Why do explosions look like earthquakes
When
I participated in the XCP Student Computational Physics Workshop this past summer. I worked under Ting Chen and Carene Larmat from the Earth and Environmental Science (EES-17) division to answer this question. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996 motivates developing (in this case, underground) treaty-monitoring technologies. In order to do this, we configured a blackbox numerical simulator to simulate earthquakes and explosions at the DAG Site (a part of the NNSA). Simulations were done on an HPC (CPU-GPU hybrid architecture cluster). The simulations output seismic recordings for which S/P ratios were analyzed to determine if the source of the recording was an earthquake or explosion. There is an overview of methods used, conclusions are drawn from multiple experiments, a short discussion on complications follows, and an answer is presented to the question of interest. Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/98593835992