In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:43:36 -0400 (GMT-04:00): Hi, [snip] >Seismologists estimate the size of the North Korean explosion at between 1 and >15 kilotons. My bet: 1 kt. I mean literally, 1000 tons of explosive.
Then they obviously registered something, and clearly not natural. Explosions have a different seismic signature to natural Earth tremors. > >I just spoke with Mizuno about unrelated stuff, and he mentioned that his >department at U. Hokkaido, Nuclear Engineering, has superb monitoring >equipment, but they have not seen a thing. He said that even with an >underground test "something comes out of the ground; we would seen some >signature after 24 hours." I suppose the material migrates up the instrument >lead-wires. They would need to have something in orbit wouldn't they? I thought that they would detect gammas from a real explosion (though this was deep underground), and I thought the USA had satellites in orbit specifically for this purpose (that picked up the gammas from thunderstorms?). I doubt that they would be able to pick up gammas in Hokkaido, because the curvature of the Earth would put hundreds of km's of rock between them and the explosion. So what exactly were they looking for, neutrinos? [snip] Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://users.bigpond.net.au/rvanspaa/ Competition provides the motivation, Cooperation provides the means.
