Study of Anomalous Mine Blasts

The Altai-Sayan mining region located east of Novosibirsk, Russia, comprises over 72 mines which are located between 7 and 559 km from the International Monitoring System (IMS) primary 3-component station ZAL. We have origin time and location estimates of 853 blasts that have occurred in this trend between 1/1/1995 and 6/30/2000. The mines are known to use millisecond delay-fire blasting and had explosive yields ranging from < 10T to > 500 T. We are currently analyzing the range dependence of seismic waveforms from these blasts to prepare for the use of a correlation method to associate individual mine blast recordings with a specific mines and to look for detonation anomalies. Detonation anomalies are of particular interest as the simultaneous release of a significant explosive yield within a routine mine blast shot sequence might be confused with a clandestine nuclear test.