Did the nuclear bomb just explode? Australian scientists believe they can distinguish between weapons tests and earthquakes

A group of geologists in Canberra have developed a way to detect secret underground nuclear tests.

Countries have been testing nuclear weapons below the surface since the 1960s, but while they avoid some of the risks of above-ground testing, they still release significant energy.

This can make it difficult to distinguish between nuclear explosions and earthquakes, which may exhibit similar seismic characteristics.

Typically, seismologists use two types of seismic energy generated by an earthquake or large explosion to distinguish between the two. Body waves propagate from the center of the event, while surface waves — those that cause buildings at ground level to shake and destroy — travel along the planet's surface.

Usually, the ratios between these waves are used to differentiate between an earthquake and an explosion.

“What the current method that has really worked is it looks at the amount of energy that is produced in body waves versus the amount that comes in surface waves,” says Mark Hoggard, an earth scientist at the Australian National University. .

But as Hoggard points out, this method was unable to detect a major nuclear test in 2017 when North Korea hid inside a mountain to detonate its nuclear weapon.

While technically underground, the detonation of a bomb inside a mountain actually occurred at a higher level than many of the valleys and depressions surrounding the area. As a result, the resulting wave ratios were more like a seismic event, and usual monitoring systems were unable to distinguish between the two.

Punggye-ni nuclear testing facility in North Korea. Credit: DigitalGlobe via Getty Images

To solve this problem, Hoggard and his colleagues turned to mathematics.

In collaboration with Janice Seeley, a statistician also at the Australian National University, and Brent Delbridge, a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, the group's new method is designed to evaluate the characteristic conditions for testing weapons against a natural earthquake.

They achieved this by relying on years of high-quality US nuclear testing and seismic data. Instead of wave ratios, they use moment tensors—calculations of ground deformation at the source of the event—to differentiate between an atomic bomb and the movement of tectonic plates.

“It's basically a mathematical description of what's happening at the exact moment this thing explodes; “What displacements are surrounding it,” Hoggard says.

Hoggard explains that an earthquake typically involves tectonic fault movements, where a nuclear detonation radiates energy from a single source point.

“We exploited these differences to create this technology,” Hoggard says.

Once the software was designed, the trio took data from North Korea's six most recent nuclear tests and ran it through their new method.

“It definitely comes out in explosions.”

Dr. Mark Hoggard. Credit: ANU, supplied

Published today in Geophysical Journal International, Hoggard says he has already been contacted by several parties looking to adopt the new technology.

It is also made available as open source data to parties looking to incorporate it into their monitoring methodology.

“Ideally, we would live in a world where there were no more nuclear weapons tests, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be happening. There are treaties in place that try to achieve this, but so far not everyone has agreed to them,” Hoggard says.

“So, I think having a well-funded health surveillance program, using as many different tools as possible, all these different technologies available, is key to ensuring that there is accountability if you're a government that is doing these things. Things in secret.”

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