Mass surveillance

Why Does DARPA Want To Turn Earth’s Atmosphere Into a Surveillance Sensor?

DARPA, the Pentagon’s pet research agency, says the Atmosphere as a Sensor (AtmoSense) program is meant to detect natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. But DARPA is a military research organization, which raises the question of what else this research can be used for.

The theory behind AtmoSense is that natural events occur that aren’t detected because there is no continuous global surveillance system to spot them. Nonetheless, the energy of an earthquake leaves telltale signs in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“It’s well known that energy propagates from the Earth’s surface to the ionosphere, but the specifics of how that happens is not currently known enough to use the atmosphere as a sensor,” according to a DARPA press release. “Scientific literature has clearly documented that events like thunderstorms, tornadoes, volcanos, and tsunamis make big ‘three-dimensional wakes; that propagate to the upper reaches of the ionosphere and leave a mark there. Since that energy traverses several other layers of the atmosphere—the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere—on its way up to the ionosphere, the idea is to try and identify the disturbances the “wake” is making along its way to see if researchers can capture information to indicate what type of event caused it.