Six Indonesian volcanoes erupted within 24 hours on August 31, 2026, it was easy to see why people started asking questions.
Were the eruptions connected? Could one volcano have triggered another?
But there is another claim that often appears whenever unusual geological events happen: what if humans caused them?
One name that regularly appears in these claims is HAARP, a U.S. research facility in Alaska that conspiracy theories have linked to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.
So, can humans actually do something like that?
First, What Is HAARP?
HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
According to the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), HAARP is a research facility that studies the ionosphere, a region of Earth's upper atmosphere that begins roughly 60 to 80 kilometers above the surface.
The program's goal is observational, to understand how this layer behaves and affects things like long range radio communication and navigation systems, both for scientific and military interest, not to manipulate anything happening underground.
Its main instrument is a powerful array of high frequency radio antennas. At full capacity, the system can transmit about 3.6 megawatts of radio frequency power into the ionosphere.
That sounds sophisticated, and it is. But what matters is where that energy goes and what it interacts with.
HAARP's radio waves are used to heat small regions of the ionosphere and create controlled disturbances that scientists can measure. The ionosphere directly affects things people rely on daily, like GPS accuracy, satellite communication, and long distance radio signals used in aviation and shipping.
Understanding how it behaves helps predict and prevent disruptions to those systems. It is essentially studying the upper atmosphere.
So here's the question:
how does a device built to point up at the sky get blamed for something happening dozens of kilometers underground?
A Claim With No Mechanism Behind It
Every time a major eruption or earthquake hits, HAARP's name resurfaces online.
The pattern has repeated after the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes, the 2024 Vanuatu earthquake, and recent 2026 quakes in Venezuela and Colombia, where posts blamed the facility despite officials attributing the damage to ordinary tectonic plate movement.
The six Indonesian eruptions were quickly folded into the same narrative, even though PVMBG had already ruled out a shared trigger between the volcanoes themselves.
Read here to learn more: Six Indonesian Volcanoes Erupted in 24 Hours. Did They Trigger Each Other?
But the claim runs into a wall that has nothing to do with volcanology.
A Harvard applied physics professor, David Keith, put it bluntly when addressing similar claims after the February 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake.
Speaking to AFP for a March 2023 fact check examining claims that HAARP had caused the earthquake, Keith said: “There is simply no known mechanism for anything remotely like HAARP to have any impact on earthquakes.”
Robert McCoy, then director of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has made a similar point. In comments to Science Feedback while addressing claims that HAARP could cause natural disasters.
McCoy explained that HAARP's transmissions produce only small effects in the ionosphere that last a few seconds. He also said the facility operates for only a few hours each year and cannot affect natural phenomena such as earthquakes or snowstorms.
One fact checking note lays out the physical limit precisely. HAARP's radio waves can penetrate less than one centimeter into the ground, far shallower than the depth where earthquakes and magma movement actually occur.
A Volcano Is Not a Radio Controlled System
A volcanic eruption happens when processes inside Earth allow magma and volcanic gases to move toward the surface.
Pressure can build inside a magma reservoir. Magma can rise through cracks and conduits. Changes in the surrounding crust can also affect a volcano that is already close to an eruptive threshold.
None of this happens in the ionosphere.
The distance alone is a major clue, HAARP operates tens to hundreds of kilometers above Earth’s surface, while volcanic magma systems are underground.
There is also no established physical mechanism showing that HAARP’s radio transmissions could transfer enough energy into Earth’s crust to force a volcano to erupt.
The proposed mechanism itself doesn’t fit how the technology or volcanoes work. There's no giant elevator shaft running from an antenna in Alaska straight down to a magma chamber, ready for someone to switch on during a boring monday.
What About the Indian Ocean Tsunami?
The HAARP claim also appears in conspiracy theories about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
But the event has an extremely well understood geological cause, the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake.
The earthquake occurred along the Sunda subduction zone, where one tectonic plate is forced beneath another. The enormous movement of the seafloor displaced the water above it, producing the tsunami.
A single tectonic plate involved in that kind of shift weighs something like several billion-trillion tons. No amount of "super hydraulic pressure" from human made technology is going to budge a slab that size, the math simply doesn't check out.
There is no need for an artificial energy source to explain it.
The same principle applies to other tsunamis, scientists can identify their physical sources such as earthquakes, submarine landslides or volcanic collapse and then model how those events displaced seawater.
So Could Humans Ever Cause a Natural Disaster?
Humans can influence Earth’s geological systems in limited circumstances. Activities such as fluid injection, mining and reservoir construction have been linked to induced earthquakes.
But that is very different from having a machine that can remotely choose a volcano and make it erupt or generate a massive tectonic earthquake and tsunami on demand.
In that sense, the HAARP theory sits in the same family as flat earth claims or the idea that no human has ever actually left the planet, let alone walked on the moon.
The scientific evidence for all three is well documented and independently verifiable, and none of it serves any strategic interest that would justify faking it on this scale.
