tinychaseNuclear kiosks · a cross-dex match
The Bombs in the Earthquake Catalogue
Two TerraPulse dexes, one built from the DOE's list of detonations and one from the USGS earthquake catalogue, describe the same events without knowing it. Line them up by time and place and the underground tests fall out: hundreds of "earthquakes" that were bombs, with origin times that agree to the second, and a magnitude that steps up with the announced yield.
Magnitude against yield
Every matched test with a timed shot, by the catalogue's announced yield band. Boxes span the middle half of the magnitudes in the band; whiskers the full range. A bigger bomb is a bigger quake, and the bands barely overlap.
Who found whom
Nevada shots from 1973 with a shot point and a sub-second time, the set the catalogue could hold. The catalogue's floor is what it misses: the small ones.
To the second
The catalogue's own view of Nevada
Every catalogue event within 50 km of the Nevada Test Site, 1973 to 1992, by magnitude, and how many of them are matched tests. Above magnitude 5 there is almost nothing else there.
The biggest, and the Soviet ones by date
Still filed as earthquakes
How the match works
A timed match takes the nearest catalogue event within ten minutes and 50 km of a shot that has a printed time and coordinate; the DOE prints both for every underground Nevada shot. Because the Soviet and French catalogues print a date and a site and nothing finer, their tests can only be matched by date: any magnitude 4.5 or larger event within 150 km of the site during the hours that calendar date can occupy in UTC. In practice every such match is a magnitude 6, because that is the only size the global catalogue holds before 1990, and nothing else of that size occurs on a test site.
The event type is a live ComCat lookup per matched event on the export date. It is not in the dex, and it is what makes the timed matches with a zero-second gap that ComCat still calls "earthquake" worth a second look: the DOE's time and place say bomb.
Every match
Sorted by magnitude. Rows in blue are timed matches; the rest are Soviet and French shots matched by date and site to a magnitude 6 event, the only kind the global catalogue holds that far back. Type is what ComCat says the event is today.