Turkey denies US Navy and HAARP system involvement in Istanbul earthquake

Turkish authorities strongly refuted rumors about man-made causes of the earthquake in the Sea of Marmara, reports TUT.AZ.

The Center for Combating Disinformation under the Turkish Presidential Administration issued an official statement in response to the mass spread of conspiracy theories supported by photographic evidence on social media.

"Claims spread by some social media accounts that the Istanbul earthquake could have been caused by drilling the fault line at the location where the GPS Saturn drilling platform was anchored are not true. It has been established that the images used to support these claims were taken during the passage through the Bosphorus Strait in December 2018 of this drilling platform, which Rönesans Endüstri Tesisleri company planned to use in a natural gas storage project," the center's statement says.

It is also noted that GPS Saturn "did not conduct any drilling operations in the Sea of Marmara in the area where the earthquake occurred," "currently it [the platform] has been anchored in the Black Sea waters near Bulgaria for 340 days." Claims that "the Istanbul earthquake was provoked by some vessel are the result of a disinformation campaign lacking scientific argumentation," the center stated.

Regarding claims that "an American ship caused the earthquake in Istanbul" or that the HAARP system contributed to it, the center also indicated that they are unfounded. "The photos presented [on social media] show the USS Nitze, an Arleigh Burke-class ship of the US Navy. They were taken in 2023. The mentioned ship has not recently carried out any activities in our seas.

There is also no scientific basis for claims that an earthquake can be caused by a ship or the HAARP system," the statement indicates.

The center explained that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program HAARP is "a research program created to study the ionosphere using high-frequency radio waves." "Current scientific data and the general opinion of the scientific community are such that a ship or HAARP system is not capable of generating enough energy to cause earthquakes," the center noted.