Joint maximum-likelihood magnitudes of presumed underground nuclear test explosions

Peacock, Sheila; Douglas, A.; Bowers, David

doi:10.1093/gji/ggx130

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 33 publications

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“…Official event locations, depths, and yields were released by the USSR for the pre-1972 tests [6]. For later tests, only estimates of event locations [30,56] and body-wave magnitude (m b ) [39] are available (Table S1 in Supporting Information).…”

Section: Teleseismic Waveform Data From Nuclear Explosions At the Deg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ringing mountain ranges: Teleseismic signature of the interaction of high-frequency wavefields with near-source topography at the Degelen nuclear test site

Pienkowska,

Nippress,

Bowers

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Over the last decade there has been an international effort to find methods to recover and digitize recordings from historical earthquakes and explosions that occurred during the 1950’s through to the 1980’s. Making these recordings accessible in digital format offers opportunities to study what signatures are encoded in the data, and to apply state-of-the-art techniques and methods to historical data. In this study we employ unsupervised machine learning to cluster historical teleseismic waveforms from nuclear explosions conducted at the former USSR Degelen test site, in Kazakhstan, recorded at seismic arrays in the UK (EKA), Canada (YKA), Australia (WRA) and India (GBA). In particular, we use two unsupervised algorithms to cluster waveforms using shape-based clustering: kernel k-means and k-Shape. The algorithms clearly split waveforms into distinct clusters that are spatially related, even when waveform differences are subtle, and we show with local and teleseismic numerical simulations that the clusters are related to the topography. The topography at the Degelen test site has characteristic wavelengths of 2-4 km and local simulations highlight that the seismic wavefield is trapped in reverberating mountain peaks. The location of the explosion is crucial in determining which section of the mountain range reverberates, influencing the outgoing wavefield. Teleseismic waveform simulations confirm that it is this superposition of energy leaving the reverberating peaks that results in the observed teleseismic waveform differences we observe.

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Section: Teleseismic Waveform Data From Nuclear Explosions At the Deg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ringing mountain ranges: Teleseismic signature of the interaction of high-frequency wavefields with near-source topography at the Degelen nuclear test site

Pienkowska,

Nippress,

Bowers

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Sixty years of forensic seismology at AWE Blacknest

Heyburn¹,

Keeble²,

Nippress³

et al. 2021

Astronomy &Amp; Geophysics

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The body-wave magnitude mb: an attempt to rationalize the distance-depth correction q(Δ, h)

Saloor

Okal

2020

Geophysical Journal International

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SUMMARY We explore the possible theoretical origin of the distance–depth correction q(Δ, h) introduced 75 yr ago by B. Gutenberg for the computation of the body-wave magnitude mb, and still in use today. We synthesize a large data set of seismograms using a modern model of P-wave velocity and attenuation, and process them through the exact algorithm mandated under present-day seismological practice, to build our own version, qSO, of the correction, and compare it to the original ones, q45 and q56, proposed by B. Gutenberg and C.F. Richter. While we can reproduce some of the large scale variations in their corrections, we cannot understand their small scale details. We discuss a number of possible sources of bias in the data sets used at the time, and suggest the need for a complete revision of existing mb catalogues.

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Joint maximum-likelihood magnitudes of presumed underground nuclear test explosions

Cited by 6 publications

References 33 publications

Ringing mountain ranges: Teleseismic signature of the interaction of high-frequency wavefields with near-source topography at the Degelen nuclear test site

Ringing mountain ranges: Teleseismic signature of the interaction of high-frequency wavefields with near-source topography at the Degelen nuclear test site

Sixty years of forensic seismology at AWE Blacknest

The body-wave magnitude mb: an attempt to rationalize the distance-depth correction q(Δ, h)

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