WEBVTT - What does HAARP do? 0:00:00.160 --> 0:00:07.240 Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to 0:00:07.400 --> 0:00:15.880 Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, 0:00:16.000 --> 0:00:18.520 the podcast that looks at the future and says somewhere 0:00:18.560 --> 0:00:20.919 they're meeting on a pinhead, calling you an angel, calling 0:00:20.960 --> 0:00:24.200 you the nicest things. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Foca, 0:00:24.400 --> 0:00:27.760 and I'm Joe McCormick. And you know, guys, I did 0:00:27.840 --> 0:00:31.400 a an episode of Forward Thinking, the video show Now 0:00:31.480 --> 0:00:34.320 that long ago where I started talking about the possibility 0:00:34.800 --> 0:00:38.480 of weather controlled devices, and uh, you know, it turns 0:00:38.479 --> 0:00:42.239 out weather is pretty complicated stuff that has a lot 0:00:42.240 --> 0:00:43.720 of energy involved in it. But there were a lot 0:00:43.760 --> 0:00:46.000 of people who who said, why are you talking about 0:00:46.000 --> 0:00:48.040 this is If this is a possible future thing, we've 0:00:48.080 --> 0:00:50.960 got one right now, And they all came up with 0:00:51.000 --> 0:00:53.800 the same example. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, 0:00:53.840 --> 0:00:57.040 I believe you're talking about a program called HARP, which 0:00:57.200 --> 0:01:00.360 is a big machine up at the North Pole that's 0:01:00.440 --> 0:01:05.720 run by reptilians and transdimensional reptilian Yeah, that's exactly what 0:01:05.800 --> 0:01:09.640 I'm talking about, secretly run the world. And uh, I 0:01:09.680 --> 0:01:11.959 mean yet it causes all kinds of things like like 0:01:12.040 --> 0:01:17.520 earthquakes have mind control. Sometimes it can hurricanes, it can 0:01:17.560 --> 0:01:19.920 it can zap stuff right all the sky. This is 0:01:19.959 --> 0:01:23.880 all due to, uh, you know the fact that conspiracy 0:01:23.880 --> 0:01:27.120 theories run rampant on the Internet. Now we're going to 0:01:27.240 --> 0:01:31.600 actually talk about the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program 0:01:31.680 --> 0:01:38.240 better known as HARP in this podcast. Yes, like HARP, HARP. Yeah, 0:01:38.440 --> 0:01:41.440 so it's a little piratical in that sense. We're going 0:01:41.520 --> 0:01:44.880 to talk about what it really does and why there 0:01:44.959 --> 0:01:47.760 are all these conspiracy theories around it. Now, first of all, 0:01:47.800 --> 0:01:50.200 let's just get this out of the way. HARP is 0:01:50.280 --> 0:01:54.000 not a weather control device. It's not able to create 0:01:54.120 --> 0:01:58.640 hurricanes or guide a tornado or any of that that 0:01:58.720 --> 0:02:02.320 we know of orcan sign typically proved to be in 0:02:02.320 --> 0:02:06.200 any way even feasible. Yeah, we can't even hint at 0:02:06.280 --> 0:02:09.239 really right, right, we can't. We don't even fully understand 0:02:09.440 --> 0:02:14.040 all the variables that go into creating the weather patterns 0:02:14.080 --> 0:02:17.480 that many people attribute to HARP. And we have leading 0:02:17.560 --> 0:02:21.560 scientists who are always talking about how much we do 0:02:21.600 --> 0:02:24.120 not know and how much we're still learning about these things. 0:02:24.160 --> 0:02:27.799 So to assume that we could uh create and control 0:02:28.080 --> 0:02:32.240 a system as as destructive and packing as much energy 0:02:32.240 --> 0:02:36.160 as a hurricane is a little um yeah, because I 0:02:36.160 --> 0:02:38.799 mean hurricane can have as much energy as ten thousand 0:02:38.880 --> 0:02:42.400 nuclear bombs. That's a lot of energy. You think if 0:02:42.440 --> 0:02:45.560 we could reliably create hurricanes, we'd also have the power 0:02:45.600 --> 0:02:49.160 to stop them. Yeah, yeah, or at least steer them 0:02:49.200 --> 0:02:52.000 somewhere else, although that raises its own problems, and maybe 0:02:52.080 --> 0:02:56.160 the interdimensional reptilians really justlike Florida. It could be. Yeah. 0:02:56.160 --> 0:02:58.360 So let's let's talk about what harp really is and 0:02:58.639 --> 0:03:01.200 we'll we'll get back to the RC theory stuff towards 0:03:01.240 --> 0:03:04.440 the end and kind of talk about what was it 0:03:04.480 --> 0:03:08.600 that even got these conspiracy theories moving in the first place. Okay, 0:03:08.639 --> 0:03:11.120 so I was wrong on lots accounts. Actually, it's not 0:03:11.200 --> 0:03:17.240 even at the North Pole is now. It's in Alaska. Well, 0:03:17.280 --> 0:03:20.800 I mean it's it's in the the general region of 0:03:20.840 --> 0:03:25.200 the Arctic. Uh, it's in actually the southern central part 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:28.360 of Alaska. It's not really close to anything else, which 0:03:28.400 --> 0:03:31.679 may in fact have lent itself somewhat to the conspiracy 0:03:31.720 --> 0:03:34.080 theories because it's not easy to get to or at least, 0:03:34.120 --> 0:03:36.200 you know, it's not close to anything else. It's near 0:03:36.280 --> 0:03:38.320 some I looked it up on Google Maps. It's like 0:03:38.440 --> 0:03:43.400 near a hunting lodge or something. Yeah, I saw and 0:03:43.400 --> 0:03:45.080 if you were to look at this place, it would 0:03:45.120 --> 0:03:49.000 look like it's a forest of antenna Like they're they're 0:03:49.320 --> 0:03:52.640 various antenna fields, some of them as large as something 0:03:52.680 --> 0:03:57.360 like thirty acres of antennas that are all spaced out exactly. 0:03:57.800 --> 0:04:00.400 Uh you know, whether like eight ft apart art it's 0:04:00.440 --> 0:04:02.440 kind of and there's seventy two ft tall. I mean, 0:04:02.440 --> 0:04:04.960 this is impressive stuff. Yeah, it looks like a hazard. 0:04:05.040 --> 0:04:09.320 You jump over in Mario, fell into it, you die. Yeah, yeah, 0:04:09.320 --> 0:04:11.480 it does. Yeah, we're talking like maybe, well really we're 0:04:11.480 --> 0:04:14.800 talking about Super Mario. But it's like it's this big 0:04:14.880 --> 0:04:18.120 field of spiky metal. Yeah. Yeah. So again it look 0:04:18.160 --> 0:04:20.359 it looks a little weird. So what's the deal with 0:04:20.400 --> 0:04:25.960 this thing? It's actually a program meant to study the ionosphere, 0:04:26.200 --> 0:04:30.880 which then raises the question, what the heck is the ionosphere? Y'all? 0:04:31.560 --> 0:04:36.440 So the ionosphere is the very outer edge of our atmosphere. 0:04:36.440 --> 0:04:40.320 It is technically a kind of a layer within an atmosphere. 0:04:40.960 --> 0:04:44.200 Some people call it the thermosphere, and the ionosphere is 0:04:44.279 --> 0:04:47.120 part of that. So if you're going from the surface 0:04:47.120 --> 0:04:50.160 of the Earth outward, you have the troposphere, which is 0:04:50.200 --> 0:04:52.720 where all the weather happens, right that's like, you know, 0:04:52.800 --> 0:04:54.919 all the storms and everything that we think of that 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:58.520 happens in the troposphere. Then you've got the stratosphere, which 0:04:58.560 --> 0:05:00.640 we've all heard about. That's where a lot of these 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:03.599 weather balloons that are going even higher up to study 0:05:04.200 --> 0:05:08.000 uh effects above the troposphere, that's where they are. It's 0:05:08.000 --> 0:05:10.640 also where you hear about things like Google's Project Loon. 0:05:11.680 --> 0:05:15.120 There's a lot of different bands of air moving at 0:05:15.160 --> 0:05:17.919 different speeds there, so you can kind of catch those 0:05:17.960 --> 0:05:20.360 to get your stuff where you want to, right right, Yeah, 0:05:20.400 --> 0:05:22.200 there there are a lot of different bands, but they 0:05:22.400 --> 0:05:26.640 tend to behave in a very predictable way. Much less 0:05:26.720 --> 0:05:28.919 you know, you know, the troposphere, things can get a 0:05:28.920 --> 0:05:31.720 little a little crazy, you know, it gets party time 0:05:31.720 --> 0:05:34.120 in the troposphere and the stressphere, it's a little more predictable. 0:05:34.200 --> 0:05:36.640 Then you have the miso sphere, and then you have 0:05:36.720 --> 0:05:40.720 the ionosphere. So it's way out there and some like 0:05:40.720 --> 0:05:43.600 like eight kilometers or fifty miles above the surface at 0:05:43.600 --> 0:05:46.919 its starting point. Yeah, yeah, So the ionosphere isn't at 0:05:47.000 --> 0:05:49.440 the exact same altitude over every point of the Earth. 0:05:49.640 --> 0:05:52.080 So I hear the word ion in the prefix of 0:05:52.200 --> 0:05:55.440 io sphere. Yeah, what does the ionosphere have to do 0:05:55.480 --> 0:05:58.160 with ion? Well, that would be exactly where you would 0:05:58.160 --> 0:06:01.280 expect to find charged particle that's ions. It's you know, 0:06:01.440 --> 0:06:03.720 an ion is essentially an atom that is either lost 0:06:03.800 --> 0:06:06.400 or gained an electron, and in this case we're talking 0:06:06.520 --> 0:06:10.279 about particles that have been zapped by the Sun's energy. 0:06:10.360 --> 0:06:12.640 This is the part of our atmosphere that's absorbing some 0:06:12.720 --> 0:06:15.000 of the more harmful rays coming from the Sun, like 0:06:15.200 --> 0:06:18.279 X rays for example. Now, as it absorbs that, the 0:06:18.360 --> 0:06:21.520 particles that absorb it get more energy and become ions. 0:06:21.880 --> 0:06:24.240 Thus you have the ionosphere. And so you've got these 0:06:24.320 --> 0:06:28.120 magnetic fields that the Earth has, and you have these 0:06:28.440 --> 0:06:32.320 ions that are essentially trapped in that layer, this thin 0:06:32.520 --> 0:06:37.239 layer called the ionosphere. So it's an interesting um part 0:06:37.320 --> 0:06:40.240 of the Earth's atmosphere. It's really useful because it helps 0:06:40.720 --> 0:06:43.840 block some of the stuff that would otherwise harm us. 0:06:44.080 --> 0:06:46.760 It also allows us to do stuff like have long 0:06:46.880 --> 0:06:51.880 range radio communication. You know, when uh, when Mark Coni 0:06:52.000 --> 0:06:56.080 wanted to send a message across the Atlantic, how are 0:06:56.080 --> 0:06:58.919 you going to do that? Because after two miles the 0:06:59.320 --> 0:07:01.640 curvature of the Earth will prevent line of sight, won't 0:07:01.640 --> 0:07:03.680 it right, And you would think radio waves travel on 0:07:03.720 --> 0:07:05.440 the straight line. How the heck could you get a 0:07:05.560 --> 0:07:07.640 radio wave to go? It just hit the water and 0:07:07.680 --> 0:07:11.240 that's it. Now I've actually turns out that the radio wave, 0:07:11.320 --> 0:07:16.160 when directed toward the sky would bounce off the ionosphere 0:07:16.160 --> 0:07:20.720 and reflect back down to Earth, thus allowing a transatlantic broadcast. 0:07:20.800 --> 0:07:24.880 And the first broadcast was three dots, which represents the 0:07:24.960 --> 0:07:29.400 letter S in Morse code. So that was the reason 0:07:29.400 --> 0:07:31.880 why that was possible was because the ionosphere, which at 0:07:31.920 --> 0:07:35.280 the time no one really truly understood, and we're still 0:07:35.400 --> 0:07:38.080 learning about the ionosphere because it's so far out there 0:07:38.600 --> 0:07:41.160 that our weather balloons don't get to it and our 0:07:41.200 --> 0:07:43.640 satellites are kind of above it for the most part. 0:07:43.920 --> 0:07:46.440 So that means that you know, to study it directly, 0:07:46.520 --> 0:07:48.520 we'd have to find some other means of doing it. 0:07:48.920 --> 0:07:53.640 Enter harp as a long introduction for this for this facility, 0:07:53.680 --> 0:07:56.280 but it it warrants it right because you have to 0:07:56.320 --> 0:08:00.000 understand that really the goal here was to learn more 0:08:00.000 --> 0:08:04.320 about radio waves, about the ionosphere, about the interaction between 0:08:04.520 --> 0:08:09.360 radio waves and the ionosphere, about what causes things like auroras, 0:08:09.440 --> 0:08:11.480 which are those beautiful lights that you could see that, 0:08:11.560 --> 0:08:14.480 you know, the northern lights are what we often call them, uh, 0:08:14.560 --> 0:08:18.720 and southern southern lights in fact also happened. Uh. So 0:08:19.200 --> 0:08:21.520 this is the layer where that stuff happens. And this 0:08:21.600 --> 0:08:23.840 is why it was you know, kind of an important 0:08:23.840 --> 0:08:26.600 way of important thing to to build to study that. 0:08:26.880 --> 0:08:30.800 But wasn't this all funded partially by the military largely? 0:08:31.080 --> 0:08:33.800 Why would the military want to know about science? An 0:08:33.960 --> 0:08:38.920 excellent question, Why would the military be interested in funding it? Well, 0:08:39.000 --> 0:08:44.560 let me guess telekinesis wrong, so uh, you know. Although 0:08:44.920 --> 0:08:47.680 we'll get into how the military was sold on this 0:08:47.840 --> 0:08:51.000 later on this podcast, which again ties into some of 0:08:51.000 --> 0:08:54.320 the conspiracy theory stuff, but in general, really what the 0:08:54.360 --> 0:08:57.319 military was interested in was finding ways to make more 0:08:57.320 --> 0:09:01.240 effective communication systems. A couple of different reasons for this. Uh. 0:09:01.480 --> 0:09:05.800 In the nineteen fifties, so the University of Alaska started 0:09:05.800 --> 0:09:08.959 building equipment to study effects of radio waves in the 0:09:09.000 --> 0:09:14.160 ionosphere during heavy ionic activity. So for example, or yeah, 0:09:14.280 --> 0:09:17.319 like when auroras were active. Alaska's far enough up there, 0:09:17.400 --> 0:09:20.240 but yeah, Aurora's come because of solar flares, right, you 0:09:20.280 --> 0:09:23.920 get this crazy ionic activity, You get this beautiful light show. 0:09:24.360 --> 0:09:28.280 And one drawback for communications is that sometimes radio waves 0:09:28.280 --> 0:09:32.520 get absorbed rather than reflected back. And in the nineteen fifties, 0:09:33.040 --> 0:09:34.880 if you if it meant that you couldn't have a 0:09:34.920 --> 0:09:39.240 long distance communication active in the Arctic region. That was 0:09:39.320 --> 0:09:41.440 bad news for the United States, which at the time 0:09:41.480 --> 0:09:43.760 was engaged in what we call the Cold War with 0:09:43.920 --> 0:09:47.160 the then Soviet Union. And the idea was that if 0:09:47.160 --> 0:09:50.200 you if you can't have reliable communication, would say, an 0:09:50.240 --> 0:09:55.280 aircraft carrying nuclear weapons that's flying towards the Soviet Union 0:09:55.280 --> 0:09:58.560 in the case of worst case scenario, that could be bad. 0:09:58.640 --> 0:10:01.199 So there were there was a lot of a lot 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:04.000 of need to study this this effect and figure out 0:10:04.040 --> 0:10:06.560 ways around it. So there was that. There's also the 0:10:06.640 --> 0:10:10.040 Navy that was interested in this because, as it turns out, 0:10:10.440 --> 0:10:12.720 radio waves like our our average radio waves that we 0:10:12.760 --> 0:10:16.720 tend to use for communications, are not good at penetrating seawater. 0:10:16.840 --> 0:10:20.280 Seawater is conductive, it can cause some scintillation, you get 0:10:20.280 --> 0:10:24.280 this weird changes and amplitude and frequency, and in other words, 0:10:24.320 --> 0:10:27.840 you cannot reliably use radio communication for something like a 0:10:27.920 --> 0:10:31.240 submarine that's submerged. So what do you do well, it 0:10:31.240 --> 0:10:36.000 turns out extremely low frequency and very low frequency radio waves, 0:10:36.000 --> 0:10:40.520 which have much longer wavelengths and very low frequencies, can 0:10:40.640 --> 0:10:44.560 penetrate seawater much more deeply than your average high frequency 0:10:44.640 --> 0:10:48.280 radio waves can. So if you were able to build 0:10:48.360 --> 0:10:53.880 something that could transmit these uh, these waves to a submarine, 0:10:54.200 --> 0:10:57.440 then you could issue commands that without having to worry 0:10:57.480 --> 0:11:01.079 about making them surface first. Uh are some downsides. You 0:11:01.080 --> 0:11:03.560 wouldn't be able to have two way communication because, as 0:11:03.600 --> 0:11:06.520 it turns out, you have to have an antenna that 0:11:06.679 --> 0:11:10.240 kind of matches the length of the wavelength we're talking 0:11:10.320 --> 0:11:14.120 about here, at least in some form of ratio. Right. 0:11:14.360 --> 0:11:17.920 So ideally, if you want to resondent antenna, your antenna 0:11:17.960 --> 0:11:20.600 should be the same length as the wavelength of the radio. 0:11:21.280 --> 0:11:25.520 And so if we're talking extremely low frequency radio waves, 0:11:25.679 --> 0:11:28.679 you're talking of a wavelength of around a hundred thousand kilometers, 0:11:28.679 --> 0:11:34.199 which is not practical for your average submarine. Even even 0:11:34.280 --> 0:11:36.160 if you were to go with a fraction, it would 0:11:36.200 --> 0:11:38.480 still be so huge you could never use a submarine. 0:11:38.520 --> 0:11:40.560 You can never have that attached to a submarine. So 0:11:40.760 --> 0:11:43.520 you might be able to use the Earth itself as 0:11:43.600 --> 0:11:46.120 part of your antenna and thus be able to eat 0:11:46.200 --> 0:11:48.599 up some of that distance that is necessary for you 0:11:48.640 --> 0:11:51.000 to be able to transmit. But you wouldn't be able 0:11:51.040 --> 0:11:53.160 to put that on a submarine so it could it 0:11:53.240 --> 0:11:55.360 could talk back, you could send messages to it. They 0:11:55.360 --> 0:11:58.200 couldn't talk back unless they then surface so that they 0:11:58.200 --> 0:12:02.240 could use regular high frequency media waves. Okay, so all 0:12:02.240 --> 0:12:04.080 of this is making sense. So we've got this data 0:12:04.160 --> 0:12:07.640 station and and research facility that has been sponsored by 0:12:07.640 --> 0:12:11.160 the Office of Naval Research, UM, the Air Force Research Laboratory, 0:12:11.200 --> 0:12:14.440 and DARPA and uh I believe it came online originally 0:12:15.720 --> 0:12:18.680 didn't really hit full strength until something like two thousand 0:12:18.760 --> 0:12:20.959 seven when it got the full array. Yeah, the full 0:12:21.040 --> 0:12:24.360 array of antenna's. Yeah. They had an initial smaller array 0:12:24.400 --> 0:12:27.400 of antenna's active in ninety nine and it took almost 0:12:27.400 --> 0:12:31.440 a decade for them to get up to what was 0:12:31.480 --> 0:12:34.720 supposed to be the full facility. Uh So two thousand 0:12:34.800 --> 0:12:38.240 seven is really when they get fully operational and death 0:12:38.280 --> 0:12:42.640 Star standards. Um. But but but but it wasn't just 0:12:42.720 --> 0:12:45.760 the military. There were a lot of research facilities, right. Yeah. 0:12:45.800 --> 0:12:48.240 In fact, lots of universities were part of this and 0:12:48.440 --> 0:12:51.800 have been part of it from the beginning. University of 0:12:51.920 --> 0:12:54.920 Alaska of course is a big one. They've been very 0:12:54.920 --> 0:12:57.800 peer Yeah. Yeah, a lot of their work was stuff 0:12:57.880 --> 0:13:03.880 that went into the Shoal approach. Uh. You also have Stanford, Cornell, U, C, 0:13:04.040 --> 0:13:06.360 L A, M, I. T. There are a lot of 0:13:06.400 --> 0:13:10.640 different universities that have been part of this project. And 0:13:10.800 --> 0:13:13.280 you know, it's there's a lot of valuable science that's 0:13:13.320 --> 0:13:17.160 going on now. From the military standpoint, they want things 0:13:17.160 --> 0:13:19.680 that are applicable, right, they want things that they can 0:13:19.840 --> 0:13:25.480 use as soon as possible to make their operations more effective. Uh. 0:13:25.520 --> 0:13:28.560 The scientists, they it's not that they don't want that, 0:13:28.640 --> 0:13:31.880 but they also want to do exploratory science. Well, yeah, 0:13:31.960 --> 0:13:35.760 because we can never predict what all of the applications 0:13:35.760 --> 0:13:37.920 of exploratory science are going to be. I mean, when 0:13:37.960 --> 0:13:40.480 we learn things about the natural world that might just 0:13:40.520 --> 0:13:45.160 seem like, you know, pure information with no technological application, 0:13:45.400 --> 0:13:47.840 a lot of times, ten years down the road, it's like, oh, 0:13:47.840 --> 0:13:50.680 good thing, we know that, because now we can make 0:13:51.040 --> 0:13:54.240 this thing that cleans your bathtub with the power of 0:13:54.240 --> 0:13:58.480 of puppy magic. Yeah, that's that's almost exactly how I 0:13:58.520 --> 0:14:01.240 would have raised that. Yeah, oh no, you're absolutely right. 0:14:01.280 --> 0:14:05.640 Exploratory science by its very nature, gives rise to developments 0:14:05.679 --> 0:14:09.000 that we could not anticipate because we're exploring, right, I mean, 0:14:09.080 --> 0:14:12.200 exploring is one of those things I'm really excited about 0:14:12.640 --> 0:14:15.920 in just about every avenue because you never know what 0:14:16.000 --> 0:14:19.640 you're going to uncover and what could potentially become not 0:14:19.760 --> 0:14:23.400 only useful, but maybe it's gonna be the the core 0:14:23.640 --> 0:14:26.680 of some new technology that makes lot you know, it 0:14:26.720 --> 0:14:31.480 could completely transform life, um as we knew it. So Okay, 0:14:31.520 --> 0:14:34.760 So so we've talked a little bit about some of 0:14:34.800 --> 0:14:37.920 the parts that that HARP includes, but what exactly is 0:14:38.000 --> 0:14:40.480 on the list here? Alright? So we gotta let's let's 0:14:40.560 --> 0:14:43.920 let's run down a list of some of the equipment 0:14:44.120 --> 0:14:46.120 at this facility. We've talked about how there are a 0:14:46.160 --> 0:14:49.320 lot of these antenna arrays, but what is exactly does 0:14:49.360 --> 0:14:51.800 that mean? Well, first, you've got your high power, high 0:14:51.920 --> 0:14:57.320 frequency phased array radio transmitter which has the name the 0:14:57.400 --> 0:15:01.360 ion A Sphere Research Instrument or i are I, and 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:06.120 that's specifically used to stimulate small, well defined volumes of 0:15:06.160 --> 0:15:10.360 the ionosphere regions uh nor more or less directly above 0:15:10.480 --> 0:15:13.440 the HARP facility. Yeah, it can't really range out of it. 0:15:13.440 --> 0:15:15.760 It's working sort of like a magnifying glass of the 0:15:15.800 --> 0:15:17.440 way that the array is set up so that it's 0:15:17.480 --> 0:15:21.560 just pinpointing a very small amount of ionosphere. Yeah, in 0:15:21.600 --> 0:15:24.320 the most in the simplest terms here, you're talking about 0:15:24.360 --> 0:15:27.920 aiming radio waves up at the sky to do stuff 0:15:27.920 --> 0:15:32.160 in the ionosphere. Essentially, you're exciting the particles up in 0:15:32.160 --> 0:15:35.240 the ionosphere, adding energy to them. So in in many 0:15:35.280 --> 0:15:39.200 cases you'll hear a phrase like the I an ionosphere heater, 0:15:39.720 --> 0:15:42.840 where they're heating the ionosphere. Now in this case, it's 0:15:42.880 --> 0:15:45.120 not like they've got a whole bunch of hair dryers 0:15:45.120 --> 0:15:47.520 and they're pointing them up at the sky. They're exciting 0:15:47.560 --> 0:15:50.760 particles exactly. They're using radio waves to excite particles. Now, 0:15:50.760 --> 0:15:53.480 when you're exciting particles, you're adding energy, they start moving 0:15:53.480 --> 0:15:57.480 around faster. Heat is essentially the movement of molecules. So 0:15:58.040 --> 0:16:01.200 really it's not that it's um misleading or anything. It's 0:16:01.240 --> 0:16:03.000 just kind of I think a lot of us think 0:16:03.040 --> 0:16:05.680 of heating like you've added some sort of heating element 0:16:05.840 --> 0:16:07.480 up there, but that's not really what's going on. The 0:16:07.480 --> 0:16:10.960 heat is really a byproduct of everything else. The study. Yeah, 0:16:11.000 --> 0:16:13.760 so the idea here is that they use this to 0:16:13.840 --> 0:16:17.520 excite certain small regions of the ionosphere directly above the 0:16:17.560 --> 0:16:20.920 Hart facility. Uh, and then run various experiments on. Now 0:16:20.920 --> 0:16:24.520 this this does do cool things, like it creates plasma. 0:16:24.600 --> 0:16:28.360 So you get ionized gas, which is a conductive gas. Right, 0:16:28.400 --> 0:16:31.440 it's got free ions running through it. You can actually 0:16:31.520 --> 0:16:35.080 run an electrical current through plasma. So uh. And there 0:16:35.120 --> 0:16:37.720 already are plasma bands in the ionosphere. It's not like 0:16:37.760 --> 0:16:41.080 we're introducing something that isn't already there. This is just 0:16:41.160 --> 0:16:43.760 kind of a way of studying that. So they also 0:16:43.880 --> 0:16:47.960 have a high frequency ion a sonda, also known as 0:16:47.960 --> 0:16:52.000 a chirp sounder. I love that term. And this is 0:16:52.040 --> 0:16:56.160 a type of radar. Yeah, it's they chirp at the sky. No, 0:16:56.280 --> 0:16:58.280 I wasn't laughing at the chirp. I was laughing at 0:16:58.280 --> 0:17:04.320 the first words. So that again, I on a Sanda dessert. Yeah, monsieur, 0:17:05.200 --> 0:17:10.600 the Yeah, I'm sure, be very Uh. What does a 0:17:10.720 --> 0:17:14.200 chirp sounder do. So, it's a radar. It emits high 0:17:14.200 --> 0:17:17.600 frequency radio waves over a very wide range of frequencies, 0:17:17.640 --> 0:17:20.720 and it's specifically used to examine the ionosphere, as you 0:17:20.720 --> 0:17:25.600 would expect from iona sanda um. Uh, And so engineers 0:17:25.640 --> 0:17:28.840 would use these to find the ideal operation frequencies for 0:17:28.920 --> 0:17:32.920 two way radio communications in most cases. So in other words, 0:17:32.920 --> 0:17:35.320 you might use this to see, all right, well, this 0:17:35.359 --> 0:17:37.640 particular frequency band is going to be the most effective 0:17:37.720 --> 0:17:42.040 considering the distance between the two communication points. Uh. Now, 0:17:42.400 --> 0:17:45.159 of course HARP is using it to really study the 0:17:45.200 --> 0:17:49.000 effects that there are other instruments have upon the ionosphere itself. 0:17:49.680 --> 0:17:53.040 Then you've got the extremely low frequency and very low 0:17:53.080 --> 0:17:58.080 frequency receivers. Uh. So, yeah, ELF and VLF. These are 0:17:58.119 --> 0:18:01.080 those frequencies I was talking about the If you're looking 0:18:01.080 --> 0:18:04.600 at the extremely low frequency range, typically we say that's 0:18:04.640 --> 0:18:08.159 three to thirty hurts, but in atmospheric science, it actually 0:18:08.240 --> 0:18:11.679 is three hurts to three killer hurts. And then and 0:18:11.720 --> 0:18:14.600 then very low is three killer hurts to thirty killer hurts. 0:18:14.880 --> 0:18:19.360 And this is where we get into those crazy long wavelengths. 0:18:19.359 --> 0:18:22.080 So um, on the short end, if you're talking about 0:18:22.119 --> 0:18:24.399 thirty killer hurts, you're talking about around ten kilometers for 0:18:24.440 --> 0:18:26.719 your wavelength. And on the long end, if you're going 0:18:26.760 --> 0:18:28.200 all the way down to three hurts, you're talking about 0:18:28.200 --> 0:18:32.280 a hundred thousand kilometers. So these are incredibly long uh. 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:36.000 Radio waves, and um, this is that stuff that's going 0:18:36.040 --> 0:18:39.320 to possibly do better than than or that does do 0:18:39.400 --> 0:18:42.520 better than regular radio in in like submarines and things. 0:18:42.520 --> 0:18:44.640 It's also one of the other and this is something 0:18:44.680 --> 0:18:46.960 else the military was very interested in. One of the 0:18:46.960 --> 0:18:49.360 other things that can do is penetrate the ground and 0:18:49.480 --> 0:18:53.159 potentially discover things like the location of an underground bunker, 0:18:53.760 --> 0:18:56.639 which you could probably understand the military would think, hey, 0:18:57.440 --> 0:19:01.520 that's handy. Those They also another reason why they have 0:19:01.600 --> 0:19:06.520 these receivers is because they discovered that by agitating the ionosphere, 0:19:06.600 --> 0:19:11.320 you could create these frequencies of radio waves up in 0:19:11.359 --> 0:19:14.560 the ionosphere. And so the thought was, maybe you could 0:19:14.600 --> 0:19:19.920 do that instead of building those incredibly huge antenna to 0:19:19.920 --> 0:19:24.080 to broadcast summary, maybe you could just use the ionosphere itself. However, 0:19:24.119 --> 0:19:27.800 that hasn't really panned out. Um, then you have magnet magnetometers, 0:19:28.640 --> 0:19:31.400 or magnetometers as I like to call them. These are 0:19:31.440 --> 0:19:36.639 not used to measure supervillains, but rather to measure magnetic fields, 0:19:36.720 --> 0:19:39.360 their their strength and their direction. I think it's technically 0:19:39.480 --> 0:19:44.400 magnetom eaters. Magnetom eaters. Okay, thank you Joe, always keeping 0:19:44.480 --> 0:19:48.520 us on task. And then uh, we have rio meters, 0:19:50.000 --> 0:19:53.200 which I was going to make a nineteen eighties new 0:19:53.200 --> 0:19:55.680 wave reference. But yeah, I'm not gonna I'm gonna back 0:19:55.720 --> 0:19:58.000 off of that. But no, that's that stands for the 0:19:58.680 --> 0:20:05.040 good job avoiding that if only. Uh No, but this 0:20:05.119 --> 0:20:09.560 is a relative ionospheric opacity meter, and that measures electromagnetic 0:20:09.600 --> 0:20:13.840 wave absorption in the ionosphere. Now that was originally developed 0:20:13.840 --> 0:20:15.960 by researchers at the University of Alaska. This was what 0:20:16.000 --> 0:20:17.800 I was talking about when they wanted to find out 0:20:17.800 --> 0:20:21.280 the effects of aurora on radio waves. This is the 0:20:21.280 --> 0:20:23.600 sort of technology they were developing. Then you have a 0:20:23.720 --> 0:20:26.640 uh F diagnostic radar, which is a radar that works 0:20:26.640 --> 0:20:30.600 at ultra high frequency radio wave frequencies if I can 0:20:30.640 --> 0:20:33.280 be a little repetitive and redundant. And then you have 0:20:33.760 --> 0:20:37.800 finally optical and infrared spectrometers and cameras which are used 0:20:37.800 --> 0:20:42.360 to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska's ionosphere as 0:20:42.359 --> 0:20:45.240 well as to detect artificial effects produced by the I 0:20:45.680 --> 0:20:48.520 R I. So that's kind of a rundown on the 0:20:48.560 --> 0:20:52.119 general equipment that they're using over at HARP, or that 0:20:52.200 --> 0:20:55.280 they have been using at HARP and uh and what 0:20:55.440 --> 0:21:00.000 that stuff is supposed to do. So there you go. Okay, 0:21:00.119 --> 0:21:01.840 we we've covered a bunch of the different ways that 0:21:01.880 --> 0:21:05.480 this equipment is being used. But um, I think I 0:21:05.520 --> 0:21:08.919 think the ones that we haven't covered so far involve 0:21:09.280 --> 0:21:13.120 uh space applications. Yeah, there are a couple of different 0:21:13.280 --> 0:21:16.520 space applications. Well, one is is just figuring out how 0:21:16.560 --> 0:21:21.600 to how to handle things like solar flares more effectively. 0:21:21.640 --> 0:21:25.640 So when a solar flare uh impacts the Earth, you're 0:21:25.680 --> 0:21:28.639 talking about a lot of these high energy particles interacting 0:21:28.760 --> 0:21:33.400 and energy interacting with our ionosphere, making it more um 0:21:33.600 --> 0:21:36.919 aggravated active. Maybe we can say, like you probably have 0:21:37.000 --> 0:21:41.359 heard stories about so giant solar flare storms that caused 0:21:41.520 --> 0:21:45.879 spectacular aurora. Right, there was a solar storm in the 0:21:45.920 --> 0:21:49.359 eighteen hundreds that I believe they said caused all kinds 0:21:49.359 --> 0:21:53.520 of electrical malfunctions around the world and there and supposedly 0:21:53.600 --> 0:21:56.880 people as far south as Cuba could see the northern lights, 0:21:57.480 --> 0:22:01.040 which is phenomenal. I mean normally can't see those if 0:22:01.040 --> 0:22:03.680 yourself of say Canada. I mean, don't get me wrong, 0:22:03.720 --> 0:22:06.000 I want my laptop to continue working, but I but 0:22:06.119 --> 0:22:07.840 that would be really cool now, it would be kind 0:22:07.840 --> 0:22:10.200 of pretty to see but I'm actually willing to travel 0:22:10.280 --> 0:22:12.840 up there to see it rather than have it zapped 0:22:12.880 --> 0:22:16.119 the entire power grid, because, yeah, that it can cause 0:22:16.160 --> 0:22:20.400 electromagnetic interference, which is a major problem in today's technology. 0:22:20.640 --> 0:22:24.359 We didn't have orbital electronics back then, and we had 0:22:24.400 --> 0:22:26.439 I'm sure it would have been a really bad scene 0:22:26.480 --> 0:22:28.719 for them. One of the other things that that I 0:22:28.720 --> 0:22:32.280 think they say can sort of like pump the the 0:22:32.320 --> 0:22:35.560 ionosphere like like a solar storm, would also be a 0:22:35.680 --> 0:22:39.800 high altitude nuclear explosion. Sure, so if you had, like 0:22:39.840 --> 0:22:43.639 a somebody detonate a nuclear bomb way up high up 0:22:43.640 --> 0:22:46.040 off the surface of the Earth, it could set off 0:22:46.040 --> 0:22:48.320 this chain of reactions that could it could do the 0:22:48.359 --> 0:22:52.560 same thing. It could cause major atmospheric e m P. Yeah, 0:22:52.640 --> 0:22:55.280 lots of charge particles bouncing around that would interfere with 0:22:55.280 --> 0:22:58.760 electronics and potentially damage satellites that we depend on for 0:22:58.800 --> 0:23:01.320