Amid the swirling rumors about the U.S. government controlling the weather, a familiar sight popped up in one that claims an Alaska space lab had “activated” a site in South Florida.
Accompanied by ominous music, the post that appeared on TikTok and X the weekend before Hurricane Milton struck shows a map of the Florida Keys. It then zooms to an underwater photograph of divers working on the seafloor, surrounded by blocks of concrete and PVC pipe, in a coral nursery.
"HAARP is positioned perfectly right around Florida," the post reads, referring to the Alaska lab.
By Monday, the posts had been viewed more than 3 million times.
“This certainly falls into the ever-growing category of things I never thought I'd have to talk about as a marine biologist,” said Kevin Macaulay, who manages the underwater coral nursery off Tavernier shown in the posts and operated by the non profit Reef Renewal USA.
The photographs were taken several years ago by an Australian nonprofit that produces educational projects, according to Macaulay. Such nurseries, located in the Keys and off Miami-Dade for years, have become a familiar sight as coral struggling to survive on reefs has drawn more attention.
READ MORE: How FEMA tries to combat rumors and conspiracy theories about Milton and Helene
When an ocean heat wave hit last summer, the nurseries repeatedly made headlines as scientists and volunteers raced to retrieve bleaching coral and stash them in tanks to prevent them from dying.
The nursery is not in any way affiliated with the University of Alaska lab, Macaulay said. Until 2015, the lab was run by the U.S. Air Force when it was transferred to the university to continue research on the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The facility has been targeted by conspiracy theorists Lara Loomer and Alex Jones, among others, who falsely claim that weather events — like hurricanes and snowstorms — can be controlled by scientists and have been weaponized by the government.
The photograph included in the posts shows structures used to hold pieces of growing coral before being outplanted on reefs. At the time, scientists focused on growing staghorn and elkhorn hit hardest by disease and warming oceans.
“In particular, there were some empty structures in the photo that they seemed to really have focused in on being antennas,” Macaulay said. “So those are just empty pieces of PVC is all it is.”
They were, in fact, structures specifically designed to capture egg and sperm when coral spawn in summer months. With last summer's heat wave, the lab has since switched most growing efforts to onshore labs where temperature and diseases can be controlled. Reef Restoration is also focusing on growing reef-building boulder coral rather than branching staghorn and elkhorn coral that grow at the top of the reef, Macaulay said, because temperatures are now too hot in the Keys for many to survive.
“If any of us could control the weather, I think we would certainly be trying to make it cooler, not warmer,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the direction we would take if we could do that.”
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