Abstract
In our nuclear era, suspicions exist about the fate of the Earth’s ozone layer: both large- and local-scale conflicts, using nuclear weapons, are thought to be able to destroy the ozone layer for years to come. On September 22, 1979, an officially unidentified state covertly performed the nighttime nuclear weapon test in a desolate region of the World Ocean. This event is conventionally called the Vela Incident. In this work, we used ozone data obtained by the NASA satellite Nimbus-7 16 min and 44 s after the explosion. It is shown that the shock wave left a “trace” in the ozone layer. No decrease in the ozone amount is noticed. The coordinates of the explosion site are determined from the trace.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank T. S. Kelso for providing the orbital data from Nimbus-7 satellite and V. Yu. Romasko for calculating the orbit.
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Translated by O. Bazhenov
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Kashkin, V.B., Odintsov, R.V. & Rubleva, T.V. On the Effects of a Nuclear Explosion on Stratospheric Ozone. Atmos Ocean Opt 35, 402–406 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1024856022040066
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1024856022040066