It looks like we are in the middle of nowhere, and I guess we are.
About a mile that way is Qanaaq, on the west coast of Greenland, about 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The town has more sled dogs than people;
The locals, some of them, still hunt seals and narwhal when the ice retreats in the summer.
And just outside the town, someone in listening for nuclear explosions.
In 1999, 183 countries signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Cold War had just ended, and with the threat of nuclear apocalypse seeming just a little less likely, the idea of the treaty was to completely ban nuclear explosions, even for research.
Two decades later, and the treaty is still not in force, because politics. But the people who drafted the treaty thought that might happen, and created the Preparatory Commission, whose job it is to get everything in place for when the treaty hopefully, eventually ,comes into force and even if it never actually happens, to try and do some good anyway.
And You can see in the picture one of the results: IS18, an infrasound listening station, part of a network that spans the planet.
It’s a microbarograph: a set of very precise air pressure sensors,
and it listens for very low frequency sound waves, far below the range of human hearing.
They’re less like sound, and more like massive disturbances in the air that travel round the globe after enormous Explosions.
If you just put a micro barometer in the air, the noise from the wind will be killing every Signal.
So we have arrays, we have 96 inlets.
It all goes to the barometer.
Because have that many inlets, it is not really probable that the wind noise will be exactly the same at all those inlets so they are fed to a central manifold and the wind will sort-of cancel out.
Detecting something doesn’t mean that there’s been a nuclear test it might be a meteor breaking up, a volcano erupting, or even a massive iceberg calving off a glacier Nearby, but if it can't be explained like that, then governments should start asking questions.
Results from here go to the Commission’s headquarters in Vienna, via a base in the middle of town, where they’re combined with those from the dozens of other listening stations around the planet. And as well as that, the commission uses hydro acoustic sensors to detect underwater explosions, seismic stations that detect earthquakes from nuclear tests, and radionuclide detection stations that check the level of radioactivity in the Air.
You can see from the time difference when the individual stations detect the pressure wave. From that you can deduct what direction it's coming form.
The nuclear test ban treaty, if it ever actually comes into force, will apply around the world. Even up here in the Arctic. And theoretically, some rogue government could be ridiculous enough to try and get away with a nuclear test in the Arctic. After all, back in the 20th century, about a fifth of all Soviet nuclear tests were in the Russian Arctic and that included Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb in history.
Even if new testing in the Arctic is unlikely, data from here can still help triangulate
other explosions. When you’re designing a network to keep watch on the planet, not just where most of the people live, that network really does have to be global. Even if that means setting up a research base in one of the most remote locations on Earth.