The Haiti Earthquake Caused by HAARP? Uh, No
February 13th, 2010
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As everyone now is aware, there was an earthquake in Haiti recently that caused a great deal of devastation. In terms of seismic energy and ground shaking, the earthquake was not one for the record books, and was considerably less powerful than many other earthquakes the world has experienced in recent years. However, due to the construction of buildings in Haiti and the location of the epicenter, not far from Port Au Prince, the quake resulted a great deal of devastation.
Of course, most rational people realize that these things happen. Earthquakes have caused damage and loss of life since antiquity and Haiti is located right near the boundary of the small Caribbean plate – a seismically active area. The fact of the matter is that places like this experience earthquakes and when these quakes are severe enough and occur close enough to human settlement, they can be disastrous. It was well known that Haiti lacked the kind of construction and infrastructure that can hold up to an earthquake, but as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, there wasn’t much they could do about that. This wasn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened and it won’t be the last.
That explanation doesn’t seem to cut it for some. They insist that the United States Government, the Illuminati, the Jews, the Freemasons, Major League Baseball, the Crabpeople or whoever else they choose to fear was actually behind the earthquake. Why? Perhaps so they could end up spending a lot of money on the relief effort or maybe they’re just really mean.
Their weapon for causing the quake? HAARP, of course!
This crudely edited video, which implies that HAARP is the reason for the quake is not the only one that was posted on Youtube and there will likely be even more, as well as rantings on conspiracy theorist websites. Apparently the idea that earthquakes simply happen is not good enough for some.
The demonstrations shown have a few problems. For one thing, it’s certainly possible to excite or vaporize clouds of moisture with radio waves, if you have a reasonably powerful transmitter and the clouds are in an enclosed chamber less than a foot away from the radio source. This doesn’t really demonstrate much. It’s like claiming that HAARP could boil the oceans because you can heat a cup of coffee in your microwave. Even if HAARP was powerful enough to blow away clouds, it could only do so directly above it.
The other demonstration shown is even worse. The demonstration uses a subwoofer, but HAARP does not produce acoustic energy, it produces radio waves. You could bombard a rock with HF radio waves all day and night and nothing would happen. The only way you could get the rock to move, as in the simulated earthquake, is if you hit it with so much radio energy that it became hot enough to melt. Aside from that, they also have the scale entirely wrong. Yes, it is true you could cause an earthquake with a subwoofer – IF that subwoofer were the size of the entire state of Texas and about as powerful as a nuclear weapon detonating several times per second.
HAARP has been dealt with here before. HAARP is an “ionospheric heater” – basically a big HF radio transmitter that is aimed up at the ionosphere. The purpose of “heating” or exciting the ionosphere is to study the behavior of the ionosphere and especially the aurora that occurs in northern and southern area of the globe. As the ionosphere is excited it generates secondary radio emissions. By receiving these emissions, the altitude, density and other properties can be measured. Although powerful by radio transmitter standards, HAARP is a pea-shooter compared to the enormous energy that the ionosphere receives from the solar winds and cosmic radiation. HAARP can only excite a small part of the ionosphere, directly above the site and can only do that to a relatively small degree.
HAARP is not secret at all. The facility does open, general research in cooperation with a number of universities, especially the University of Alaska. If you so desire, you can visit HAARP and take a tour of the facilities. If you wish to tour HAARP, you can attend one of the periodic open houses held at the site, or you can contact the program office to set up a tour date. Tours are generally provided to groups, such as schools, community organizations, ham radio clubs and so on. Setting up a tour date, aside from the open houses, will likely require that you have a group and not just one or two people. You will need to arrange the tour ahead of time by at least a couple of weeks and ideally a couple of months or more and the scheduled time will be subject to availability of staff and the facility.
The image to the right is from this blog and shows a group visiting HAARP visiting the facility. The blog’s author attended MIT and apparently did some research work involving HAARP. They don’t *look* evil.
Talks are also given on HAARP by researchers involved in the project. They’re hosted at Prince William Sound Community College. If you do go, please don’t heckle them about the non-existent conspiracies.
Jesse Ventura went to the HAARP site as part of his “Conspiracy Theories” TV show on TruTV. (note: The name does not mean it’s actually true.) When he got to the gate, one of the poor saps who had been working at the site that day was faced by a bunch of SUV’s and guys with cameras who hadn’t made any arrangements to visit the facility. Naturally, he told them they couldn’t enter. Sinister? Just try walking up to some random research facility and demanding to enter. If Jesse wanted to see HAARP, he should have called their public information office ahead of time instead of yelling at one of the guys working there.
HAARP is not an entirely civilian project. While civilian entities do participate at the site, it receives major funding through the Department of Defense. The US Air Force and DARPA are involved in the funding. That said, as far as military research projects go, this one is neither very large nor is the level of secrecy very high – most of the activities aren’t even classified. Some of the research is classified, although that doesn’t necessarily imply anything sinister, as if military research were all publicly disclosed, there wouldn’t be much point in conducting the research. It doesn’t give the military much advantage if any scientific and technical knowledge gained is also avaliable to potential adversaries.
Some of the areas of research conducted at HAARP includes:
- Attempts to improve the accuracy of HF direction finding by taking into account ionospheric distortion
- Development of next generation over the horizon radar
- Evaluation of communications jamming and jamming mitigation
- Evaluation of how ionospheric fluctuation, geomagnetic storms and similar events could impact military communications and GPS and potential methods for mitigating these unwanted effects.
- Research directed at the ability of communications systems to function during a nuclear war that could involve high altitude detonations, causing ionospheric disturbances.
- Generation of ELF and ULF waves, used for communications with submarines, by modulation of HF waves and excitement of the ionosphere, in effect using the ionosphere as an antenna. This could offer an alternative to the use of conventional transmitters, which require very large antenna systems, potentially making them vulnerable to attack.
These are all legitimate areas of stratigic and tactical research. The US military, as well as other armed forces around the world, have been interested in ionospheric research since the beginning of wireless communications. While it is possible that HAARP also engages in other research activities which have not been publicly disclosed, it does not cause earthquakes, becasue it couldn’t even if operators tried.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Enviornment, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, inverse square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 13th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
There doesn’t appear to be any limit on what these people’s paranoia is capable of making them believe. It must be unbelievably stressful to live in the sort of world they have created for themselves. The constant state of fear would break anyone over time.
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February 13th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
This video does prove one thing – some people are incredibly gullible.
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February 13th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
I wonder what it is about HAARP that draws so much of this conspiracy stuff. As far as defense programs go, HAARP is not very large. It’s 250 million dollars for the whole project – spread over a few years, that’s nothing like the amount of money that goes into research involving missile defense, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, satellite intelligence and any number of things. As far as secrecy goes, HAARP is also one of the more open programs. There is a lot less classified and privileged about HAARP than there is of many other projects.
The DOD, DARPA and Air Force fund any number of different research programs with the potential to yeild information useful to the military. They come in all sizes and shapes. One of my first jobs after getting out of graduate school was with a contractor involved in a US Navy research program which, as I’ve put it “we were trying to make paint more sticky.” To be more accurate, it was research involving anti-corrosion coatings and aimed at making them bond to metal in a way that would reduce the problem of water getting in under the coating and making it come off. Not very much, if anything, was classified.
This was just one of the many programs run at any given time.
HAARP really doesn’t stand out against the other defense funded research done.
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February 13th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Its not so much that people are capable of believing anything, but they are bombarded by tons of information they have no chance of understanding. Their everyday stuff has nothing to do with or is concerned with higher levels of science. So they are ignorant of what the HAARP is, does, or how it works. then many have the religious mind set, meaning they accept ’statements from authority’ as being true.
Just think back to your high school or college. How many took advanced science or math and how many where in some whoosy liberal arts schite?
So a secret high powered military transmitter that transmits thru the water…an earthquake at some island coast, not a hard stretch for a mind with limited abilities.
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February 14th, 2010 at 1:43 am
CybrgnX said:
I suppose. Although, I’m not a research scientist and I certainly don’t have any formal education on ionospheric research, wave physics as it applies to the ionosphere and it’s states of excitement. I’d have no idea how to understand the data from a system like they have up at HAARP or how to operate it in its most basic functions.
Still, I like to think I have at least a *basic* idea of the fundamentals. I mean, I know that it’s a big HF transmitter that is used to measure the properties of the ionosphere. I’m not aware of the finer points of it.
Is that so much to ask from the average person?
The general population is not made up of rocket scientists, granted that. However, members of the general public still ought to be able to know that a rocket shoots hot gas out of a nozzle to propel itself in the opposite direction. Is that so much to ask?
It’s not like the information isn’t out there. Many of these organizations bend over backwards to try to get it out. You could look at NASA – how many visitors’ centers, television shows, teacher outreach programs, websites and so on do they contribute to? A hell of a lot. HAARP even has open houses, they send their top researchers to give free public lectures.
What bothers me more than those who just buy into this crap is the idiots like the one who made the above video. It had to take that jackass at least the better part of a couple of hours to track down all the footage, transcode it, edit it and upload it to yourube. That should have been more than enough time to get some real information.
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February 14th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
You are right, drbuxx0, in todays science based culture, people OUGHT to have at least a basic idea of science and math. But as I said above they DONT have much of a hint of knowledge. They have no trouble using the products of science (i.e.TV) but have no clue what it really is.
I think the guy who made the video was fairly bright. He had to know something to stay away form the real facts. And he knew the real facts of the cause of the earthquake are not as exciting as a sci-fi story about the HAARP. After all if hollywood thought people would find SCIENCE movies exciting there would not be as many SciFi movies. He has done nothing different then the con artist at the alter does every Sunday.
The con artist is NOT the problem…it is the proudly ignorant people he caters to.
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February 15th, 2010 at 5:49 am
This is the crux of it but please do your research. — By the way Haiti earthquake was a 7.0…
Haiti Earthquake & the HAARP Induction Magnetometer
Haiti Earthquake & the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) Induction Magnetometer – you will now see 3 images based on a time-frequency spectrogram, which shows the frequency content of signals recorded by the HAARP Induction Magnetometer. This instrument, provided by the University of Tokyo, measures temporal variations in the geomagnetic field in the ULF (ultra-low frequency) range of 0-5 Hz. The spectrogram images are produced by computing the PSD (power spectral density) of successive 102.4-second segments of timeseries data, and plotting these spectra as color/intensity slices along a 24-hour scale. Audio files are created by converting the raw 10 Hz sampled waveform (Bx channel) to a wav file at 44.1 kHz (resulting in a playback speedup of 4410 times), and then compressing the 1.7MB wav file to a 150KB mp3 file. HAARP Induction Magnetometer: http://137.229.36.30/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100110&Bx=on It is a time-frequency spectrogram, which shows the frequency content of signals recorded by the HAARP Induction Magnetometer. This instrument, provided by the University of Tokyo, measures temporal variations in the geomagnetic field in the ULF (ultra-low frequency) range of 0-5 Hz. The spectrogram images are produced by computing the PSD (power spectral density) of successive 102.4-second segments of timeseries data, and plotting these spectra as color/intensity slices along a 24-hour scale. The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake. Its epicentre was near Léogâne, approximately 25 km (16 miles) west of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. The earthquake occurred at 16:53:10 local time (21:53:10 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010,[4][5] at a depth of 13 km (8.1 miles). The United States Geological Survey recorded a series of at least 33 aftershocks, fourteen of them between magnitudes 5.0 and 5.9.
http://www.cnn.com/video/# Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 14, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100114&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 15, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100115&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 16, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100116&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 17, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100117&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 18, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100118&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 18, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100119&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 19, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100119&Bx=on Introduction Magnetometer From Haarp January 20, 2010 http://maestro.haarp.alaska.edu/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?date=20100120&Bx=on USGS Epic center Showing time and date of these graphic reports: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2010/us2010rsbb/ CNN REPORT: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/20/haiti.earthquake/index.html?hpt=T1 This was their agenda Call goes out for ‘Marshall Plan’ to rebuild from Haiti’s ruins By Tom Evans, CNN January 20, 2010 10:24 p.m. EST http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/20/haiti.rebuilding/index.html?hpt=T2 CNN REPORT: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/america... The first quake on the 12th of January 2010 the HAARP website clearly shows massive activity compared to the prior dates of the first earthquake on the 12th. We were all thinking …could this have been caused by HAARP? , But not for sure. Just spectulation.The second earthquake on the 20th in Haiti HAARP was also showing mass activity but not much proir. Coincidience? I think not.
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February 15th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
S said:
Uh, let me just point out that a 7.0 earthquake is a big one but nothing beyond what the earth experiences on a fairly regular basis. The 1989 San Fransisco Bay Area quake was roughly 7.0. There was a 7.0 quake in Java last year. The 1985 Mexico City Earthquake and the 1906 San Fransisco quake and the 2007 Sumatra Quake were signifficantly more than 7.0.
There are an average of 18 quakes per year with a magnitude between 7.0 and 7.9 on the Richter Scale. Most of them occur in uninhabited places.
S said:
What I see is that two hours before the quake in Haiti, the induction magnetometer went from a relatively flat line with low ULF activity to a period of high activity lasting about two days. This would be an indication of a mild solar flare, sun-storm or possibly a local geomagnetic event. Not too uncommon, really.
There was another event on the 21 of January and there were other such events in early December. Right now, we’re coming out of a lul in the sun cycle, so these kind of event will become more common in the next couple of years, just as they were around 2003-2005. Actually the events in recent months are very small compared to some large geomagnetic events a few years ago. See here:
http://137.229.36.30/cgi-bin/scmag/disp-scmag.cgi?20040727
S said:
What is your point? That at the time the induction magnetometer registered a high level of activity there was an earthquake at roughly the same time?
And that there were other quakes at times of high power density at the magnetometer? For one thing, all earthquakes of any major scale generate aftershocks, and secondly, if you are looking for an earthquake that occurred around the time of a high ULF reading, you’re likely to find one, because somewhere in the world there is a significant quake about every two or three days.
There was yet another spike in activity on February first. What quake did that cause? Or is it just the ones that correspond to a quake of significance that matter?
By the way, the magnetometer doesn’t record what HAARP is doing – it records enviornmental data based on ionospheric and geomagnetic activity.
S said:
Bad analogy. Learn some history. The Marshall Plan was intended to aid recovery of Western Europe as a means of balancing power against the Soviet Union. Western Europe was the most strategically important place in the world and without a strong and unified Europe, it was feared that the Soviets would become more powerful and eventually start to take over the continent.
Haiti has no stratigic or economic value. It’s dirt poor and tiny. If we wanted to take over the country it would not have been that difficult – not that I can think of any reason why we would.
S said:
I think so. Geez, an earthquake happened around the same time as a common magnetic event. Who woulda thunk? Not only that, the induction magnetometer doesn’t measure the output of HAARP – it measures local magnetic field density. Magnetic variations happen whether HAARP is on or off.
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February 15th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Please do your/the research.
Funny how the use of this phrase at the beginning of a post has become almost a sure sign that what follows will be the ravings of a crank.
‘Research,’ apparently now means the uncritical collecting of the drivel posted by every other moron on the subject at hand.
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February 15th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
DV82XL said:
Of all the high-horse, pompus, holier-than-thee statements these nuts make, that one is the most annoying. It doesn’t matter how many sources you site or how well you understand the subject matter, they’ll always tell you that you didn’t do your homework and they did, regardless of how lacking their statements are.
It’s annoying as hell.
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February 15th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Wow !!!!! I’m really impressed with the (incompetent on one hand) gov’mint that is so scientifically astute as to be able to use an EM wave to cause an earthquake in a precise location!!!
What a weapon!!! We probably got it from the Roswell Alien ship.
Sorry but correlation is not causation.
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February 16th, 2010 at 1:10 am
CybrgnX said:
Yeah, actually I kinda wish they would use this ability to control seismic forces with such precision a bit more often. This whole issue of Iranian uranium enrichment could be put to rest by sending a few tremors to their enrichment plants and knocking them out of commission.
For that matter, why not do something a bit more constructive? Maybe they could shift the plates around a bit to move Northern Africa a bit in order to clear up that bottleneck at the Suez Canal by making it a bit wider. They could also open up a subduction zone somewhere convenient so that we could throw all our toxic waste into it and then close it back up.
Also, how about some volcanic activity someplace like the Midwest or the Northeast? Nothing catastrophic, just one of those continuously erupting volcano that produces a slow flow of high viscosity lava. That would be pretty useful for geothermal energy.
Hell, if you actually could control plate and fault movements and that kind of thing, there’s all kinds of stuff you could do with that beyond causing the occasional disastrous earthquake.
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February 16th, 2010 at 6:20 am
Any comments on the proposal to beam radio waves tuned to a resonant frequency of carbon dioxide molecules, so as to ionise them and let the polar magnetic fields move them up out of the atmosphere?
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February 16th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Ah, but of course they don’t *look* evil. That’s because they don’t want you to figure it out! So the fact that they don’t look evil only proves that they actually ARE!!!!11!
Ahem.
Seriously, that was a cool post. Well, sad in that people are obviously willing to grasp any disaster at all in order to further their own paranoid delusions, but the pictures of HAARP are pretty neat. It’s a very interesting project. Okay, maybe not as interesting as the conspiracy theorists think, but I think manipulating the ionosphere to study it is pretty darned neat.
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February 17th, 2010 at 4:44 am
Well, you’re all wrong. Haiti was the back base for the hologram generators used for the 9/11 Attack. The truth was about to be revealed, so the US gov. needed to erase any evidence of this. Obvious, isn’t it ?
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February 17th, 2010 at 6:31 am
This phrase: “Tesla death ray” ooooh exciting, must be major mojo
Really, the connection to certain famous researchers is probably the trigger that got everyone interested in HAARP. The more sinister application of HAARP-like projects’ results would be remotely jamming electronics. And that actually has some real science with good math behind it.
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March 9th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Read this: from an article on US government millitary website, under weather modification. It quotes ” Even if power levels achieved were insufficient to be an effective strike weapon, the potential for psychological operations in many situations could be fantastic”
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March 9th, 2010 at 11:35 am
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2025/v3c15/v3c15-4.htm#Communications%20Dominance%20via%20Ionospheric%20Modification
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March 9th, 2010 at 11:36 am
Maybe these so called smartie pants, should do more research themselves.
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March 9th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Melody said:
You really know where to hit my annoyance button. Yes, I’ve done the research
Melody said:
Melody said:
An earthquake is not weather, and even there they’re admitting that a RF source of enormous power would never be able to alter weather enough to actually cause any damage. They go on to talk about “simulated weather” using highly speculative technology like “nanoparticles” that talk to eachother and communicate back to a base etc.
DARPA and the Airforce Advanced Technologies programs occasionally engage in this – highly speculative pie-in-the-sky speculation of what might be possible in 25 or 50 years in the future.
As far as their reports go, this is not even a very good one. Then again, you can’t count on the government to always produce A+ level proposals and such. The Air Force also came up with a preliminary proposal for research into a “Gay Bomb” that would use hormones to turn troops into horny homosexuals with such passion they could not resist the urge to turn a war into a big gay orgy.
In other words, the fact that something comes from the military does not preclude it from being completely ridiculous.
Anyway, if you actually read that thing, you’ll notice that the weather modification speculation is just a small part of a system which has the primary mission of communications denial by alternative jamming methods as well as over the horizon radar and direction finding.
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March 23rd, 2010 at 11:34 pm
When I saw HAARP in the title I thought it was gonna involve Muse somehow. Thanks for getting my hopes up lol
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