This washed up on the digital beach today.
With the opening of the Oppenheimer biopic, worth reviewing this 4 year old “60 Minutes” piece on rediscovered films of nuclear weapons tests.
A whole lot of people don’t have the slightest clue how bad, really awful, they are.
US seismologists got a lot of funding in the 1950s to set up measuring stations to monitor underground tests. Their primary goal, of course, was to study earthquakes, but this kept them in business.
Nowadays it’s trivial to measure North Korea’s tests. The North Korean announcements exaggerate the yield, but the seismic signature and magnitude can’t be faked. (Seismologists also know the difference between a coal mine that spontaneously collapses and one where an earthquake is blamed.)
66 million years ago an asteroid impacted Earth near Chicxulub which wiped out the dinosaurs. This event produced a tiny world wide layer of iridium which can still be seen in the geological record. Similarly, the large number of nuclear tests beginning in 1950 has produced a tiny world wide layer of nuclear ash (includes plutonium) which continued for a decade until governments agreed to stop above ground testing. This ash layer is also part of the geological record. While there is no formal definition of “the Anthropocene”, the layer of nuclear ash is often referenced in literature as “before present” which means “circa 1950”