TIL Desk/World/Singapore/ North Koreas latest and largest underground nuclear test last year was powerful enough to move a mountain, say scientists who found that the bomb was 10 times stronger than the one dropped by the US on Hiroshima during World War II.
Researchers, including those from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and University of California, Berkeley in the US, showed how the explosion altered the mountain above the detonation.
The nuclear test on September 3, 2017 took place under Mt Mantap at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in the countrys north, rocking the area like a 5.2-magnitude earthquake, according to the study published in the journal Science.
Based on seismic recordings from global and regional networks, and before-and-after radar measurements of the ground surface from Germanys TerraSAR-X and Japans ALOS-2 radar imaging satellites, researchers showed that the underground nuclear blast pushed the surface of Mt Mantap outward by as much as 3.5 metres and left the mountain about 0.5 metres shorter.
By modelling the event on a computer, they were able to pinpoint the location of the explosion and its depth, 400-600 metres below the peak. They also located more precisely another seismic event, or aftershock, that occurred 8.5 minutes after the nuclear explosion, putting it some 700 metres south of the bomb blast.
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