快猫短视频

25 years ago, 快猫短视频 was pondering an accidental cold-war ecological experiment

IT WASN鈥橳 anyone鈥檚 intention, but it happened all the same. 鈥淭rees growing close to a giant communications antenna in Michigan have put on an unusual spurt of growth since the Navy moved into the forest eight years ago,鈥� we reported in our 14 January 1995 issue. The culprit, forestry researchers thought, was the electromagnetic field around a military communications antenna buried there.

Quite the antenna it was too, at 90 kilometres long. Yet incredibly, Project ELF 鈥� named by the US Navy after the extremely low-frequency radio waves it was to use 鈥� was a masterpiece of miniaturisation. The original proposal from which Project ELF emerged, Project Sanguine, would have needed a grid of live cables to be buried beneath 40 per cent of the state of Wisconsin.

The idea was to communicate with submerged nuclear submarines. Radio waves spread out as they travel, ultimately rendering the information they carry unreadable. The lower a wave鈥檚 frequency, the less this dispersion occurs, allowing information to be carried further. Penetrating as far as distant oceans, however, required waves tens of thousands of kilometres in wavelength 鈥� and appropriately scaled-up antennas.

Project ELF became fully operational in 1989 and began subtly influencing the surrounding forest. While northern red oaks and paper birches seemed unaffected, 鈥渞ed pines near the antenna grew taller than red pines at the distant site, while aspen and red maple grew thicker than their counterparts further off,鈥� we wrote.

It is one example pointing to the effectiveness of 鈥渆lectroculture鈥�, the use of electrical fields to promote growth. Others have come to light over the decades. Between 1915 and 1920, for example, plant physiologist Vernon Blackman charged wires to between 40 and 80 kilovolts for 6 hours each day above test plots of oats, barley, winter-sown wheat and clover-hay mixtures in three different areas of Britain. Of his 18 field trials, 14 showed increased yields.

Such achievements have proved inconsistent and hard to reproduce 鈥� although last August we reported the first concerted commercial roll-out of the technology, -chinas-attempt-to-boost-crop-yields-with-electric-fields/in China. The forests of Michigan, meanwhile, have long since ceased to be an unintentional test bed. Declaring it obsolete, the US Navy called time on Project ELF in 2004.