Scientists Refute False Claims Blaming Alaska Facility for Colombia Earthquake

Social media claims alleging that a research facility in Alaska triggered a deadly 7.4 magnitude earthquake in western Colombia are false, according to seismologists and the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake, which struck on Monday, resulted entirely from natural geological processes deep beneath the Earth's crust.

The disaster has killed at least 270 people and caused widespread damage across Colombia's Pacific region, an area located along the seismically active "Ring of Fire." Search teams continue to look for people buried under rubble, with authorities warning that hundreds remain missing. Humanitarian aid from regional partners began arriving in the country on Wednesday.

Following the disaster, posts on social media falsely claimed that the earthquake was caused by the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), an Alaska-based program that studies the upper atmosphere.

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed that the tremor was primarily caused by natural strike-slip faulting, which occurs when two sections of the Earth's crust move horizontally past each other. The earthquake occurred at a depth of 110 kilometres.

Suzan Van der Lee, a seismologist and professor at Northwestern University, stated that no human activity caused the earthquake. While shallow industrial activities such as gas extraction or wastewater injection can trigger small-to-moderate tremors, Van der Lee noted that the Colombia earthquake occurred at least 10 times deeper than any human-caused event.

Dean Whitman, a geophysicist at Florida International University, confirmed there is zero physical basis for radio-frequency transmissions having any effect on earthquakes. Whitman explained that the energy released by the earthquake was millions of times larger than the energy produced by HAARP, noting also that HAARP's equipment points upward into the atmosphere rather than into geological fault zones.

HAARP has been operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks since 2015 on land owned by the U.S. military. Researchers use the facility's high-frequency transmitters to study physical processes in the thermosphere and ionosphere.