Last night we reported that an 5.1 magnitude artificial earthquake was detected originating in North Korea, after which the country's state media announced that the country had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb. However, the strength of the detected seismic activity has international experts saying that it appears more likely that the test was a traditional plutonium or uranium nuclear device of about 10 kT. Over the next few days the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization will use its monitoring network to look for radionuclides indicators in the atmosphere to specify what type of denotation occurred.
A few months ago Matthias Auer and Mark K. Prior wrote in the magazine how exactly we can look for clandestine nuclear tests and how effective such a monitoring network can be. The picture below is from the 2013 North Korean test. It is the results of a backtracking calculation for an air sample containing radioactive xenon isotopes (131mXe/133Xe) collected at the International Monitoring System’s radionuclide station in Takasaki, Japan, on 8 April 2013. The colored regions represent the most likely areas for the isotopes’ release into the atmosphere, had it occurred one day earlier on 7 April 2013 between 03:00 and 06:00 UTC. The measured ratios of the Xe isotopes indicate that they were the product of a nuclear fission event that occurred 50 days earlier, consistent with the time of the 2013 North Korean nuclear test.
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