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The US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have performed over 2,000 nuke tests ever since the first one detonated in 1945. Nowadays, groups like the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization are always watching for tests. But detecting them isn’t very easy because they occur underground for safety and secrecy purposes. These explosions create seismic waves, which indicate they’ve detonated. Australian National University and Los Angeles National Laboratory researchers devised a method to determine if those waves are the result of earthquakes or nukes.
People focused on attempts to create a nuclear weapon testing monitor system. And most of this was done secretly due to the competition. Today’s nuclear test detection involves using different instruments. For example, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization uses seismometers for detecting earth vibrations from underground tests, air-testing stations that detect tiny amounts of radioactive particles in the atmosphere, and aquatic listening posts that sense underwater tests. There are also infrasound detectors that sense an explosion’s low-frequency rumbles in the atmosphere.
However, relying on seismic waves can be challenging because earthquakes or nuclear explosions produce them after they release large amounts of energy. So it’s harder to distinguish between both. And since the earth experiences thousands of daily earthquakes, underground test monitoring for nuke explosions is almost impossible.
Other detection methods have popped up over six decades. One of them deals with analyzing the source’s depth or location. Usually, suspicions might arise due to activity transpiring far from plate tectonic boundaries and volcanoes. But if it happens at a depth of over 3 kilometers, the chances of it being a nuke test decrease.
Even then, those techniques aren’t perfect. Some may try to perform tests where earthquakes hit, effectively hiding them. Shallow earthquakes could also occur. It’s better to determine how much energy is delivered in body waves versus the amount surface waves carry. Compared to explosions, earthquakes expend more energy in surface waves.
Although this approach detects underground nuclear tests, it’s not a perfect system. In one case, it didn’t identify North Korea’s 2017 nuke test that produced sizeable surface waves since it happened in a mountain tunnel. That’s why it’s imperative to use several monitoring methods, whereas one won’t always be reliable.
A better solution has recently been created by the Australian and US researchers. This latest technique considers the displacement of rocks when an event occurs and works with an advanced statistical model that describes various event types. They performed tests on catalogs of earthquakes and explosions from the western US and discovered this new method has 99% accuracy. The researchers believe it can be used for detecting and monitoring underground nuke tests.
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