Australian researchers develop new method to more accurately spot underground nuclear tests

Phys.org  February 7, 2024 Currently possible mis-classification of explosions as earthquakes currently limits the use of screening methods for verification of test-ban treaties. Researchers in Australia showed that populations of moment tensors for both earthquakes and explosions are anisotropically distributed on the hypersphere. They described a method that uses these elliptical distributions in combination with a Bayesian classifier to achieve successful classification rates of 99 per cent for explosions and 98 per cent for earthquakes using existing catalogues of events from the western United States. The 1983 May 5 Crowdie underground nuclear test and 2018 July 20 DAG-1 deep-borehole chemical […]

New technique separates industrial noise from natural seismic signals

EurekAlert  May 19, 2020 In the past, human-caused seismic signals, as a result of industrial activities, were viewed as ‘noise’ that polluted a dataset, resulting in otherwise useful data being dismissed. A team of researchers in the US (Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Washington) used a year’s worth of data from more than 1,700 seismic stations in the contiguous United States and detected approximately 1.5 million industrial noise sequences, which corresponds on average to around 2.4 detections per day at each station. With cloud computing that allows for greater scalability and flexibility, they were able to analyze large-scale seismic […]