Earthquake or secret nuclear explosion? A new tool reveals the truth with up to 99% accuracy: ScienceAlert

Since the first detonation of an atomic bomb in 1945, eight countries have conducted more than 2,000 nuclear weapons tests: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

Groups like the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization are constantly searching for new tests.

However, for safety and confidentiality reasons, modern nuclear testing is conducted underground, making it difficult to detect. Often, the only indication of their occurrence is from the seismic waves they generate.

In research published in Geophysical Journal International, my colleagues and I developed a method to distinguish between underground nuclear tests and natural earthquakes with about 99 percent accuracy.

He falls

The invention of nuclear weapons sparked an international arms race, with the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France developing and testing increasingly larger and more advanced devices in an attempt to keep up with the United States.

Many early tests caused serious environmental and societal damage. For example, the Castle Bravo test conducted secretly by the United States in 1954 on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands delivered large quantities of radioactive dust to several nearby islands and their inhabitants.

Between 1952 and 1957, the United Kingdom conducted several tests in Australia, sprinkling long-lived radioactive material over large areas of the South Australian bush, with devastating consequences for local Aboriginal communities.

In 1963, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed to conduct future tests underground to limit the fallout. However, testing continued unabated, with China, India, Pakistan and North Korea also entering the fray over the following decades.

How to discover the atomic bomb

During this period there were major international efforts to figure out how to monitor nuclear testing. The competitive nature of weapons development means that much research and testing is done in secret.

Today, groups such as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization operate global networks of tools specifically designed to identify potential tests. These include:

Air testing stations to detect minute amounts of radioactive elements in the atmosphere, aquatic listening centers to hear underwater tests, ultrasonic detectors to pick up low-frequency booms and the roar of explosions in the atmosphere, seismographs to record ground shaking caused by underground tests. Needle in a haystack

Seismometers are designed to measure seismic waves: small vibrations of the Earth's surface that are generated when large amounts of energy are suddenly released underground, such as during earthquakes or nuclear explosions.

There are two main types of seismic waves. First, body waves, which travel outward in all directions, including deep into the Earth, before returning to the surface. The second is surface waves, which travel along the Earth's surface like ripples spreading across a pond.

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The difficulty of using seismic waves to monitor underground nuclear testing is distinguishing between explosions and naturally occurring earthquakes. The primary goal of monitoring is to never miss an explosion, but there are thousands of large natural earthquakes around the world every day.

As a result, observing underground tests is like searching for a potentially non-existent needle in an Earth-sized haystack.

Nuclear weapons versus earthquakes

Many different approaches have been developed to aid this research over the past 60 years.

Some of the simplest of these procedures involve analyzing the location or depth of the source. If an event occurs far away from volcanoes and tectonic plate boundaries, it may be considered more suspicious. Alternatively, if it occurred at a depth greater than, say, three kilometres, it would be unlikely to constitute a nuclear test.

However, these simple methods are not foolproof. Tests can be carried out in earthquake-prone areas for camouflage, for example, and surface earthquakes are also possible.

A more sophisticated observational method involves calculating the ratio of the amount of energy transmitted in body waves to the amount transmitted in surface waves. Earthquakes tend to expend more of their energy in surface waves than in explosions.

This method has proven highly effective in identifying underground nuclear tests, but it is also imperfect. It failed to effectively classify North Korea's 2017 nuclear test, which generated large surface waves because it was conducted inside a tunnel in the mountain.

This result underscores the importance of using multiple independent discrimination techniques during monitoring – a single method is unlikely to prove reliable for all events.

Alternative method

In 2023, I and my colleagues from the Australian National University and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States will come together to re-examine the problem of identifying the source of seismic waves.

We used a recently developed approach to model how rocks are displaced at the source of a seismic event, and combined it with a more advanced statistical model to describe different types of events. As a result, we were able to take advantage of fundamental differences between the sources of explosions and earthquakes to develop an improved method for classifying these events.

We tested our approach on known explosion and earthquake catalogs from the western United States and found that the method succeeds in achieving the goal in about 99% of the cases. This makes it a useful new tool in efforts to monitor underground nuclear testing.

Robust techniques for identifying nuclear tests will remain a key component of global monitoring programmes. They are necessary to ensure that governments are held accountable for the environmental and societal impacts of nuclear weapons testing.

Mark Hoggard, DECRA Research Fellow, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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