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Comment by Mugwort | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it might be related to this event? (linked below ) I'm going to make a guess, that there might have been a nuclear detonation. It probably wasn't a test. This seems to be an accident. Not all weapons are accounted for, e.g. there a American hydrogen bombs lost in Spain (I know... it sounds crazy but look it up.). Could there have been a bomb laying around someone in a place everyone forgot existed maybe some forgotten relic from the Soviet day?

A GLOBAL MAGNETIC ANOMALY: On June 23rd, Earth’s quiet magnetic field was unexpectedly disturbed by a wave of magnetism that rippled around much of the globe. There was no solar storm or geomagnetic storm to cause the disturbance. So what was it?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/25/weird-out-of-nowhere-...

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Almost certainly not. A nuclear detonation would also produce noticeable seismic effects as well as release iodine-131, which was not detected.

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/ecology/2020/06/various-re... reports that Iodine 131 was measured in Norway during the week of June 2-8.

Ok, but that's two weeks off from this detection.

From what I can see in the article, its source is explained:

“Pc waves are classified into 5 types depending on their period. The 10-minute wave on June 23rd falls into category Pc5. Slow Pc5 waves have been linked to a loss of particles from the van Allen radiation belts. Energetic electrons surf these waves down into Earth’s atmosphere, where they dissipate harmlessly.”

It basically impossible the lost bombs from old broken arows woild detonate i nuclear way (the conventional explosive might still explode and contaminate a small area).

Even if you discount machinery still working after being embedded in the ground or unde water any neutron initiators or bateries would have lomg sonce became unusable.

There’s a huge risk of abandoned nuclear weapons self detonating. Russian ICBMs (used to?) have safeties that failed “deadly”. They had to run around and turn them off during the 90’s so they didn’t self-deploy. That was a huge problem because they had lost track of some of them.

Also, the soviet’s “Dead Hand” is still active.

It is a dead man’a switch that’s designed to automatically destroy the world if it detects the initial phase of a nuclear war. It could easily fail in a way that caused a false positive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

I’m sure other countries have equally problematic aging arsenals.

What the hell? Thanks for this, haven't seen anything about this anywhere.

Maybe because only specialists even took note of this. The article itself states that it's more like "hearing a pin drop".

If you look at the scales on the included diagrams, you might note that these "ripples" are on the order of a few nT.

The natural variation of the magnetic field can be 2 orders of magnitude higher, so the real story here is that they were even able to pick this up in the first place...

Cool, thanks.

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