IN A military-style nerve centre in Vienna, a bunch of scientists are watching over the entire planet. Giant computers process a torrent of data that pours in through secure satellite links from seismic detectors all over the globe, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Today they have seen nothing unusual. Tomorrow could be different.
But let’s hope not, for these are the scientists charged with spotting whether someone, somewhere has decided to explode a nuclear bomb. Their network is the International Monitoring System, an unprecedented global surveillance system.
Designed to warn of illicit nuclear tests, the IMS is not yet operating at full strength. But when—or more importantly, if—it gets there, it will also be able to notify us almost instantly about a host of other large-scale disasters. These range from natural events such as earthquakes, incoming meteorites and huge turbulent waves to human-made disasters such as nuclear accidents. There’s just one problem: the network may never reach its full potential. This week politicians are meeting in Vienna to discuss the fate of the IMS. No one knows if it will survive.
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The future of the IMS is bound up with the survival of the increasingly fragile-looking Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, designed to outlaw nuclear weapons tests. If the CTBT dies, the network that was built to help enforce it will be in jeopardy too.
Loss of the IMS would be a huge blow not just to the cause of nuclear non-proliferation, but also to all the humanitarian and disaster relief agencies that might have used the system.
For now, though, the plan remains as it was: to grow the network over five years until it is processing 10 gigabytes of data each day. This will stream data in near real time from a global network of 170 seismic stations, 11 hydro-acoustic stations monitoring underwater explosions, and 60 infrasound arrays listening for the low boom of atmospheric blasts, plus 40 radionuclide detectors that check the air daily for the gases and radioactive particles released by nuclear tests.
“It’s the synergy that makes it powerful,” says Peter Marshall of Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, who headed the scientific panel that designed the IMS. If seismographs detect vibrations beneath the seabed, but hydroacoustic microphones do not hear an explosion, then it is an earthquake, not a secret underwater nuclear test. But an unexplained infrasound rumble plus a gust of caesium at a radionuclide detector could be an atmospheric bomb test.
The radioactive signal without the infrasound, however, would sound the alarm that someone was concealing a serious nuclear accident. It was when radionuclide monitoring stations in Sweden picked up just such a signal in 1986 that the world was alerted to the Chernobyl accident. And that could be just a fringe benefit. Researchers are also confident that the network will reveal global phenomena that they cannot now predict.
All this is now in doubt because of uncertainty over the test ban treaty. Agreed in 1996, the CTBT needs to be ratified by another 13 of the 44 nations with nuclear reactors before it comes into force. The most important nation of all, the US, has already said it won’t sign (see “Death of a treaty”), and Israel is just one country likely to follow its lead.
“The future of the CTBT verification system depends on the renewal of political support from the US for the treaty itself,” says Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, a think tank in Washington DC. And India and Pakistan’s current demonstration of the power that comes with the bomb might mean that even fewer states are likely to sign up.
Some scientists hope that the network’s scientific potential will ensure its survival, whatever happens to the treaty. Researchers and British officials met at the Foreign Office in London last month to discuss potential non-verification uses for the system. But other countries are lobbying to limit its application.
When the treaty was written, the founder nations insisted that the data from the network should only be given to the states that had signed up to the test ban treaty, and then kept confidential. But the treaty also said that the data can be used for scientific purposes, and intense negotiations at the Vienna meeting are now aimed at resolving what exactly this means. The US, which continues to back the monitoring network if not the treaty itself, thinks the basic data should be freely available. Other countries, led by China, do not.
“Some are afraid pressure groups will use the data to claim a natural event was a test, before the government has a chance to review the data itself,” says Oliver Meier of Vertic, an arms-control think tank in London. “But if there is an ambiguous event, independent seismologists will post the information on the Web in minutes anyway. At least the treaty data comes from secure stations protected from tampering. It should help prevent misinformation.”
In March, Wolfgang Hoffman, head of the CTBT Organisation that runs the monitoring system, got member states to agree for the first time to release seismic data from 2000 and 2001 to scientists. “We have no problem with this,” Wang Qun of the Chinese delegation in Vienna told New Scientist.
He agrees that scientists should get to see the data, but only after a delay of two weeks. “Even US scientists tell us they do not need data sooner than that,” says Wang. “If governments want the release of real-time data, and it is not needed for science, then they should say what their interests really are.”
But Greg van der Vink of a Washington-based consortium, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, disagrees. He argues that seismologists rely on being able to exchange information freely, and that real-time data is increasingly important. He fears that if the IMS data is kept secret, even for a few days, scientists will not use it when it is eventually released, further reducing the network’s chances of survival.
But there are other more pressing reasons why real-time network information could be extremely useful, says IMS coordinator Peter Basham. The system will be able to locate earthquake damage faster than other systems, and sound the alarm even when the earthquake has already destroyed local stations or communications networks.
Releasing infrasound data might also make air travel safer (see The spin-offs from global surveillance). Combining data from the seismic and hydroacoustic networks could bring about a “fantastic improvement” in forecasting tidal waves in much of the Pacific, says Marshall, while the radionuclide detectors could warn of trouble with nuclear submarines.
Even Wang accepts that such data could be released in real time to disaster relief organisations. But China is not convinced that the whole system should operate all the time before the treaty comes into force. While the Vienna talks may decide on part-time operation, many of its scientific and humanitarian uses require the system to be running full-time.
That is also the best way to prove that nuclear tests can be detected reliably. And that could encourage more countries to sign up to the test ban treaty. In the end, that will be the only way to secure the network and the huge benefits it will bring to science as well as disarmament.
Some of the Earth’s big secrets could be unlocked by listening to infrasound, the low-frequency sounds that rumble about the planet.
- Infrasound has already detected distant volcanic eruptions and waves in the North Atlantic. It has revealed new forms of lightning, and tracked storms and the Northern Lights.
- The IMS will have the most comprehensive and sensitive infrasound monitoring network ever built, made up of 60 stations around the globe, each with an array of sensitive micro-barometers spread across 1 to 3 kilometres. These instruments could transform climate studies by measuring hitherto unquantifiable vertical movements in the atmosphere. They could also track incoming space debris, outgoing rocket launches and destructive soliton waves in the lower atmosphere and reveal the true number of meteorites crashing into the upper atmosphere.
- Real-time data could detect dangerous volcanic eruptions and be used to steer aircraft around them. Night flights from North America to Japan travelling over Russia’s volcanic Kamchatka region are especially at risk.