True Facts: Wisconsin was a giant tectonic radio antenna for the U.S. Navy
a downsized version of an insanely larger project the Navy considered in 1968.
In the 1960s, America’s Dairyland almost became one big, giant antenna for talking to the Navy's nuclear submarines. It was called Project Sanguine, and while the scientific reasoning was sound, it was just a wee bit impractical.
See, as the Cold War was heating up, the US Navy was looking for better ways communicate with deep sea nuclear and spy submarines. Aa you can probably guess, the radio waves that were used for communication at the time do not travel effectively through water. But in 1958, physicist Nicholas Christofilos came up with a solution. One antenna station, built from a network of 6,000 miles of cable, could generate low-frequency ELF waves to communicate with submarines anywhere on the planet. These cables would need to be buried six feet into solid bedrock to produce the signal, and after much consideration, Wisconsin was selected as the best candidate for the super-ultra-mega antenna. It would have covered 41% of the state.
In 1973, the Secretary of the Navy scrapped the project because it was just too extremely expensive. President Reagan would resurrect the project – dubbed Project ELF – in 1989 and antenna stations were built in northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper peninsula to attempt a smaller scale version of the idea. Despite being smaller than the proposed full-on, state-wide network of cables, it was still able to communicate with submarines in the Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, and theoretically anywhere else in the world. The program, despite its success, was shut down in 2004.
At the time, the US Navy proclaimed that there would be no safety or health risks to people living above the cable network. But I, for one, am I glad that submarine whispers aren’t passing beneath my feet.
Joseph Stromberg at Vox has done a great job making the science behind this bit of arcane history more user-friendly. You can read more about this unbelievable story here.
