Tires stick to hot asphalt as I drive the Stuart Highway from Alice Springs northward, leaving the MacDonnell Ranges behind. My destination is the Warramunga facility, about 500 kilometers north — a remote monitoring station I’ve directed for the Australian National University for nearly 19 years. It’s one of the most sensitive nuclear detection facilities on Earth.
When I started exploring Earth’s inner core in 1997, I had no idea my calling would lead me here, or that I’d spend years driving this highway through the red expanse of the Australian outback.
And today, as the New START treaty curbing the US and Russian nuclear weapons programs expires, the work we do in the red center has become more important than ever before.
A giant telescope pointed at Earth’s center
Located 37km southeast of Tennant Creek — or Jurnkkurakurr, as it’s known in the local Warumungu language — Warramunga consists of what might generously be called a demountable building, surrounded by sensors lined up across 20km of savannah, covered by red soil and long, white spinifex grass.
The facility operates two sophisticated arrays. One consists of 24 seismometers detecting vibrations through Earth, the other eight infrasound sensors picking up ultra-low-frequency sound waves inaudible to human ears.
When North Korea detonated its largest nuclear device in September 2017 — about 7,000 km away — our instruments captured it clearly. Warramunga detected all six of North Korea’s declared nuclear tests, and our data was among the first to reach the International Data Center in Vienna.
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