A shallow 3.5-magnitude earthquake hit North Korea near the country’s nuclear test site Saturday, US seismologists said, in what Chinese experts said was a “suspected explosion”, but Seoul deemed a “natural earthquake”. “This event occurred in the area of the previous North Korean Nuclear tests. Regional experts differed on their analysis of the tremor, with the China Earthquake Network Centre (CENC) service calling it a “suspected explosion” while Seoul’s Korea Meteorological Agency (KMA) judged it a “natural quake”. “There is no possibility that this could be an artificial quake,” Yonhap news agency quoted a KMA official as saying. The strength of the quake was much lower than the tremors registered during any of North Korea’s nuclear tests, including its first detonation in 2006, which triggered a 4.1-magnitude quake.

Source: Dhaka Tribune September 23, 2017 18:56 UTC