Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Here's how you can follow this on your PC.  First you need to download Google Earth. It is an amaaaaaazing tool.  Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips.  I am looking at a shot (not real time) of Pyongyang right now.  I can count the cars on the road.  You get about 1 meter resolution in that part of the globe.

That's cool, but we are talking about seismic data, so you need a plug in.  Well, it turns out the USGS offers Latest Earthquake data in realtime via RSS feeds and a Google Earth plug in!  After you download Google Earth, go to the USGS page and download the Google Earth plug-in. It's a KML file labeled M 1+ earthquakes, past seven days (colored by age).  After you download it, Google Earth will automatically open running the plug-in.

You can see seismic records for 1 hour, 1 day, and 1 week color coded by time and coded by size (1 to 8 on the Richter scale).  Right now, there is an event registered at the time indicated in the correct location.

 However, there's a problem.  The seismic raw data doesn't match that claim.  Seismologists will try to get a separate magnitude estimate from every seismograph station that records the earthquake, and then average them.  This accounts for the usual spread of around 0.2 magnitude units that you see reported from different seismological labs right after an earthquake.  Each lab is averaging in different stations that they have access to.  It may be several days before different organizations will come to a consensus on what was the best magnitude estimate.  However, even if you overlook the mismatch in the estimates, you still have trouble finding evidence in the raw data from several sites.

Devilstower is also looking at the actual data and not seeing the signature you would expect from a nuclear blast of that magnitude.  

To show you what I am talking about, I have uploaded the telemetry from Inchon Korea, which is the closest station to North Korea.  Click on the thumbnail to see the larger image.  You see nice squiggles from the earthquake that happened earlier in the day starting around 13:50 near Tonga in the South Pacific, which is much further away. But nothing around 1:35 from a blast that happened relatively close by.

To see what I am talking about with the Tonga quake, here is a trace from the Solomon Islands, right near by. Again, click on that link to see the full size image.   See the BIG deflection?  That is the Tonga quake.  There is nothing after 1:35 on this trace either.

Here is a telemetry trace from Beijing China.  Click on the link to see the full size image.  Even with all the noise in the trace, you can still make out the high frequency squiggles from the Tonga quake, but nothing after 1:00 UTC.  The blast should show up sometime after 1:35 UTC.

I would be really interested if a professional seismologist could comment on these. But for now, I am witholding my judgment here.