Lifeboat Foundation

Thanks to a significant scientific breakthrough in detection methods, conducting secret underground nuclear tests could become obsolete.

A team of Earth scientists and statisticians say they can now tell with 99 percent accuracy if such an explosion has taken place. This is up from 82 percent and is based on a dataset of known tests in the US, according to the new study published in Geophysical Journal International. It has previously been tricky to differentiate between nuclear explosions and other seismic sources, such as naturally-occurring earthquakes or man-made noise above ground.

“The explosion goes off and you have all this energy that radiates out, which can be measured on seismometers,” said lead author Dr. Mark Hoggard, of The Australian National University (ANU). “So, the science problem becomes how do we tell the difference between that and a naturally-occurring earthquake?”