Hurricane in Florida or volcanic eruption in Iceland, flood or forest fires. Whatever disaster happens, the terrible word HAARP will surely sound nearby. The American radio complex and its counterparts from other countries are endowed with the most fantastic abilities to manipulate the weather, earthquakes, and even human consciousness. To find out how everything really is, we went to one of the centers of the web of the global conspiracy, to the "Russian HAARP" - the "Sura" heating stand.
An old pier on the Volga, 150 km from Nizhny Novgorod. Ancient Vasilsursk seemed to have frozen in the past, when Shishkin and Levitan came here to paint the famous river views. It is impossible to get to the village by public transport, you will need your own car, and then a few kilometers of a broken road, turn to the right - and among the copses, the supports of high antennas begin to be seen. "Sura" looks quiet and somehow ordinary: a water pumping station, a boiler room, a power transmission line, suitable for the transformer box. It is hard to believe that the threads of a worldwide conspiracy to control either the climate or the mind converge here.
On a cleared field measuring 300 x 300 m, at a height of 22-meter reinforced concrete supports, almost one and a half hundred emitters of a phased antenna array are installed. Together with three 250 kW radio transmitters, it is capable of sending up a narrow beam of short radio waves. The effective power of the compressed beam reaches 200 MW. Being absorbed high in the Earth's ionosphere, it causes its heating and other local disturbances. The associated behavior of particles, waves and fields is recorded by ground and space sensors. This is how Sura works and comparable projects - HAARP in Alaska, Arecibo in Puerto Rico, EISCAT near Tromsø, Norway.
EISCAT radio complex (Tromsø, Norway). All such stations are based on arrays of highly directional antennas that focus energy in a narrow beam.
Despite the enormous power of these heating stands, charged particles of the ionosphere are much more strongly influenced by the multitude of radio waves generated by modern civilization. “It is influenced by all radio stations and special purpose stations, all mobile communications,” Vladimir Frolov, a physicist working at the Sura, told us, a leading researcher at the Nizhny Novgorod Scientific Research Radiophysical Institute (NIRFI). - But the ionosphere protects us from a lot of troubles. Therefore, it is so important to know how it changes under the influence of such an electromagnetic load and how much it can withstand."
Top view
In fact, every moment the Sun waters the Earth not only with myriads of photons, but also with fast particles of the solar wind - mainly protons. Most of them do not reach the planet's surface, interacting with particles still in the upper atmosphere. Here, the radiation of the Sun knocks out electrons from atoms and molecules of atmospheric gases, leading to their ionization and precipitation of charged particles. Above 90 km, oxygen and nitrogen ions accumulate in the atmosphere, and at high altitudes, starting from 1000 km, there are more helium and hydrogen ions.
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This rarefied plasma forms our planet's turbulent, volatile ionosphere. Its charged particles do not exist for a long time, and at night, when there is not enough sunlight, the plasma is noticeably scattered. But during the day, under bright rays, the ionosphere becomes denser again and can form several layers of different heights, each with its own characteristics. Once, having discovered plasma at an altitude of 90-140 km, it was attributed to layer E, expecting that the margin in front of this letter and after it will be useful for other layers that scientists will discover in the future.
Radio complex HAARP (Gakona, USA).
In fact, two were enough: the bottom of the ionosphere is limited by the D layer, which appears only during the day, and from the top, by the "electronic" F layer, which goes hundreds of kilometers into the near-earth space and at night (especially in winter) also greatly weakened. Under the influence of a coronal ejection on the Sun or other events, high-altitude electrons of the F-layer can flow down below. Interacting with nitrogen ions, atomic and molecular oxygen in the E layer, they create auroras - blue-violet, green and red.
Military secrets
A moving ocean of charged particles affects the propagation of radio waves. Marconi himself noticed this, in 1901-1902, having caught a signal from a station located in England in Newfoundland. Such waves travel in a straight line, and the transmission from a source hidden by the earth's bend can only be explained by the fact that the signal is reflected high in the atmosphere and returns back to the surface. In the following decades, scientists, including Nobel laureates Eduard Appleton and Vitaly Ginzburg, confirmed the existence of a rarefied plasma in the atmosphere and, in general, described the principles of radio wave propagation in it.
These principles seemed very promising for the army. The reflection of radio waves by the ionosphere has found application in over-the-horizon radars capable of looking far beyond the bend of the earth's surface. In addition, the currents flowing in the plasma could be used to communicate with submarines. A normal radio signal is absorbed by water, but ionospheric currents can be modulated by powerful radio waves, causing them to emit ultra-long waves that can penetrate the water column.
Finally, the military was interested in the scenario associated with a possible explosion in the ionosphere of an atomic bomb. Such a catastrophe will fill it with a huge number of new charged particles and can completely disrupt communications and the operation of satellites in near-earth orbit. Theoretically, the heating stands are capable of accelerating the "cleaning" of the ionosphere, forcing the electrons accumulated in the radiation belts to spill out below and dump excess charges in auroras and lightning. It is not surprising that from the first such installation, which appeared in the USSR in 1963 and ending with HAARP, launched in 1997, these projects were funded by defense departments and were often semi-closed. And where there is conspiracy, there is also conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories
The really "unhealthy fuss" around the heating stands arose during the construction of HAARP, when some public figures tried to draw attention to another "suspicious" item of the Pentagon's expenses. Since then, it has been difficult to name at least one climatic or even technological disaster that they would not try to associate with the operation of heating stands. A hurricane in Haiti, floods in the Philippines, plane crashes and even the spread of chronic fatigue syndrome were all named among the effects of turning on either HAARP or the Russian Sura, which too remind the public of Tesla's semi-legendary experiments on wireless transmission of energy over a distance.
Radio complex "Sura" (Vasilsursk, Russia).
The principles and purposes of these tools are not well understood; these are not telescopes or a thermonuclear tokamak - they are both large-scale, spectacular and mysterious at the same time. The combination of these features, apparently, turns the heating stands into a convenient target for conspiracy exercises. Although anyone can be convinced of the absurdity of these statements: in August every year, HAARP organizes an open door, and Sura is not nearly as secret as one would expect from a weapon of global influence. Even military developers are no longer interested in heating stations. The same HAARP, which until recently received tens of millions a year from the US Navy, periodically faces financial difficulties. The behavior of the ionosphere turned out to be too complex and unpredictable to rely on for communication with submarines."The military requires high reliability," explains Vladimir Frolov, "but because of the plasma disturbances, it is impossible to provide it." It turned out to be unrealistic to influence the ionosphere on a global scale for solving larger practical problems. The plasma ocean is very vast, and compared to the influence of the Sun, the contribution of heating stands is too weak even near the stations.
The mysteries of the ionosphere
"The radiation energy of HAARP is great, but it is vanishingly small in comparison with the energy of a single lightning," said Professor Umran Inan, who works in Alaska. “But every second, from 50 to 100 lightning flashes in the atmosphere”. As far as is known, even the "elementary" aurora was only once triggered by such stations, due to a coincidence of circumstances. As a result, these installations remain really valuable only for researchers of the ionosphere. Its lower layers are located at uncomfortable altitudes of 90-140 km: these areas are no longer accessible to aviation, but not yet suitable for satellites. This is where heating stands will come in handy, and the laws of radio wave propagation found with their help help to build more and more perfect and reliable communication systems.
Sura is the only stand located in the middle latitudes. The relatively calm local ionosphere does not allow either "launching" the aurora, or seeing many complex effects. But it helps to carry out experiments that are too difficult for the stormy ionosphere of polar latitudes. “From the point of view of physics,“Sura”was and remains on a par with all major stations in the world,” adds Vladimir Frolov.
So, it was on the "Sura" that oscillations of neutral particles were discovered, which arise in response to disturbances of a charged plasma. It turns out that not only the ionosphere is influenced by the atmosphere, but also vice versa - ionospheric ions are able to change the behavior of atmospheric gases. “Modern research is changing the traditional concept, within which the atmosphere was considered separately - the troposphere, mesosphere, etc., separately the ionosphere with its layers, separately the magnetosphere, lithosphere, biosphere,” says Vladimir Frolov. "In fact, everything - from the upper atmosphere to the core of the planet - is a single system that determines the existence of life and civilization on Earth."
Roman Fishman
