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Seismological investigation of an explosion in Göttingen

E. Rothert und J. Ritter, Göttingen
in: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Geophysikalischen Gesellschaft, 1/1999, S. 9-14

On 30 December 1998, a powerful explosion (MD – 1.2 ± 0.2) rocked the urban area of Göttingen, hurling a city bus several meters into the air. Its three passengers suffered some serious injuries. The explosion caused a crater and destroyed large parts of the road surface. Despite extensive investigations, the cause of the explosion has so far remained unclear. Seismological data of the 17-tonne Wiechert seismograph and recordings at the station of the German Regional Seismic Network in Clausthal suggest a bomb from World Word II. This becomes particularly evident from the comparison with a bomb explosion that occurred in December 1992 just a few hundred metres away and shows very similar seismic waveforms and energy spectra.