The mysterious anomalies that periodically appeared on the radio broadcasts of Great Britain in 1943-1945 turned out to be a kind of echo of the massive bombing of German cities by Allied aircraft. Physicists who have published an article in the journal Annales Geophysicae write about this.
“It's amazing how vibrations generated by anthropogenic explosions can reach the edge of space. Each Allied raid released roughly the same amount of energy as three hundred lightning bolts. The terrifying force of these impacts helped us understand how events on the Earth's surface could affect the far reaches of its atmosphere,”says Christopher Scott of the University of Reading (UK).
As scientists explain, any large-scale events in the bowels of the planet generate a mass of powerful infrasonic waves that can noticeably change the air pressure and the density of distribution of electrons even in the ionosphere.
For example, an analysis of data collected by the GRACE gravity and climate satellites in March 2011 showed that they were able to record the traces of such sound waves generated by the famous 9-point earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan, which led to the tsunami and disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Scott and his colleague Patrick Major discovered another interesting example of how events on the Earth's surface affect the ionosphere when they studied anomalies on the air recorded by British military stations and radio amateurs in 1943-1945.
Analyzing the data collected by the Center for the Study of Radio Waves in Sloe (UK) during the war years, Major and Scott drew attention to an unusual pattern. Anomalies appeared at about the same time when the armadas of the British Lancaster and American Superfortresses bombed Berlin, Essen, Dusseldorf, Cologne and other industrial centers of Nazi Germany.
This prompted scientists to believe that carpet bombing caused strong infrasonic oscillations that changed the nature of the distribution of electrons, as well as the speed of their movement, which led to these interference.
They tested this theory by calculating the strength of acoustic waves generated by British and American bombs and estimating the amount of energy released into the atmosphere from the explosions.
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Calculations have shown that even relatively modest Allied raids, during which less than 200 tons of bombs fell on German cities, caused strong vibrations that heated the ionosphere and accelerated the movement of electrons. This caused radio interference even from a distance of a thousand kilometers separating Britain from the western regions of Germany.
Why did nothing of the kind happen in the early years of the war, when Germany was bombing? According to Scott and Major, this is due to the fact that Nazi troops did not use powerful bombs, but preferred to bombard England with V-1 and V-2 missiles with a relatively weak warhead.