Geophysical weapon is a conditional term adopted in a number of foreign countries, denoting a set of various means that make it possible to use the destructive forces of inanimate nature for military purposes by artificially induced changes in the physical properties and processes occurring in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere of the Earth. The destructive potential of many natural processes is based on their enormous energy content. So, for example, the energy released by one hurricane is equivalent to the energy of several thousand nuclear bombs.

Possible methods of active influence on geophysical processes include the creation of artificial earthquakes in seismically hazardous areas, powerful tidal waves such as tsunamis on the coast of the seas and oceans, hurricanes, fire storms, mountain landslides, snow avalanches, landslides, mudflows, etc.

Influencing the processes in the lower layers of the atmosphere, they achieve the induction of heavy precipitation (showers, hail, fog). By creating congestion on rivers and canals, it is possible to cause floods, floods, disrupt navigation, disable irrigation and other hydraulic structures.

In the US and other NATO countries, attempts are also being made to study the possibility of influencing the ionosphere by causing artificial magnetic storms and auroras that disrupt radio communications and prevent radar observations over a wide area. The possibility of a large-scale change in the temperature regime is being studied by spraying substances that absorb solar radiation, reducing the amount of rainfall, calculated on unfavorable weather changes for the enemy (for example, drought). The destruction of the ozone layer in the atmosphere can presumably make it possible to send destructive cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet radiation.

To influence natural processes, various means can be used, including chemicals (silver iodide, solid carbon dioxide, urea, coal dust, bromine, fluorine compounds, and others), it is also possible to use powerful generators of electromagnetic radiation, heat generators and other technical devices .

At the same time, the most effective and promising means of influencing geophysical processes is nuclear weapons, the use of which for this purpose can most reliably ensure the expected effects. Therefore, the term "geophysical weapon" reflects, in essence, one of the combat properties of nuclear weapons - to influence geophysical processes in the direction of initiating their dangerous consequences for the troops and the population. In other words, the damaging (destructive) factors of geophysical weapons are natural phenomena, and the role of their purposeful initiation is performed mainly by nuclear weapons.

As for many other geophysical means that cause precipitation, fog, melting glaciers, etc. phenomena, they are mainly aimed at creating obstacles and difficulties for the actions of troops that do not directly lead to their defeat, and cannot be classified as " weapons."

In general, the appearance of geophysical weapons is a new and extremely dangerous direction in the development of weapons of mass destruction and methods of their use.

The secret weapon of intimidating power has been talked about even now, after a powerful earthquake in Japan, where more than 27,000 people died or went missing. Russia is suspected of this attack: after all, relations between Moscow and Tokyo have recently become complicated.

The possibility of the existence of such a tectonic weapon was commented on by the head of the laboratory of pulsed energy in geophysics of the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Novikov to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

All these rumors were not born out of nowhere, - V. Novikov noted, adding that back in the 1990s, Russian scientists really tested installations that could affect the earth's crust at geophysical test sites in the Pamirs and the Northern Tien Shan. Meanwhile, the expert assured that this was done not to shake the bowels, but, on the contrary, to extinguish the slightest tremors. These tests were not secret at all, he stressed.

The installation was called intricately - a pulsed magnetohydrodynamic generator, abbreviated as an MHD generator, - V. Novikov said, noting that it was developed in the 1970-1980s by scientists from institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

According to V. Novikov, the generator was installed on the machine, moved to any point and generated electrical energy in the right place in a pulsed mode. The current was fed into the earth's crust and changed its state, - the specialist explained.

As a result of the tests, scientists found that during the experiments, the number of strong earthquakes near the MHD generator decreased, while the number of weak ones, on the contrary, increased.

This happened because the impulses of the MHD generator were a kind of trigger, leading to the emergence of a large number of weak, non-dangerous seismic shocks, V. Novikov explained. The expert stressed that there are still no analogues of this machine in the world. American scientists tried to repeat and create an analogue, but they did not succeed.

Meanwhile, the specialist noted that the generator created by Russian scientists was not a weapon at all. What is a weapon? It is a means of striking with the required force at the right time and in the right place. And from the point of view of tectonic weapons, it is impossible to cause an earthquake just from scratch, - the expert assured. This is colossal energy, which is commensurate with the explosion of several nuclear warheads. It is possible to cause an earthquake only where it is prepared by nature. And these are already restrictions both in place and in time. As for the strength of the impact, it is also impossible to quietly cause an earthquake, the expert believes.

If you want to shake another country thousands of kilometers away, it is not enough for you to know the dangerous place of a tectonic fault, you also need to make a rather powerful impact on it. Therefore, talk about some kind of seismic weapon is speculation, V. Novikov assured.

Tectonic weapons: bombardment from the bowels of the Earth

Given the rapid pace of scientific and technological progress, there is nothing surprising in the emergence of ideas about new, more effective and large-scale types of weapons. One of the proposed means of warfare in the near future is tectonic weapons capable of provoking devastating earthquakes in seismically unstable parts of the world. Moreover, there is an opinion that tectonic weapons are not a matter of the future, but a fact of the present.

Does Russia have tectonic weapons?

At the end of the last century, there were rumors that Russia was testing a secret weapon that provoked earthquakes in certain places, the so-called climate weapon.

It has been cited as the cause of a number of earthquakes at the end of the century. After a powerful Japanese earthquake, they started talking about it again. In addition, relations between Russia and Japan have been complicated lately. Massive lamps do not reduce the wedge of the production of modern technologies, so what the hell is not joking, you can assume, even hypothetically, that tectonic weapons exist!

Head Laboratory of Problems of Geophysics JIHT RAS Viktor Novikov notes that the rumors did not arise from scratch. In the 1990s, installations capable of influencing the Earth's crust were tested in the Pamirs and Tien Shan. But not with a military purpose, but on the contrary, with the aim of extinguishing tremors. The tests were not secret.

The MHD generator on the machine moved to the right place and generated electrical pulsed energy supplied to the earth's crust and changing its state.

Tests have shown that the number of strong earthquakes near the generator decreases, while the number of weak ones, on the contrary, increases. The generator pulses were a "splitter" of strong earthquakes into a series of weaker ones. There are no analogues of such a generator in the world yet. The Americans tried to create an analogue, but they did not succeed. The MHD generator was not a weapon, since an earthquake cannot be caused from scratch. An earthquake can be caused only where it is provoked by nature itself or by inept economic and environmental actions of a person. It is also impossible to cause an earthquake imperceptibly.

In order to shake up some country located at a distance of thousands of kilometers, it is not enough to know the place of a dangerous tectonic fault, it is still necessary to make a powerful impact there. "All talk about seismic weapons is fiction," Viktor Novikov assured.

For a long time there are disputes about the fact that man has managed to unravel the mystery of the control of natural phenomena.

I want to first raise the topic of the Tunguska meteorite, which happened not so long ago. There is a hypothesis that Nikola Tesla was the culprit of such a terrible phenomenon, who at that time conducted experiments in this direction. According to the data after that, all installations were destroyed. The topic was raised only because such a weapon could escalate into an economic war.

Research groups were sent to study the Tunguska meteorite. According to them, this phenomenon was associated with colossal electric currents. The trunks of the trees were burned from the inside. The reason for this phenomenon is still considered a mystery, if this is the work of an ordinary person, then we can say the most terrible creation of God.

Sources: www.rbc.ru, goldnike-777.blogspot.ru, www.chuchotezvous.ru, info-kotlas.ru, ruforum.mt5.com

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Given the rapid pace of scientific and technological progress, there is nothing surprising in the emergence of ideas about new, more effective and large-scale types of weapons. One of the proposed means of warfare in the near future is tectonic weapons capable of provoking devastating earthquakes in seismically unstable parts of the world. Moreover, there is an opinion that tectonic weapons are not a matter of the future, but a fact of the present.

Is it possible to "shake" the Earth on demand

The theoretical foundations of the concept of tectonic weapons are interesting. At first glance, the idea looks simple and effective - using a powerful explosive charge (fortunately, there are plenty of nuclear warheads) to provoke a large-scale earthquake or in the region where there are natural conditions for this. An earthquake can also be directed against military facilities and manpower of the enemy. However, the most promising use of tectonic weapons is in terms of use against industrial infrastructure and economic facilities, which will significantly reduce the combat potential of the enemy.

But what looks good in theory often looks rather weak in practice. In the case of tectonic weapons, there are no real conditions for deliberately provoking earthquakes.

First of all, science still does not know exactly the causes and mechanism of seismic activity. It is clear that it is directly related to the movement of tectonic plates. - but what exactly happens directly during an earthquake is unclear. According to one version, the plates simply "rub" against each other; on the other, as a result of mutual pressure, one of the plates breaks.

In addition, a number of problems arise in the direct use of tectonic weapons. It is necessary to determine the zones of tectonic tension - this is real, but scientists cannot give guarantees in this matter. Then it is necessary to place the "detonator" at the required depth, which is also difficult, including because of the need to maintain the secrecy of the operation. Finally, even powerful nuclear charges in their potential cannot be compared with the energy of real earthquakes, that is, the problem of a "trigger" arises.

Attempts - were, successes - not noted

However, the conclusions about the absence of practical prerequisites for the existence of tectonic weapons does not mean the absence of such developments in the past or in the present. You can often hear that there is a tectonic weapon in the United States and even that the large-scale earthquakes of recent years in the Caribbean (for example, in Haiti in 2010) are nothing more than tests of this weapon. However, the US military considered such a weapon unlikely back in the late 1960s, after the joint Seal project with New Zealand. The project was to create a chain of interconnected powerful charges that would be located on the ocean floor and actuated simultaneously. Calculations and experiments have shown that such a weapon would ensure the occurrence of a tsunami 10-15 meters high.

But the practical creation and use of these weapons was ultimately assessed as inappropriate. To launch one tsunami, it would be necessary to place about two million explosive charges to a depth of hundreds and even thousands of meters, which were to be connected in a single circuit. In this case, the chain had to be located at a strictly defined distance from the coast, about 8 kilometers. So the Americans, although they understood the theoretical reality of such weapons, decided to abandon its embodiment, which is practically impossible in a real war.

The tectonic weapons of the USSR are being discussed much more actively. According to the version circulated in the media, during the arms race between the two superpowers, the Soviet leadership relied on tectonic weapons.

There is evidence that in the 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev himself took the initiative to create a tectonic weapon that could be used against the East Coast of the United States. . In the bowels of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, a possible model of such a weapon was even developed, but scientists recognized it as unpromising. The project was frozen until the second half of the 1980s, when the Mercury-18 program was allegedly launched. She had to achieve her goal on a new scientific and technical base and in new conditions. The nuclear arms race was deadlocked, there were too many atomic weapons and it was difficult to hide them from the enemy, so tectonic weapons were a good alternative. The project, which did not achieve practical results, was closed in 1990, but it is believed that Russian tectonic weapons based on Soviet developments exist and are even being tested. Thus, in the early 2000s, there were several statements from Georgia that the earthquakes in this country were caused by the testing of secret Russian weapons.

Alexander Babitsky

This book was written by dozens of authors who, in the media and online publications, seek to show that qualitatively new types of weapons have been created and really threaten humanity. Some of them, someone not devoid of humor, called "non-lethal". Sergey Ionin proposes a new term - "parallel weapons", that is, weapons that are not considered at international conferences and summits, are not recorded in documents on limiting various weapons, but these are weapons that, perhaps, will be more terrible than the existing ones.

The publication is of interest to the widest range of readers: the sharply posed by the author question - what and how will they kill us in the 21st century? - will not leave anyone indifferent.

TECTONIC WEAPON

Sections of this page:

TECTONIC WEAPON

Superbomb for Khrushchev

As part of the team of American physicists engaged in the implementation of the Manhattan Project, physicist Edward Teller, who moved to the United States in 1935 from Germany, worked in the laboratory of Robert Oppenheimer. In 1942, he began preliminary calculations to prove the reality of building a hydrogen bomb.

According to Teller's calculations, a hydrogen bomb of enormous power could be no larger than an atomic bomb. The explosive potential of a "super bomb" was cheaper than an atomic one for every kiloton of trinitrotolulu (TNT), that is, as cynical as it sounds, it took less money to destroy a large city with one hydrogen bomb than using several conventional atomic bombs. A hydrogen bomb is more environmentally friendly, since its explosion does not produce radioactive fission products that pollute the atmosphere during explosions of plutonium or uranium bombs.

The new line of research at Los Alamos had been known since the summer of 1946.

On January 31, 1950, President Truman made a public announcement that he had directed the Atomic Energy Commission to "develop all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen bomb, or 'superbomb'."

The first American hydrogen bomb was called the Ulam-Teller model. Preparations for testing not yet a bomb, but a special device, were carried out in great haste. In Los Alamos, a day off on Saturday was canceled for the sake of this (in the USSR, Saturday was then still a regular working day). The test was made on November 1, 1952 on a small atoll in the South Pacific. It passed successfully. The atoll was completely destroyed, and the resulting crater was a mile in diameter. Measurements showed that the force of the explosion was 1,000 times greater than the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

At the beginning of 1953, Stalin was informed that work on the creation of a hydrogen bomb, more powerful than an atomic bomb, was being completed in the USSR. However, Stalin did not live to see this bomb tested. It was produced on August 12, 1953. According to the American classification, this Soviet test was designated as "Joe-4", in honor of "Uncle Joe", as Stalin was called in the USA during the war.

After testing the first hydrogen bomb, Sakharov, Zel'dovich and other scientists began work on the creation of a more powerful two-stage hydrogen bomb. The bomb was tested on November 22, 1955. It was the first and last hydrogen bomb tested at the Semipalatinsk test site. For testing high-power hydrogen bombs, a new test site was equipped on Novaya Zemlya, far from villages and economic facilities.

On October 30, 1962, a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb with a capacity of 50 million tons of TNT was detonated in the area of ​​Mityushi Bay at an altitude of 4000 m above the land surface. However, perhaps more, the instruments that measured the power of the explosion went off scale.

The Soviet Union tested the most powerful thermonuclear device in history. Even in the “half” version (in general, the power of the bomb was 100 Mt, but they were afraid, too much ...) the energy of the explosion was ten times higher than the total power of all explosives used by all the warring parties during the Second World War (including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The shock wave from the explosion circled the globe three times, the first time in 36 hours and 27 minutes.

The light flash was so bright that, despite the continuous cloudiness, it was visible even from the command post in the village of Belushya Guba (almost 200 km away from the epicenter of the explosion). The mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 km. By the time of the explosion, while the bomb was slowly descending on a huge parachute from a height of 10,500 m to the estimated point of detonation, the Tu-95 carrier aircraft with the crew and its commander, Major Andrei Egorovich Durnovtsev, was already in the safe zone. The commander returned to his airfield as a lieutenant colonel, Hero of the Soviet Union. In an abandoned village located 400 km from the epicenter, wooden houses were destroyed, and stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors. As a result of the explosion, for many hundreds of kilometers from the test site, the conditions for the passage of radio waves changed for almost an hour and radio communications ceased.

The bomb was developed by V. B. Adamsky, Yu. N. Smirnov, A. D. Sakharov, Yu. N. Babaev and Yu. A. Trutnev (for which Sakharov was awarded the third medal of the Hero of Socialist Labor). The weight of the “device” was 26 tons, and a specially modified Tu-95 strategic bomber was used to transport and drop it. The “superbomb,” as A. Sakharov called it, did not fit in the aircraft’s bomb bay (its length was 8 m and its diameter was about 2 m), so the non-power part of the fuselage was cut out and a special lifting mechanism and a device for attaching the bomb were mounted; while in flight, it still sticks out more than half. The entire body of the aircraft, even the blades of its propellers, was covered with a special white paint that protects against a flash of light during an explosion.

The results of this explosion caused shock around the world. Moreover, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, a great champion of rocket technology, declared on every corner that the USSR could deliver such a bomb to any place at any time and hit it “in the window”.

An explosion force of 100 Mt will ensure the complete destruction of the adjacent territory at a distance of 35 km, serious damage - at a distance of 50 km, and third-degree burns at a distance of 77 km.

Such a weapon is capable of destroying an entire region - a metropolis with all its suburbs.

The maximum power of the bomb - 100 Mt - for the test was halved by replacing the uranium shell of the third stage of the charge with lead. This reduced the contribution of the uranium part from 51.5 to 1.5 Mt. However, the 50 Mt charge is still the highest ever produced and tested.

The explosion occurred at 11:32 Moscow time. The flash turned out to be so bright that it could be observed at a distance of up to 1000 km. Eyewitnesses described it as the brightest and at a distance of 300 kilometers; much later they heard a distant and powerful roar.

The light of the flash came from a huge fireball, despite its considerable height, 4 km, which reached the ground and continued to grow to a size of about 10 km in diameter. In its place, an orange ball of hot gases appeared, swallowing up tens of kilometers of space. A giant mushroom rose to a height of 65 km. After the explosion, due to the ionization of the atmosphere, radio communication with Novaya Zemlya was interrupted for 40 minutes.

If the bomb had been tested with a nominal charge of 100 Mt, it would have resulted in massive radioactive contamination of the area, increasing the global radiation release at that time by 25%. However, even despite the explosion of the “clean” version, where 97% of the energy was released due to thermonuclear reactions, the test caused an unprecedented release of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Further development, modernization and production of the bomb was not carried out.

It was obvious that such a fantastically powerful bomb could not be used pointwise against military targets. It is a means of total war of annihilation, a weapon of genocide. Perhaps it was this explosion that led to the understanding in political and military circles of the senselessness of a further nuclear race.

Strongele tragedy

... But a loophole was found in order to circumvent all international agreements and use nuclear bombs of the highest power. This work is just for the "Khrushchev bomb". But let's start with a long history.

The Cyclades is located in the Aegean Sea. A special place among them is occupied by Santorin, in Russian - St. Irina. Volcanic activity began here about 100 thousand years ago. Volcanic masses rose above the surface of the sea and formed a purely volcanic island, which eventually connected with a rocky island that was here before the eruption. The new island had an almost perfect circle shape, hence its original name, Strongele, was born. So how could Santorini be of interest to the inventors of nuclear weapons and the owners of various nuclear briefcases and red buttons?

Approximately 25 thousand years ago, gases and molten lava accumulated in the vent of a volcano almost at the very earth's surface. When the pressure of the gases exceeded the strength of the rocks, there was a terrible explosion. The volcano split, and huge masses of vapor and gas escaped. They raised a huge amount of ash to a height of 30–40 km, and vast voids formed under the volcano. This, in turn, caused the collapse of the land adjacent to the volcano and the formation of a large caldera, the “boiler”.

Gradually, this funnel began to fill with hardened volcanic lava, small islands merged together, and so the large island of Thira (Santorini) was formed. Scientists suggest that the entire interior of the island was occupied by a volcanic cone, and about 3500 years ago a new catastrophic eruption of the volcano occurred here.

The awakened volcanoes at first did not promise anything terrible to the inhabitants of the island, because the intensity of the eruption increased gradually. But then magma escaping from volcanoes filled the surface of the island, in the middle of it a failure formed, where sea waters poured. However, having reached the bottom of the abyss, the stream rushed back and gave rise to tsunami waves of monstrous sizes - up to 100 m, which destroyed cities and villages on the islands and the mainland. At the same time, a huge amount of hot ash fell (its temperature reached 500 ° C), which scattered over an area of ​​​​about 200 thousand square kilometers.

During excavations off the coast of Santorini, a city destroyed by an earthquake was discovered. According to scientists, its area was 1.5 square kilometers. A lot for those years. There is a version that after the death of this city, the legend of the Great Flood appeared.

Nowadays, deposits of pumice thrown out during the eruption are found at a very considerable distance from Santorin - in Asia Minor, on Crete and other islands. The energy of the volcanic explosion, according to the calculations of the Greek scientist A. Galanopoulos, was 350 times higher than the energy of the explosion of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the power of which was 13 thousand tons of TNT. Agree, not so much compared to the most powerful "Khrushchev" thermonuclear bomb. Recall that its power was 100 Mt, it was tested in the "half" version - 50 Mt.

plate movement

According to the basic principles of tectonics, which combine knowledge of subcrustal currents and data on continental drift, the lithosphere (crust, solid shell of the Earth), underlain by a less viscous asthenosphere, is divided into a number of plates. Plate boundaries are zones of maximum tectonic, seismic and volcanic activity. Along these boundaries, horizontal displacements of the plates relative to each other occur.

Along the island arcs and the margins of the continents, plates of the oceanic crust submerge under the continental crust with the buildup of the latter under conditions of compression and release of heat, as well as volcanic products.

Changes in the form of occurrence, volume, internal structure and relative position of rock bodies under the influence of deep earth or OTHER forces generate conditions in the earth's crust of local directional or all-round tension, compression or shear.

There is a classification of these phenomena based on the study of layered rock masses. Thus, folding is the result of residual deformation of rocks when tectonic stresses exceed their elastic limit; ruptures occur due to the destruction of rocks when tectonic stresses exceed their tensile strength.

Platform - one of the main types of structural elements of the earth's crust (lithosphere); large (several thousand kilometers across), relatively stable blocks of crust of sustained thickness are characterized by a very low degree of seismicity, specific volcanic activity, and a poorly dissected topography of the earth's surface.

The time of formation of the folded basement of the platforms determines their geological age. There are ancient and young platforms. The ancients include: East European (Russian), Siberian, North American, Sino-Korean, South Chinese, Hindustan (or Indian), African, Australian and Antarctic. These platforms form the core of modern continents.

The young platforms include the flat territories of Western Siberia, Northern Kazakhstan, the Turan lowland, Ciscaucasia, Western Europe and others.

The largest structural elements of the platforms are shields and slabs. Periodic activation of tectonic movements leads to a partial transformation of the platforms. In this case, an intensive uplift of the platforms occurs and a secondary mountainous relief arises with large elevation fluctuations.

In the 60s of the 20th century, in connection with the widespread research on the bottom of the World Ocean, ideas about the global tectonics of the Earth were greatly developed. Within the oceans, analogues of the platforms of the continents were identified, although they differ sharply from them. This marked the beginning of the difference between the concepts of "continental (continental) platform" and "oceanic platform".

Scientists represent the outer shell of the Earth as consisting of more than 15 plates of the lithosphere (crust and upper mantle) about 60 km thick, moving relative to each other. On opposite edges of the plates, there are usually deep-sea trenches along the same island arc of the Pacific Plate. At these gutters, plates moving in opposite directions converge, and one of the plates goes under the other, sinking into the depths of our planet. In a subducting plate at many depths, the centers of earthquakes are located.

earthquakes

Earthquake sources occur at depths from five to six dozen to several hundred kilometers.

On average, about 10,000 people die from earthquakes every year.

A detailed list of earthquakes has come down to us from Ancient China, since the Shan Dynasty (more than 3,000 years ago). Lists compiled by Chinese scientists include more than 1,000 devastating earthquakes that occurred over a period of 2,750 years. European monuments of Mediterranean civilizations, Hebrew and Arabic texts contain references to earthquakes of very early times. The biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah can be explained geologically as follows: a violent earthquake that occurred along a rift that bounded the Dead Sea Rift Valley destroyed structures and released natural gas and bitumen, which ignited, leading to what is described in the Bible. the fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

The commonly used characteristic of the "strength" of an earthquake is the intensity ("intensity") of earthquakes. Intensity is a measure of damage to man-made structures, disturbances to the ground surface, and human response to shaking. It can be seen that earthquakes, like volcanoes and high mountain ranges, are not scattered over the Earth at random, but are mostly concentrated in narrow belts. Many earthquakes occur along mid-ocean ridges and do not pose a threat to humanity. For our topic, it is interesting that the greatest seismic activity is confined to the edges of tectonic plates, and, in particular, to the edges of the Pacific Plate, the inner regions of which are almost non-seismic.

The ancient Greeks considered it quite natural to associate volcanic eruptions with earthquakes in the Mediterranean. Over time, it turned out that most destructive earthquakes are actually not caused by volcanic activity, but are associated with deformation of the Earth's outermost shell, especially the earth's crust, which has a thickness of about 35 km in continental regions. Such earthquakes are called tectonic. They arise with the rapid release of the deformation energy accumulated in elastic rocks.

Tectonic earthquakes often occur in areas with large elevation differences of relatively "young" mountains, for example, in the Caucasus (remember the Spitak earthquake), in the Andes, the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas, and in the same way - along high underwater ridges in the oceans. In addition, as discussed above, earthquakes occur along deep ocean trenches that demarcate tectonic plates.

Strong earthquakes are quite rare. Of the catastrophic destructive forces, the most famous are: Lisbon (1755), California (1906), Taiwan (1923), Messina (1908), Gansu (1920), Tokyo (1923), Iranian (1935), Chilean (1939 and 1960), Agadir (1960), Mexican (1975). On the territory of the CIS countries, the most significant are the Ashgabat (1948), Tashkent (1966), Gazli (1976), Spitak (1986), Neftegorsk (1995) earthquakes.

The scale of destruction during major earthquakes is enormous.

During a catastrophic earthquake on December 4, 1957 in the Mongolian Altai, the Bogdo fault, about 270 km long, appeared, and the total length of the resulting faults reached 850 km.

Swords and plowshares

The use of the atom for peaceful purposes is not only obtaining relatively cheap electricity, but also engineering work, for which underground nuclear explosions are used. Thus, in the United States, a program aimed at making the energy of atomic explosions work for construction was part of the Plowshare project (plowshare, plowshare). According to this project, experimental explosions were carried out in the 60-70s of the 20th century in order to increase the production of natural gas by crushing gas-bearing layers. During an experiment conducted on September 10, 1969 in Colorado, an underground nuclear explosion with a capacity of 40 thousand tons was carried out at a depth of 2570 m. Layers of sandstones and shales were crushed. As a result, the pressure in the well increased by 6 times, additional volumes of gas were produced.

It is clear that the use of the energy of an atomic explosion for economic purposes is very, very tempting, but it should be noted that ground vibrations caused by an underground explosion can be strong enough to cause side effects in the tectonic life of the Earth. However, if this circumstance worried scientists, the public, then military specialists watched the experiments with hope, fixing the force of the explosion and its secondary consequences, an increase or even manifestation of seismic activity in areas where they had never heard of earthquakes ...

At the end of the day on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, at 17:36 local time, a strong earthquake broke out in a sparsely populated mountainous area surrounding the northern part of Prince William Bay (in the middle of the coast of South Alaska). The waves propagated from the source of the earthquake caused serious damage over an area of ​​more than 20 thousand square meters. km. In the zone of significant damage, Anchorage, located about 130 km from the center of the earthquake, was the largest affected city.

In a well-maintained suburb of Anchorage, in Turnagain Heights, on a high cliff overlooking Cook Inlet, was the home of the editor of the Anchorage Daily Times, Robert B. Atwood, who later described his feelings.

“I had just picked up the trumpet to begin my musical exercises when the earthquake began. It immediately became clear that this earthquake was serious: the chandelier made from the ship's steering wheel swung too much. Objects began to fall that had never fallen before. I rushed to the doors. On the path in front of the house, I turned around: my house was writhing and groaning. Tall trees were falling in the yard. I rushed to the place where I thought I would be safe, but when I got there, I saw that the ground was cracked. Pieces of earth of an incomprehensible shape, with torn edges, moved up and down, leaning at all sorts of angles. I tried to move to another place, but more and more cracks appeared everywhere. Suddenly my house moved away from me, and very quickly. I began to climb over the fence into the neighboring yard, when suddenly this fence fell into the ground. Trees fell in different directions, forming disorderly blockages. Deep cracks appeared. Flat blocks of earth rose to a great height and looked like ugly mushrooms with huge caps. Some of them bent at crazy angles. A new crack suddenly opened under me, I collapsed into it and immediately almost found myself buried alive. I barely managed to dodge pieces of wood falling on me, hedge poles, mailboxes and all sorts of other debris. Then my neighbor's house collapsed and also slid into this crevice. When the movement of the earth stopped, I climbed up and saw a strange angular landscape that surrounded me from all sides.

Earthquakes are terrible in their consequences. History contains many descriptions of large earthquakes that occurred near the coast and were accompanied by destructive sea waves that devastated entire cities. This happened during the famous Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755. Several high ocean waves hit the west coast of Portugal, Spain and Morocco; as a result, the death toll from the earthquake rose in Lisbon (its population was 235,000) to about 60,000. The height of the waves in Lisbon was, according to eyewitnesses, 5 m above the maximum tide level. Waves swept across the Atlantic Ocean, they were observed in Holland and England, in the Azores and in the West Indies. In the harbor of Kinedale (Ireland), four and a half hours after the earthquake, the water level rose rapidly, as a result of which the anchor chains of two ships stationed there broke.

This famous incident was remembered when on February 28, 1969, an 8-magnitude earthquake struck the eastern Atlantic. It probably had the same origin as in 1755. The hearth was located in the region of an underwater ridge near the coast of Portugal. Losses of life and property were reported from Spain, Portugal and Morocco, and again a tsunami occurred, but in this case it reached a height of only 1.2 m off the coast of Casablanca.

During the Alaska earthquake, geologist J. Williams was sitting on the couch in his living room. He later recalled: “At first we noticed that the house began to crack somehow loudly. The first fluctuations lasted, probably, five or ten seconds, and then, without any noticeable lull, strong lateral shocks began, as it seemed to me, from east to west.

A few seconds passed, the strong lateral roll continued, I grabbed my son and rushed to the door leading to the hall, left it open so that it would not jam, and stood in the aisle. I looked at the wall from the side of the hall and again from the side of the apartment. The concrete blocks of the interior walls could be seen rubbing against each other, and I noticed that some of the blocks had already spilled out onto the street and into the apartment and hall. I took my son and ran out to the parked car. I looked at the building: it swayed from east to west. Concrete blocks fell, the earth swelled; trees and poles swayed violently. Destruction was all over the house. Our apartment was among the least affected. The light couches did not move; the portable TV did not fall off its caster stand; the imprint of the child's hand, made in the plaster on the wall, remained intact. The stove in the kitchen did not move from its place, but the refrigerator moved away from the wall.

With a sudden vertical displacement of the ocean floor, the waters of the Gulf of Alaska surged sharply, and a giant sea wave, a tsunami, hit the central regions of the southern coast of Alaska, which then spread throughout the Pacific Ocean.

About 70 km from the center of the earthquake, waves devastated the harbor and coastal areas. In the very first seconds, when the shaking began, eyewitnesses realized that something terrible was happening at the pier. At first, everyone's attention was riveted on the Chyna steamer, about 120 m long. Like a cork, it jumped 6–9 m, then fell, hit the bottom, rushed forward, sank deep and again completely rose out of the water. Only by some miracle the ship survived. The people on it claimed that the list reached 50 °, and then the waves leveled the ship straight. The bow of the ship was raised so that it was clearly visible above the superstructures of the floating dock. Two people on the steamer were killed by falling cargo and another died of a heart attack.

The floating dock jerked sharply and split in half, and the warehouses and other deck superstructures located on it were thrown into the sea with one push. Men, women and children floundered helplessly around the dock, trying to grab hold of something. In a short time, a huge wave rolled into this place, breaking everything in its path: buildings were smashed to pieces, heavy trailers were scattered all over the coast, and cars and trucks turned into mangled heaps of metal. Some eyewitnesses claim that the height of the wave that hit the shore was about 9 m. All this happened in a matter of minutes. Approximately 10 minutes after the first wave subsided, another rolled in, bringing even greater destruction. Then there was a five- or six-hour lull when rescue teams were able to go in search of survivors. However, no one was found.

The quake killed 300 people in a low-density area: some were killed directly by the shaking, others were drowned by the tsunami. Severe shaking triggered numerous rock falls, snow avalanches and ground slides throughout central South Alaska. In unstable deposits, such processes as crushing, collapse of slopes, curvature and subsidence of the surface were widely manifested, and cracks and “pressure shafts” - hummocks appeared on the ice of lakes and rivers.

Huge sea tsunami waves, generated by the tectonic activity of the Earth, are a natural disaster that occurs when a sudden underwater displacement of tectonic plates (most often displacement along an underwater rupture) and generating a disturbance of huge masses of water in the seas and oceans. For example, movement along an underwater rupture was the cause of the tsunami that occurred during the Chilean earthquake of 1960, the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and also in the open ocean, tsunami waves are many times longer than all other sea waves, in which the distance between the crests is rarely greater. 100 m, while such a distance for tsunami waves sometimes exceeds 100 km. On the other hand, the height of the tsunami crest does not reach 1 m, and these waves cannot be detected in the open sea from a ship. Wave speed decreases with decreasing sea depth. When the tsunami reaches shallow water near islands or on the shelf, the speed decreases sharply. At the same time, the amplitude of the wave increases many times over, sometimes reaching up to 25 meters or more. The wave front is curved, as the wave moves more slowly in shallow water than in deep water. As a tsunami approaches, sea levels along the coast may initially drop noticeably.

During the recent Indonesian tsunami, in some places the water receded 2 km from the coast, and people, amazed by what they saw, rushed to stare at the unusual spectacle, instead of running to the mountains, and were covered by the first shaft. According to experts, the material damage from the earthquake in Alaska amounted to 310 million dollars. In connection with the destruction of harbors, docks, railway lines, bridges, highways, power plants and all kinds of buildings, great disturbances occurred in the work of industrial enterprises and in the life of the population of the state.

Alaska gives us good examples of tectonic danger, but for the developers of tectonic weapons, all of the above is just music. Well, you need to think about what can be created with one nuclear charge immersed in a well drilled at the bottom!

The birth of an idea

In Russia, tsunamis usually occur on the Pacific coast of Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands. However, small ones are sometimes noted in the Black and Caspian Seas, where earthquakes often occur.

I must say that volcanic eruptions are also the culprits of the tsunami. During the collapse of the Krakatoa caldera in 1883, the height of the sea waves that rolled onto the shores of Java and Sumatra and caused the death of about 30 thousand people was, according to stories, more than 30 m. The swell even reached the English Channel.

Island of Hawaii, April 1, 1946. The 1946 tsunami was the most destructive in Hawaiian history. More than 150 people died (mostly drowned), about 90 of them in Hilo, many more people were injured, and property damage amounted to $ 25 million.

The tsunami was the product of the Aleutian Trench, where a 7.5 magnitude earthquake caused the seafloor to shift. The earthquake occurred at 12 hours 29 minutes (GMT), its source was located 3500 km north of the Hawaiian Islands. The first time the ocean level began to rise at 06:45, the tsunami spread at a speed of approximately 780 km/h. The interval between the crests of the first and third waves was about 25 minutes. Then the waves came at shorter and not very regular intervals as a result of the overlap of different waves that went around the islands in different directions.

The height of the waves rolling on the Hawaiian coast varied greatly from place to place. In some areas, the water rose smoothly, and there the damage was mainly due to the abrupt retreat of the wave into the sea, but most often the waves hit the shore very violently, with a deafening roar, hiss and whistle. In places, the wave resembled a tidal plateau with a steep front and a flat crest behind it. The energy of the waves was enough to tear off pieces of coral reefs up to 1.3 m in size and throw them ashore at a height of 5 m above sea level. The reverse movement of water exposed a flat muddy bottom at a distance of 150 m from the normal coastline.

Eyewitnesses said that the first manifestation of the tsunami was the withdrawal of water from the coast (during the Indonesian tsunami, the water retreated to a distance of 2 km, which aroused the deadly interest of onlookers). Some waves passing through the reef strips were up to 6 m high; the sixth, seventh, and eighth waves were reported to be the highest at various locations.

The reefs protecting the northern coast of Oahu have reduced the intensity of the waves compared to the open northern shores of the islands of Molokai and Hawaii. There is much evidence that the height of the waves increased at the far, inner end of the V-shaped bay; this has been seen before in Japan and elsewhere. In several small, sharply curving bays, it was later found that the water rose higher along the axis of the valley than on the coast at the mouth of the bay.

Houses, highways and railways, bridges, moorings, breakwaters, walls of fish ponds, ships were damaged; in many parts of the coast, wooden houses were damaged: most often they fell apart under the impact of the waves, and sometimes due to the destruction of the foundations. Some well-built houses, which had strong internal connections, were moved a considerable distance without noticeable damage (as happens with earthquakes). Railroads along the north coast in the Hilo region and on Oahu were out of service, mainly as a result of roadbed failure and shifting of the rails. Several road and rail bridges were destroyed, most of which were raised from their supports and found themselves afloat.

The destruction was also associated with the erosion of sandy beaches (both above and below normal sea level); The flooding severely damaged even the interior of the houses.

Chilean tsunami May 22, 1960. The earthquake and tsunami were the result of movement along the regional thrust plane passing under the Andes and crossing the ocean floor in the region of Central Chile under the South American (Chilean) Trench. The tsunami wave spread across the Pacific Ocean, crossed it and hit the coast of Japan approximately 22 hours after the earthquake, causing significant damage in many places.

During this earthquake, over a huge area, changes in height occurred that captured the coast of Chile, an uplift of 1–2 m was observed, while in the center of the earthquake there was a subsidence of about 2 m. The tsunami hit this coast 15 minutes after the earthquake in three waves that caused great damage, causing floods. More than 900 people died, 834 people went missing. When the tsunami reached the coast of Japan, it caused a lot of damage there: about 120 people were killed, thousands of houses were washed into the sea, many hundreds of ships were wrecked or sunk.

During the Indonesian tsunami on December 26, 2004, the number of victims was more than 300 thousand people, not to mention the destruction of villages, the death of ships, etc. Why not the consequences of a nuclear explosion? Even more effective: no radiation, no residual radiation. In the "dry residue", in the literal and figurative sense, the territory cleared for further use, but by other, more worthy people.

Back in 1906, the American seismologist W. Wright, who analyzed the causes of the strongest California earthquake of those years, pointed out the possibility of an artificial earthquake. The model he created was called elastic recoil and can be easily reproduced on an ordinary table using the simplest devices. Take a not very strong spring and a wooden block. Connect them to each other and slowly pull the end of the spring. At first, it will stretch, and the bar will remain at rest. But as soon as the tension force of the spring exceeds the frictional force of the rest of the bar on the surface of the table, the bar will move abruptly. Moreover, the magnitude of the applied force can be significantly reduced if the bar is placed on a slippery or wet tabletop. “About this,” Wright concluded, “and one of the plates of the mountain range, located under California, began to move.” Wright's idea is so simple that no one believed it at first. However, in connection with the filling of artificial reservoirs, the term "induced seismicity" appeared. A classic example - the construction of a dam and the filling of a reservoir near the city of Koina in India, provoked a six-magnitude earthquake in a completely calm, non-seismic area. Then dams began to be erected in many areas, and an increase in weak and medium seismicity was noticed there. True, there were no very strong earthquakes and catastrophes.

The strongest earthquake in Gazli, which occurred in April-May 1976, according to some experts, was caused by experiments to intensify the production of gas condensate, as well as explosions at the nearby Semipalatinsk nuclear test site.

Moreover, some minds have seen the relationship between such events. On June 28, 1992, a strong earthquake occurred 150 km from Los Angeles. Just five days before, at the Nevada test site, the earth shook from a nuclear charge detonated in a mine. Exactly the same period of five days separates an underground nuclear explosion on one of the islands of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean from a devastating catastrophe in the Armenian city of Spitak. Coincidences? Or, perhaps, there is a direct relationship between natural and artificial processes in the bowels of the planet?.. So, in essence, the first steps were taken not only to create, but also to test tectonic weapons ... And here is a recent newspaper report: the Tomsk branch of the Federal Service on Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks issued a patent for tectonic weapons to Irkutsk scientists. According to the Regional Information Center of Irkutsk, after a two-year wait, scientists from the laboratory of seismogeology of the Irkutsk Institute of the Earth’s Crust of the Academy of Sciences received confirmation that their patent for the invention “Method for controlling the displacement regime in fragments of seismically active tectonic faults” has been registered and officially entered into force. For the first time in the world, scientists have received a unique patent for what is called tectonic weapons abroad.

That is, this is not a simple nuclear explosion at a certain depth with the aim of causing an earthquake in no one knows where, but a controlled, predictable explosion. It was not for nothing that the opinions of various experts immediately appeared that the explosion off the coast of California (why California? Maybe because Hollywood is there?), - and so, this explosion cannot be carried out there, you see, shallow water, underwater a boat with a nuclear charge will not be able to approach unnoticed. Well, firstly, that the strategists are in shallow water ... And secondly, the earthquake may have been provoked far from our home port of Ross, and such a growing tsunami will come in shallow water that it will not seem enough.

And, by the way, one of the projects for the use of nuclear weapons during the war with Japan was the American plan to artificially induce an earthquake in the Sea of ​​Japan, which provides for the destruction of the main industrial centers on the Pacific coast of Japan by detonating nuclear charges along the line of tectonic shifts.

So, despite restrictions, reductions, etc., nuclear weapons, like a genie from a bottle, again appear to us, only in a different guise.

Or similar phenomena in certain areas by influencing natural geological processes. The term "tectonic weapon" was defined in 1992 by A. V. Nikolaev, Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who defined it as something capable of causing a destructive earthquake using the accumulated tectonic energy of the bowels. At the same time, he noted that "setting yourself as a goal to cause an earthquake is an extremely dubious undertaking."

Messages

Roger Clark, Lecturer in Geophysics at the University of Leeds in a 1996 publication in the journal Nature, evaluating newspaper reports of two secret Soviet programs "Mercury" and "Volcano" aimed at developing a tectonic weapon capable of generating long-range earthquakes using electromagnetic radiation. stated that he does not consider this impossible or wrong, however, given past experience, the creation of such devices is extremely unlikely. According to a publication in Nature, these programs have been unofficially known to Western geophysicists for several years: the Mercury program was launched in 1987; three tests were carried out in Kyrgyzstan, and the last test of the Vulcan took place in 1992.

Attempts to create tectonic weapons were made in New Zealand during the Second World War. The Seal project was aimed at creating a tsunami, which was supposed to be used to hit enemy targets. Despite the failure of the project, in 1999 experts noted that the creation of such weapons is possible.

International Treaties

The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Influencers, adopted by the UN in 1978, ratified by 75 countries and signed by 17 more, prohibits the use of environmental means that cause earthquakes and tsunamis.

Speculation and conspiracy theories

The ability to cause earthquakes or similar effects is attributed to the Tesla vibrator, a small mechanical device. However, it was not possible to reproduce the action of such a device. The TV program The MythBusters attempted to build a machine that worked on the same principle; she was able to make a large bridge vibrate, but the strength of such vibrations was incomparable to an earthquake.

After devastating earthquakes, conspiracy theories appear, usually associated with the armed forces of the United States or the former USSR, the main position of which is the artificial nature of the earthquake associated with the use of tectonic weapons. Similar reports, for example, appeared in the press in connection with the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

see also

Notes


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