(8/14), presented at this link by Wal Thornhill in 2003.
We should be asking if what is seen now is only the final stage of what created the initial feature?
Did subsequent interaction bring additional sculpting?
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Note the small features hanging just under the rim and the long features reaching to the floor. The ones that go to the floor have an obvious branching pattern. Between each of the raised branches is a trough with a rounded end. |
Note the clean rim-face of one alcove, with no hangers, it may be a crater remnant. Far to its right is a separated rim with a trough behind  The trough is against another clean rim face. Is that a tendril-path or rim-slump beginning? | What should we ask about the slumping at lower center of photo?  |
The troughs may be corona side-filaments secondary to those that reach to the rim and split the small features which are also branching with similar troughs. |
Images above, from Thunderbolt Project Video; Lightning Scarred Mars
But this suggestion is one that may not be necessary
if these features are
time-dependant dust deposits to points of seed-accumulation marked by the initial event, as seen in
these two images from the two-monitor p/o experiment of 2007
"Mass-lifting" also leaves behind similar features perpendicular to a rim attachment point.
An electric wind plays an important role in Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) where loose material is present, as does corona emissions, and it all should come into play in the formation of certain planetary features. Keep in mind that the solar wind is 'dark current' electric wind (Thornhill 2012).
Corona emissions, will manifest themselves in a variety
of ways, from barely noticeable to lethal.
A single coronal streamer also manifests its own side streamers.
In the recent CRT experiments I think we are looking
at an inverse aspect of corona emission where the current is not sustained in the conductor, which only serves as a path for discharging the CRT surface. The tendrils which clear the surface seem to mimic corona behavior, but in reverse,
their brief activity carrying material from the CRT surface.
At this low energy the ends are rounded which differs slightly from the apparent pointed ends at higher levels as seen in the left image
from this experiment by C.J. Ransom but a close up look shows rounded ends that cut scalloped trenches in the surface material.
 Image from Thunderbolts Project video "Lightning Scarred Mars". (Experiment was with an aluminum painted sphere and extreme electric discharge.) |
 CRT experiment with suspended wire Dust covered surface has strip of metal on it. Power is cycled on/off and spark is taken from wire and strip. | Additional Images
rdge2wire-13063-s2c.jpg |
The paralell paths have a counterpart at the surrounding canyon walls.
The filamentary coronal paths radiating perpendicularly from the ridge seem
to be involved in sculpting the scallops on adjacent walls of the canyon.
_ 
The most important detail of these two images is toward the center of the page where loss of contact between the metal strip and the CRT caused the discharge to jump a gap to get to the strip. This might have created a
reversal of the typical pattern, to being an inverted fan.
3D images also to found for this experiment session in Pre-conference image directory 2012
Candor Chasma section of Valles Marinaris
An important detail worthy of close consideration is the presence of a central ridge feature within the two trenches shown previously. On each side of the ridge
are excavations with cross-sectional sub-excavations which are in line with the scallops on either face and the central ridge. This is a pattern seen in the CRT experiment where axial discharge pathways offer an opportunity to show
their corona's interaction with the dust covered surface as a current is taken
through the conductor discharging the CRT surface.
Hebes canyon and the NE leg of Valles Marineris (Candor Chasma) were left in the early stages of excavation and -wrt- Candor two details seem significant: the long
characteristic of the perimeter ridges and thier hung-ridges which have
perpendicular orientation the ridge they hang from. It seems that we may be
seeing corona at two scales, one that comes off the central ridge and reaches to the scallops of the perimeter wall the other which radiates from the up-scale
tendril and climbs the remnant material between each primary tendril.
The hanging dendritic fans seem to be from down-scaled tendrils of the primary which made its way from the central ridge to the trench perimeter. Look for the feathery remnants in all the images provided.
This can be seen in many of the ridge2wire image mentioned on this page and
in the lab group directory.
Electric-spark-scars crt11 Image preview
The time-dependant mechanism spoken of earlier is associated with dust movement on the planet and may be forming a seed-locations created during an event of interplanetary discharge and since then hanging dendritic ridges grow through a Triboelectric deposition mechanis or something similar. These deposits at the rim's edge would be rather fragile and susceptable to slump but under Mars' thin atmopsphere and gravity those slumps would look different that what we see here on earth. Two aspects of the slump require our attention: the detachment-signitures and the accumulation patterns as material gently piles up far below the rim.. We can see in the right image at the top of the page a large area that looks to have slumped to the floor. We can also see a gap between the hanging-dendritic ridges at the rim and areas far below along the wall where material seems to accumulate to form swollen dendritic ridge features. Moving dust in the atmosphere may be clinging beneath the rim and then once it is too massive for the available structural support it should detach from the rim and slide into a low orientation on the wall... The dynamics of that sliding may result in what is potrayed in this google-mars image from the video Lightning-scarred Planet Mars.