No abstract

On 12 February 2013, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test in the northeastern mountainous part of the country. The explosion reached magnitude m b = 5.1 being recorded at most of seismic stations around the world and becoming one of the best ever recorded nuclear explosions in history. Similarly, as other nuclear explosions buried in Nevada, Kazakhstan, or China, the 2013 North Korean explosion is characterized by a significant nonisotropic radiation. This radiation is manifested by distinct SH and Love waves in the wave field and is inconsistent with the model of a spherically symmetric source. We show that the Love waves are not generated by a tectonic earthquake triggered on a nearby fault structures but produced by asymmetry of the explosive source caused by presence of deviatoric stress in the surrounding rock. The retrieved moment tensor of the 2013 explosion is characterized by the isotropic component of 57 ± 5%, the double-couple component of 17 ± 9%, and the compensated linear vector dipole component of 24 ± 7%. The P, T, and N axes of the moment tensor are consistent with the principal axes of the regional tectonic stress in the Korean Peninsula. A comparison of waveforms and particle motions of the 2013 explosion and the previous North Korean nuclear explosion buried in 2009 indicates that the 2013 explosion was slightly more nonisotropic.

No abstract

No abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a technique to discriminate artificial explosions from local small earthquakes (M≤4.0) in the time-frequency domain. In order to obtain spectral features of artificial explosions and earthquakes, 3-D spectrograms (frequency, time and amplitude) have been used. They represent a useful tool for studying the frequency content of entire seismic waveforms observed at local and regional distances (Kim, Simpson & Richards 1994). P and S(L g) waves from quarry blasts show that the frequency content associated with the dominant amplitude appears above 10 Hz and Rg phases are observed at close distances. P and S(L g) waves from the Tongosan earthquake have strong amplitudes below 10 Hz. For the Munkyong earthquake, however, a broader frequency content up to 20 Hz is found.For discrimination between small earthquakes and explosions, Pg/L g spectral ratios are used below 10 Hz, and through spectrogram analysis we can see different frequency contents of explosions and earthquakes. Unfortunately, because explosion data recorded at KSRS array are digitized at 20 sps, we cannot avoid analysing below 10 Hz because of the Nyquist frequency. In order to select time windows, the group velocity was computed using multiple-filter analysis (MFA), and free-surface effects have been removed from all three-component data in order to improve data quality. Using FFT, a log-average spectral amplitude is calculated over seven frequency bands: 0.5 to 3, 2 to 4, 3 to 5, 4 to 6, 5 to 7, 6 to 8 and 8 to 10 Hz. The best separation between explosions and earthquakes is observed from 6 to 8 Hz. In this frequency band we can separate explosions with log(Pg/L g) above −0.5, except EXP1 recorded at SIHY1-1, and earthquakes below −0.5, except the Munkyong earthquake record at station KMH.