Could the seismic signal of an underground nuclear test explosion be “hidden” by the signal generated by a natural earthquake?

It’s possible, according to a new review article published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America that contradicts the conventional wisdom about explosion “masking.”

The new analysis by Joshua Carmichael and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory found that advanced signal detector technology that can identify a 1.7-ton buried explosion with a 97% success rate only has a 37% success rate when seismic signals from that explosion are hidden within the seismic waveforms of an earthquake that happens within 100 seconds and about 250 kilometers away from the explosion.