Bizarre questions and conspiracy theories have been having a field day over social media after devastating earthquakes rocked southeastern Türkiye earlier this month.
Conspiracy theories about a United States research station have resurged. Social media users falsely blame it for the earthquakes, following debunked claims it causes weather disasters and spreads the coronavirus.
Scientists have for years been refuting claims that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), with its Alaska facility boasting 180 radio antennae, is a U.S. government-backed program to weaponize the atmosphere and subjugate the population.
The series of earthquakes that struck Türkiye and Syria on Feb. 6, killing tens of thousands of people, gave rise to a new variant of the theory on social media in various languages.
Experts have dismissed it as science fiction.
'Crazy' earthquake claims
Some users cited flashes of light before the quake as evidence of HAARP artificially generating them. "This is so crazy. It's like asking if the earthquake was caused by Bugs Bunny digging for carrots," said David Keith, professor of applied physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
"There is no known mechanism for anything remote to impact earthquakes," he said.
HAARP sends radio waves to heat electrons in the ionosphere, the top layer of Earth's atmosphere, to study their effects on communications systems. However, its waves are not big enough to reach Türkiye. Instead, movements of the Earth's crust cause quakes.
Experts told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that flashing lights are commonly seen during earthquakes. However, theories, concerning their origin, vary. Sometimes, they come from power lines or electricity stations shaken by the quake.
The U.S. Air Force and Navy ran HAARP before being handed over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2015.
Michael Lockwood, professor of space environment and physics at the University of Reading, said claims about HAARP being used as a weapon may have stemmed from the program initially using radio waves to communicate with submarines. This function became obsolete after the Cold War.
This history "got blown up into the farcical idea that HAARP is some form of a weapon," Lockwood said. "Some form of social mind control is the usual favorite, but generating earthquakes is one I hadn't heard before," he said.
Bizarre questions
The U.S. Geological Survey and its many experts have also answered similar and more bizarre questions over the years. One of the most prominent being "can 'MegaQuakes' really happen?"
The answer is simple: No. MegaQuakes – earthquakes of magnitude 10 or more significant – cannot happen. The magnitude of an earthquake is related to the length of the fault on which it occurs. A flaw is a break, in the rocks that make up the Earth's crust, along which rocks on either side have moved past each other. No fault long enough to generate a magnitude 10 earthquake is known to exist, according to the USGS; and if it did, it would extend around most of the planet.
The largest earthquake ever recorded was a magnitude 9.5 on May 22, 1960, in Chile on a fault almost 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) long – a "megaquake" in its own right.
One of the more prominent questions is whether one can predict earthquakes, and the answer is no. Neither the USGS nor any other scientific body have ever predicted a major earthquake. Scientists can only calculate the probability that a significant earthquake will occur in a specific area within a certain number of years.
Along the same lines, unusual animal behavior before a significant earthquake has been a mystery over the years, with no clear answer. The earliest reference to such animal behavior before an earthquake comes from Greece in 373 B.C. Rats, weasels, snakes, and centipedes reportedly left their homes and headed for safety several days before a destructive earthquake.
Anecdotal evidence abounds of animals, fish, birds, reptiles, and insects exhibiting strange behavior from weeks to seconds before an earthquake. However, consistent and reliable behavior before seismic events, and a mechanism explaining how it could work, still eludes scientists.
Another question people raise is, "Do solar flares, or magnetic storms cause earthquakes?" Solar flares and magnetic storms belong to a set of phenomena known collectively as "space weather." Technological systems and the activities of modern civilization can be affected by changing space-weather conditions. However, according to the USGS, it has never been demonstrated that there is a causal relationship between space weather and earthquakes.