Electric Universe: Peer Review Exercise 4

This is the fourth of five posts devoted to providing a more professional peer-review of the "Special Issue" of the Bentham Open Astronomy Journal (BOAJ) devoted to Plasma Cosmology and Electric Universe (PC/EU).  While BOAJ claims to be a peer-reviewed journal, we'll see in the upcoming posts that the quality of the peer-review process for this issue was very questionable.  Each of the articles exposed in these reviews exhibit many fundamental errors in physics (especially electromagnetism) and astronomy.  Many of the unchallenged mistakes are at levels which could be identified by an undergraduate physics student or possibly even a competent EE undergraduate.

Review report by W.T. Bridgman and Nereid.  
Quotes from the article discussed are in blue. 

Article Reviewed:
Laboratory Modeling of Meteorite Impact Craters by Z-pinch Plasma
by C. J. Ransom

This paper exhibits a number of shortcomings which would explain why it could not be accepted at a journal with a more rigorous peer-review process.

Here's a few of the questions immediately raised by this paper which the author does not answer but which are well established by impact researchers (see General References).

• What energies were needed to form pits of a specified size?  There is no graph of the relationship of input energy and crater diameter and/or depth.
• What is the detailed crater profile is created by the arc?  How does it vary with current and/or voltage?
• The author ignores the implications of their arc formation model for large-scale cratering.  How much energy is needed to produce craters of large size (10-100 km diameters)?  Where does the energy come from?
• We have lots of examples of objects moving around the solar system that can impact with other objects and can release many megaton equivalents of energy at a localized point of impact such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (wikipedia).  We have no such examples of electric discharges or arcs that can deliver an equivalent energy density on such a large scale.
• The author mentions the problem of corona crater formations on Venus, but his reference is a bit out of date:  See Subduction initiation by thermal chemical plumes: Numerical studies

General References

• High-explosive cratering analogs for bowl-shaped, central uplift, and multiring impact craters
• Temperature and Density in a Cloud of Material Vaporized by Meteorite Impact
• Impact Cratering Calculations
• Experimental investigation of the relationship between impact crater morphology and impacting particle velocity and direction
• The effect of impact angle on craters formed by hypervelocity particles

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Note: Comments that DIRECTLY address the points in THIS post are favored.  Since there will be a post on each of the five papers in the EU 'Special Issue', comments more relevant to one of those other papers should await that specific post.