No evidence US earthquake linked to nuclear blast
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"Radiation Spike Off California Coast Raises Alarm... questions are now swirling over whether it was actually an underwater nuclear detonation," says a December 11 X post.
One of the first claims came from radio host Hal Turner, whom AFP has previously fact-checked for posting misinformation.
"Some people actually said this was a nuclear blast off the US Coast," he wrote in a December 6 article.
Similar claims circulated on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
The December 5 earthquake sparked a brief tsunami warning, with residents told to flee to higher ground before the alert was canceled. USGS seismologists said the shallow 7.0-magnitude tremor hit around 42 miles from the coastal town of Ferndale, where people experienced strong ground shakes.
But there is no evidence to support claims of a radiation spike -- the EPA told AFP its network of monitors detected no unusual activity.
"The EPA uses a network of radiation monitors, called RadNet, to monitor and to track fluctuations in gamma radiation emitted from airborne radioactive particles in the US and US territories. These monitors report data back to EPA in near-real-time, every day of the year," a spokesperson said in a December 11 email.
"EPA can confirm that the RadNet monitoring network did not detect any abnormal exposure rate measurements from any monitoring station in California from 12/1/2024 - 12/10/2024."
Screenshots below show relatively stable RadNet radiation readings from that time period in Eureka (L) and San Diego.
The United States has not conducted any nuclear testing since 1992, according to the Defense Department (archived here). North Korea conducted the last known nuclear test in 2017, according to monitors at the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (archived here).
A USGS spokesperson said December 12 that, based on data from the National Earthquake Information Center, the "source mechanism" of the California temblor "was consistent with an earthquake occurring on a tectonic fault and not an explosive source" (archived here).
AFP has debunked other claims about the 2024 California earthquake here.
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