Peyton Powell

Staff Writer

The Millersville Earth Sciences department welcomed Dr. Won-Young Kim as the featured speaker for the department seminar series on September 29.

These seminars take place every Thursday night in Roddy 149 at 6 p.m., and aim to present many different topics and speakers from a variety of different areas within the Earth Sciences disciplines.

The Earth Science Department organizes these seminars and all of the faculty have a part in selecting the speakers for the seminar series. Some of the Past seminars topics have included a talk given by Gale Blackmer from the PA Geological society and a documentary on the Flint Water Crisis.

Dr. Kim is a seismologist working at Columbia University who received his Ph.D. at Uppsala University in Sweden and post doctorate at Harvard University. He is from South Korea and was trained as a geologist, but switched over to seismology in 1976 while in Italy when the 6.5 magnitude Friuli Earthquake hit, which killed more than 1000 people.

Seismology is the study of earthquakes and seismic waves that move through and around the earth. Kim said his concentration is on many different aspects of earthquakes instead of just one.

The Thursday presentation specifically focused on the monitoring of nuclear testing and knowing when countries are testing nuclear bombs. He began by sharing different earthquake facts such as the fact that the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were small compared to other nuclear bombs, being at around 15 kilotons.

The largest recorded atmospheric nuclear bomb was the Tsar Bomb at approximately 52 megatons, and was detonated by the Soviet Union Oct. 30, 1961. And the largest ground nuclear bomb was about 4.6 megatons.

Since 1992 the United States has not done any nuclear testing, however North Korea is still performing nuclear tests with the last one recently on Sept. 9 of this year. North Korea and other countries have started to do nuclear testing underground where it is not easily detectable, and that is where Dr. Kim comes into play.

He, along with his fellow colleagues, have been using special devices and methods to detect nuclear bomb testing. One of their main resources in detecting nuclear testing is the IMS which stands for International Monitoring System.

The Comprehensible Nuclear Treaty Ban Organizing or CTBTO has many different stations located around the world which run different tests.

Some of the tests are, soundwaves in the ocean by using sensitive hydro-acoustic devices, atmospheric infrasound through listening stations, and nuclear particles and gases, especially xenon released during the explosion are detected by radionuclide facilities.

The decision to determine whether something is a nuclear test or if it was something else is then brought up in a closed meeting and not made directly by the scientists who found the information.

The CTBT0 was established in 1996 and bans all nuclear weapons and testing. This treaty has yet to be enforced due to eight countries signing the treaty, and their government not approving of it; the United States being one of those eight countries.

Before the CTBT, there have been many other treaties that were made between countries and are still in effect to this day, like the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) and the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT).

Dr. Kim said, “If there was a ban on nuclear testing that would stop the process of making weapons of mass destruction, and stop the development of even more destructive weapons.”

He then stated, “That Russia and the United States have a combined total of about 25,000 stored nuclear war heads which is less than the 70,000 warheads that were present before the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Dr. Kim then ended his presentation by telling us why he believes that there should be a ban on testing. A number of faculty members have their students attend these seminars so they can learn more about their field of study or department in general.

When asked about the impact on students, Dr. Yalda who is a meteorology professor here at Millersville said that, “These seminars introduce knowledge and spark an interest in an area that a student may not have known about before and they can also help build their knowledge in earth sciences.”

She then went on by saying that she thinks attending these seminars can show students more career opportunities in the earth science field. Although these seminars have topics pertaining to the earth science field, community members and other majors are also welcome to attend any or all the seminars.

If interested in attending one of these seminars you can visit the Millersville Earth Science website to see the complete list of upcoming seminars.