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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Note: This story is over four years old, but I just came upon it and thought other Soylentils might find it interesting.

5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion [nautil.us]:

After most of the world’s nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty [ctbto.org], in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO[*]) has wired the world [ctbto.org] with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The stations send their data to the CTBTO’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, where it is analyzed for signs of a secret bomb. But the system keeps picking up other things, too—which is sometimes a problem for the system and sometimes a boon to science. Here are some of the things that can at first seem like nuclear tests:

In the course of the efforts to detect clandestine nuclear tests, these devices have also detected:

• Space rocks
• Aurora (Northern and Southern Lights)
• Whales
• Tsunamis
• Nuclear-power-plant disasters
• Medical-isotope manufacturing

[*] CTBTO: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization [wikipedia.org]

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