“We do multiple dry runs.”Ībbott and his colleagues monitored the explosions from trailers located roughly 2 kilometers away after placing sensors like accelerometers into nearby instrument boreholes. “Like anything, practice makes perfect,” said Abbott. Credit: Gary Striker/ LLNL Sensors, Sensors, EverywhereĮach explosion was carefully orchestrated. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory technician George Governo (right) and a coworker secure the upper skids on a high-explosive canister for the Source Physics Experiment-6 test. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday. The detonations mimicked underground nuclear explosions, but the researchers used chemical explosives such as nitromethane rather than fission- or fusion-based bombs. The Source Physics Experiment, which began in 2010, has conducted 10 controlled underground explosions at the Nevada National Security Site, a Rhode Island–sized facility roughly 105 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas. Rob Abbott, a seismologist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., sums up the motivation for the project, known as the Source Physics Experiment: “Sometimes an explosion can look very earthquake-like, and sometimes an earthquake can look very explosion-like.” Going Boom in the Desert “Sometimes an explosion can look very earthquake-like, and sometimes an earthquake can look very explosion-like.” By collecting geophysical data from controlled detonations in the Nevada desert, researchers aim to do just that. With the goal of monitoring the proliferation of nuclear weapons, scientists and engineers have been tasked with differentiating between these two types of energetic events. Earthquakes send energy rippling through the planet, but so does something decidedly human caused: an underground nuclear explosion.
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