It is not immediately evident that monitoring data could be used to investigate plane crashes.  Yet it has been done in the past, as David McCormack of the Geological Survey of Canada described (see CTBTO Spectrum, 2, July 2003, pages 1 and 15-PDF).

When a Pan Am Boeing 747 crashed near the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, a seismic monitoring station at Eskdalemuir in Scotland, United Kingdom, registered the impact as a seismic event. “Although the location of the crash was quickly established from eyewitnesses and wreckage, seismic data provided the only accurate means of timing the crash”, explained McCormack (CTBTO Spectrum, 2, July 2003, page 15).

Other technologies also harbour the potential to mitigate disasters. The eleven hydroacoustic stations monitoring the world’s oceans can increase shipping safety by providing data on underwater volcanic explosions or on the break-up of ice shelves and the creation of large icebergs.

The radionuclide technology can provide critical information following nuclear accidents. Radionuclide stations can assist when radioactivity levels need to be measured rapidly or the dispersion of radioactive material needs to be mapped.

Rapid deployment mechanisms developed by the CTBTO for future on-site inspections can help with emergency response needs following disastrous events.

In a similar case ten years later, the exact timing of the crash of a Swiss Air MD11 in 1998 near Halifax, Canada, could only be accurately verified by using seismic data.

The crash of large, heavy aircraft cause seismic signals equivalent to small magnitude earthquakes, said McCormack. With more and more seismic stations being added to the CTBT (and other) monitoring networks, seismic signals emanating from plane crashes will increasingly be available to provide investigators with a useful tool in their investigative forensic work.

Since the 1990s, the issue of climate change has become a prominent feature in the public domain.  Thus, it comes as no surprise that monitoring data generated by the CTBT verification regime have roused the interest of scientists researching global climate change.

Helga Kromp-Kolb heads the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria.  At a scientific symposium organized by the CTBTO in 2006, she advocated the use of CTBT verification data for climate change research.