
Are Earthquakes Hiding Secret Nuclear Tests? New Study Raises Alarming Possibility
Seismologists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have raised the possibility that underground nuclear tests could hide behind natural earthquake signals. Published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, the study challenges previous assumptions that seismic signals from explosions and earthquakes are easily distinguishable.
Advanced detectors, once believed to identify even small nuclear tests with high accuracy, struggle when an explosion occurs close in time and space to an earthquake. According to Joshua Carmichael, lead researcher, when an explosion's seismic signal overlaps with that of a nearby earthquake, the detection success rate can drop dramatically from 97% to just 37%.
Overlapping Signals Cause Massive Detection Drop
Carmichael's team found that even ...