Seismic Monitoring of Attacks and Explosions in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

doi:10.19975/j.dqyxx.2023-042

Abstract：People usually use seismometers to detect various types of earthquakes, including explosion information on regional or global scales, so they can also be used to detect attacks and explosions in military conflicts (Carmichael et al., 2021; Gibbons et al., 2017; Pilger et al., 2021). However, military attacks are not like earthquakes, as they have lower energy and require seismic instruments and sensor networks to be closer to the explosion source. Therefore, comprehensively and objectively obtaining monitoring data from areas of military conflict presents significant challenges. Recently, Ben D.E. Dando and colleagues from the Norwegian Seismic Research Center published a paper in Nature on the identification of military conflict attacks based on seismic arrays, systematically elaborating on the identification, location, and yield estimation of military attack explosion events, providing a seismological method for monitoring the development of modern warfare (Dando et al., 2023). They took the seismic waves generated by an explosion in northern Ukraine as an example, using local seismic arrays to automatically identify military attacks in real time, determining the time, location, and magnitude of more than 1,200 explosions that occurred in regions such as Kyiv, Zhytomyr, and Chernihiv between February and November 2022. According to related seismic and acoustic signals, they found that the number of military attack explosion events far exceeds the number of publicly reported military attacks. Therefore, developing monitoring methods and observation technologies for military conflicts, detecting explosion events, mapping their spatiotemporal distribution, and estimating their yield, is of great significance for real-time monitoring and accurate recording of the situation and progress of the conflict.