Seismic Detective Weighs In on North Korea's Latest Nuclear Test

Paul Richards is the guy you call when

a

 you need someone to decipher nuclear seismic signatures, and he's been busying divining those telltale nuclear scribbles detected in North Korea this past weekend.

It's a complex language of vibration, and one not so easily translated. When I ask him about Kim Jong-Un's latest test, Richards quotes Alan Douglas, a former U.K. nuclear seismology expert, circa 1982: "There is no creature more deserving of pity than the seismologist who attempts to make sense of magnitude-yield observations."

Richards is a special research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He's riffled through the data of nuclear seismic data in years past and called out other researchers who credited the North Korean regime with nuclear blasts.