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CRaftsman1459 said:
Floating mountains are one of two signature Pandoran landforms. The Hallelujah Mountains are considered sacred por the Na'vi. They are the staging ground for Iknamaya, a treacherous but fundamental rite of passage in which a young Na'vi must selct, capture, and successfully bond with one of the Ikran (banshees) who nest there. The first human explorers to see imágenes of the floating mountains were awestrcuk, as are all humans lucky enough to have seen the phenomenon. The sight of billions of tons of rock floating as weightlessly as a nube was inexplicable, almost hallucinatory. After the initial unobtanium deposit was found, its superconducting properties provided the first clue to help unravel the mystery of the floating mountains. Scientist assumed that the phenomenon must have something to do with the intense magnetic fields in the area, but they had no explanation for their source. The answer was found as a result of site surveys conducted por RDA geologists who linked unobtanium to the magnetic fields. When accurate maps of ground magnetic isobars were studied, they revealed a magnetic field gradient that surrounded each floating mountain with a perimeter of increased field strength that acted like a "magnetic fence." This explains their stable positions, but raised the new pregunta of how their situation came about. Two schools of thought arose. The first, and por far the largest, originally propounded por Dimitri Pechta of Luna's Armstrong University, was that some sort of positive feedback mechanism during Pandora's molten phase attracted large areas of like magnetic fields in an unobtanium deposit, and their mutual repulsion finally pushed a large chunk of unobtanium-containing matter away, to hang in the air until it cooled and solidified. The ordinary nonmagnetic rock was denser, and settled to the bottom of the molten mass as it cooled, forming the necessary ballast, like the heavy keel of a boat. The crater left behind at the parte superior, arriba of the monolith was therefore deficient in the superconductor and its associated magnetic field. This left a ring of a stronger magnetic field around the circumference of the crater, which in turn restrained the floating mountain. The second, and minority, opinion held that hte finely balanced floating mountains required some sort of conscious supervision during their creation. They directed their attention to the worldwide enlaces between the various life-forms and the satelites ecology, as represented por the spiritual deity and natural phenomenon the Na'vi refer to as "Ewya."
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