NHK and other Japanese media are reporting that North Korea conducted a second nuclear test this morning. South Korea, on the other hand, says it did not detect any unusual tremors in the North. Strongly denying the Japanese report, a South Korean intelligence official told the Hankyoreh Shinmun that he found it hard to believe that they could detect in Japan tremors that they could not detect in South Korea.
I hope for his sake he’s right.
UPDATE: Seems Mr. NIS was right afterall—there was a 6.0 earthquake in northeast Japan this morning, something the Korea Times‘ Kim Heung-sook would no doubt call divine retribution for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unjust, anti-Korean hardline ways.
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Usually when I try something new and it doesn’t work the way I thought it should, I try it again. What’s wrong with that?
Other reports are saying it was an earthquake.
If it turns out to be a test, somehow, two tests seem exponentially more serious than just one test, and the first one was serious enough.
Crazy, scary times….
Is this where I insert the Godzilla joke?
The USGS is saying they didn’t detect anything either.
How long does it take to pinpoint the epicentre? If in NK, it could very well have been a test, given how rare earthquakes are on the Korean Peninsula. If the epicentre was anywhere else, then it was probably just an earthquake….
(Just stating the bloody obvious, I suppose.)
This is strange…the story first appeared on Yahoo! News about 30 mins ago…since then, there hasn’t been any significant update, nor anything new out of NHK or Kyodo….
I’ll go w/the USGS on this one.
Reuters seems to have the most up-to-date news, about 13 minutes old now. Still nothing conclusive, though Japan had “unconfirmed information” that there might be a test today:
Not very long. Data-sharing between stations makes it fairly easy to triangulate the epicenter within a reasonable certainty fairly quickly. The USGS is putting the quake off the east coast of Japan, which is exactly the wrong direction for it to be coming from North Korea (unless they used a mini-sub to tow it out there) :P. Just a false alarm due to a ‘heightened sense of alertness’.
don’t believe NHK either. it embarassed itself more than SK NIS in July.
east of japan and NW of the SEA OF JAPAN is almost 180 degree apart w.r.t. tokyo.
i doubt if any geologist would make such mistake.
did NHK mention its source?
p.s. the quake is 5.8 scale.
about 200km east of the coast between tokyo and sendai.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqc.....ustrb2.php
in fact, i believe USGS has stations in various parts of the world. it is able to triangulate the epicenter by itself.
(same for japan — and it is much easier for japan to do so, given its proximity and sophisticated seismology tech)
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