|
Novaya Zemlya is today the only nuclear test site in Russia. Even though Russia since 1990 has observed a moratorium on nuclear tests, it is still of interest to monitor the area.
NORSAR’s seismic arrays have a unique capability to monitor Novaya Zemlya. In particular, the two arrays on Spitsbergen (SPITS) and in northern Norway (ARCES) are able to record very small seismic events, down to a Richter magnitude as low as 2.0. This corresponds to a fully coupled nuclear explosion of about 0.01 kilotons TNT (i.e. 10 tons TNT). The picture below illustrates the so-called site-specific threshold monitoring technique, which has been developed at NORSAR and enables optimized use of the combined resources of a seismic array network for detection of small events in a specific target region.
The figure illustrates the concept of threshold monitoring, which focuses
a network of seismicarrays towards a target area in order to optimize
the detection of small events in that area.
|
 |
|
|
|
