06.01.2016: A very shallow seismic event was detected this morning in North Korea near Punggye Ri. The automatic GEOFON notification system at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences has calculated and notified a few minutes after the origin time at 01:30:01 UTC time (10:00 Pyongyang time) a magnitude of M 5.3 for this event. The location of the event is almost the same as the previous known explosions in 2006, 2009 and 2013.

Seismic signals from explosions are different from those observed in case of earthquakes showing particular features that allow seismologists to distinguish between the two. The similarity of the waveforms, the shallow depth and the almost identical location with respect to the previous events in 2013 and 2009 are indicating that also the source of this event is an explosion. A comparison with the measurements from 2009 und 2013 shows a larger magnitude of the 2016 test.

The GEOFON station of GFZ at Flechtingen in Germany recorded the event eleven minutes after the origin time in a seismogramme>>

Seismogramme of the event provided by the station IC.MDJ in China>> as part of the New China Digital Seismograph Data Network.

The location is found here>>

A poster with more information can be found here>>

The GEOFON-event parameters of the explosions from 2009, 2013 und 2016 may be found here>>

CTBTO>>operates GFZ-Software>> for monitoring.