Seismic Analysis of the Accidental WWII Bomb Explosion in Euskirchen, Germany, on 3 January 2014

Abstract

Besides the well‐known forensics in law enforcement, forensic techniques are used in many scientific fields, including archaeology, biology, geology, and seismology. In seismology, the discrimination between earthquakes and chemical and nuclear explosions is by far the most important and extensively studied area (e.g., Thirlaway, 1973; Stump et al. , 1999, 2002; Douglas, 2007; Bowers and Selby, 2009). However, over the past decades, very diverse sources of seismic energy have been studied, and often astonishing source process details could be revealed by the analysis of seismograms. The sources include explosions, both intentional (e.g., Willmore, 1947, 1949; Holzer et al. , 1996; Koper et al. , 1999) and accidental (e.g., Koper et al. , 2003; Hinzen, 2007), sinking of ships (e.g., Koper et al. , 1999; Koper et al. , 2001; Mucciarelli, 2012), aircraft crashes (e.g., Kim et al. , 2001; McCormack, 2003), meteor approaches and sonic booms (e.g., Kanamori et al. , 1992; Qamar, 1995; Edwards et al. , 2008; Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, 2013; Heimann et al. , 2013; Roelofse and Saunders, 2013), and lightning strikes (Hinzen, 2012). On 3 January 2014, the air‐pressure wave of an explosion was widely felt in the eastern part of the Lower Rhine embayment, Germany. At 13:30 local time, the author noticed the wave and sound arriving at the seismic station in Bensberg (BNS) and immediately checked the data of the 40‐station local network of Cologne University. Using the arrivals of the air blast at 330 m/s for five stations and a standard velocity model for explosions, the event was located east of Euskirchen, a city of 55,000 inhabitants at the southern limit of the Lower Rhine embayment. During the data processing, police from the city of Bonn asked about the cause of the boom, which had …