NHacker Next
  • new
  • past
  • show
  • ask
  • show
  • jobs
  • submit
▲Radiation Map of the World (radiaverse.com)
defrost 20 hours ago [-]
That's not a radiation map of Australia ( https://radiaverse.com/country/au#2.82/-27.05/133.28 )

This is a radiation map of Australia: https://www.ga.gov.au/bigobj/GA13928.pdf ( gridded data available for d/load )

The first being a very few submitted tracks of handheld click counters with limited accuracy and no reporting of the peaks across the breadth of gamma spectrum; the second being a decades long high resolution 256 channel 40 litre crystal pack calibrated, normalised, geophysical survey of the entire continent.

DJBunnies 19 hours ago [-]
I see you've played knifey-spoony before.
19 hours ago [-]
tialaramex 16 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that Crocodile Dundee doesn't actually use the "That's not X, this is X" pairing [Dundee says "That" not "This" both times] but that's what we end up remembering and what imitators do to reference that line.

This one isn't on Wikipedia's list (at time of writing) unlike "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By'" or "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"

6 hours ago [-]
unpleasurable 5 hours ago [-]
I knew him well
anakaine 10 hours ago [-]
defrost 7 hours ago [-]
Good addition, cheers for that.

For context that above is processed and reduced data, for those that care.

The raw data (which was once online (and may still be, having shifted)) is full 256 channel counts + height + distance to ground + raw GPS packets + post processed GPS position + etc... straight out of the airframes (and additional "meta" data - the concurrent calibration runs, stripping weights, raw GPS base station packets, etc).

The data linked above is three values per grid cell post process - the full spectrums are normalised, then U-K-Th (Uranium, Potassium, Thorium) decay product peaks are extracted to reconstruct estimated U-K-Th values for a grid cell (and a pseudo colour image created from those three values)

Great for background environmental radiation mapping - useless for spotting out of band "stray" radiation events not of a natural origin.

For that you want to subtract a NASVD kernel from the data and look to the leftover peaks between the big three daughter decay peaks ( and similarly for removing radon smear, etc ).

NoPicklez 10 hours ago [-]
I was surprised to zoom in on Olympic Dam and not see anything measured given it is a uranium mine. But I guess its measured by the people
defrost 9 hours ago [-]
More is measured than is passed on, that is true.

The entirety of Fiji,and most of Mali should ideally also be online / available - but can be a tricky find (ditto many other places about the globe).

Before and after Pokhran-II India, (1998) should also be an interesting study that might be tricky to hoard the data for.

blincoln 17 hours ago [-]
That's incredible! Thank you for sharing.

I apologize if this is answered in the PDF, but I couldn't find an explanation there - any idea why fairly large chunks were omitted from the map? Some of them seem like population centers, others look like nature preserves.

glitchc 18 hours ago [-]
moffkalast 16 hours ago [-]
> Video unavailable It was blocked due to the claimed content by VA Media.

Crikey

bluecollarworke 20 hours ago [-]
> These Terms constitute a contractual agreement between you and RadiaCode. By accessing or using www.radiacode.com (the “Website”), you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you are not of eighteen years of age, or do not agree to the Terms, then you do not have permission to use the Website, and you must exit our Website immediately and uninstall the Application to the extent applicable.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, because if you are, you are VERBOTEN according to the terms of service.

andy99 19 hours ago [-]
I left at the terms of service. I just wanted to see a map, it’s not worth trying to figure out what rights they want to take from me in order to do a quick browse.
Grombobulous 14 hours ago [-]
If you had continued they probably took just about zero rights away from you. Anyone can put a bunch of unenforceable scary language in their EULA.
moffkalast 16 hours ago [-]
I removed the ToS overlay with ublock and frankly you're not missing much, very sparse data, mostly just green everywhere.
goodmythical 17 hours ago [-]
For a while there, perhaps still the case, there were officially no gay people in Russia.

The official stance was to keep no count and so the count remained NaN.

pugworthy 16 hours ago [-]
I think I finally know how The Prisoner was recorded in the database.
Stitch4223 21 hours ago [-]
The changing scales and meaning while zooming in and out makes it hard to derive conclusion from these measurements.

Sometimes it looks like somebody just used a more sensitive or uncalibrated device or is carrying a nuclear warhead around during an entire route of measuring.

Karliss 18 hours ago [-]
From my observations it also seems to vary a lot depending on how the person recording behaves. Some people just walk around logging reading along the way. Others go out of the way to find interesting above background level radioactive objects and place the measurement equipment right next to those. Like finding 2 pieces of granite having 6x the background level in a giant pile of other rocks.

Another interesting pattern I saw while browsing around was increased level next to every fancy cast iron light fixture along a specific bridge. The bridge was made mid 20th century so I don't think they are old enough to have used thorium gas light mantles.

Morromist 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder why colorado has so many red areas around hiking trails. Is it just one guy with a bad device who loves to hike or is it because there's bits of radioactive ore on the trails or something?
Noaidi 17 hours ago [-]
> From my observations it also seems to vary a lot depending on how the person recording behaves. Some people just walk around logging reading along the way.

I think if this is only what they allowed it would be a useful since it would measure real world exposure.

phyzome 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and I was hoping that you could still look at high-level averaging over a country ("maybe the bad data will average out") but when I looked at a few hotspots it appears that those all came down to a couple uncalibrated-looking devices.

Not very useful or interesting in its current form, unfortunately.

zhivota 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah I checked some tracks and it basically looked like the longer someone spent in a place, the higher the readings got. Maybe when the device doesn't get a lot of ventilation it starts to misread.
nomel 8 hours ago [-]
Or they zeroed in on something interesting, since finding interesting radioactive bits is the primary use of the device. One I saw in CA was confirmed to be a uranium deposit, by geological survey, on a random trail near some houses.

If you don't believe any of this naturally occurring phenomenon for some reason, there are several YouTube channels that check out these places, and try to find their own high activity areas/objects. There also subreddits dedicated to it,'and even a map where you can find places! ;)

Jimmc414 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this explains why many of the higher radioactivity sites in my state are hotels.
defrost 19 hours ago [-]
Pretty much, there are no shortage of ways to merge such data badly.

Many devices, uncalibrated and drifting, poor time normalisation to address counts accumulating when lingering, ... ffs they probably don't even adjust for cosmic or radon ...

( TBF the last two are pretty picky objections unless you're going hardcore geophysical professional )

iterance 18 hours ago [-]
Your general point is true, but in this case the devices are not really sensitive enough for radon to matter and the same is usually true for cosmic radiation.

When capturing open-air terrestrial tracks they are more or less uranium and thorium detectors.

defrost 9 hours ago [-]
If only I'd had the foresight to indicate that cosmic & radon removal weren't something to fuss about on handheld consumer click counters <doh> - thank you for chipping that in.

Might be worth pointing out the principle reason preventing radon removal from a click counter, no matter how sensitive, is the lack of a channeled spectrum bucketing counts by energy level, and the main reason cosmic cannot be removed is the lack of channeled stacked height descent readings allowing a ground level current cosmic estimate.

> When capturing open-air terrestrial tracks they are more or less uranium and thorium detectors.

and Potassium also- just all bundled together as a total count with no discernment.

Still, perhaps one day in the future, just as modern GPS carry a coarse ground / ellipsoid separation model in order to return 0 elevation at the seashore, perhaps rad counters will carry a coarse global radiation background model to focus on counts over and above the expected.

( again, unlikely due to lack of real sensitivity and channel bucketing )

ethanj8011 16 hours ago [-]
> Radiaverse turns those tracks into one shared map, with the places worth knowing about described by the people who found them.

This Claude sentence would be greatly improved by deleting everything after the comma. That clause adds nothing informationally and in some sense is using a very weird definition of describe and found.

schiffern 19 hours ago [-]

  >THE WORLD’S RADIATION MAP, MEASURED BY ITS PEOPLE
I'm waiting for the one by others, but thanks.
DivingForGold 20 hours ago [-]
Just more NAG SCREENS !
4 hours ago [-]
RonanSoleste 11 hours ago [-]
3 popups about consent later i just closed the site
assimpleaspossi 11 hours ago [-]
Only 403 contribute in the USA. Is that enough to be of value now?
leonidasrup 17 hours ago [-]
Many interesting high radiation places are missing in the map, Ramsar - Iran, beaches in south Kerala - India.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-why-india-wants-to-...

jareklupinski 19 hours ago [-]
watch out for this hotspot in nyc!

https://radiaverse.com/map#15.65/40.782/-73.974

who knew we kept such things just lying around :)

adonovan 11 hours ago [-]
What’s the source? The museum’s granite facing?
lovich 17 hours ago [-]
I’m surprised no one visited this site

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/primo-autobody-repair

clara04 11 hours ago [-]
I recall there were studies about the dissemination of radiative remnants from nuclear disasters traveling across oceans to the globe. It'd be nice to have some kind of historical view on the map to monitor the process over past periods and future.
_false 7 hours ago [-]
this makes no sense, but at least it's provocative and it gets the people going
laxisOp 14 hours ago [-]
This is cool. What are the other cool maps exists like this?
Noaidi 17 hours ago [-]
If anyone want to fund a homeless guy buying one of these devices to use while he drive around the United States I could sure add a lot of contribution to the science. Let me know. I would love to help with this and be somehow useful in a society that finds me useless.
groestl 10 hours ago [-]
> Keeping the map honest

I love me an honest map, it's absolutely load bearing for me.

dreamcompiler 6 hours ago [-]
The detectors they use seem to measure only gamma. Not alpha or beta or neutrons. Which is not surprising since cheap handheld detectors usually only measure gamma.

This map is entertaining but it's not terribly useful scientifically.

Onavo 18 hours ago [-]
Any more affordable alternatives to the radiacode scintillator devices?
Zeruxe 17 hours ago [-]
This is quite interesting.
woodpanel 19 hours ago [-]
Curious as to why Germany seems to be the only large country with almost full coverage.

If all the data is crowdsourced it’s probably the German Atom-Angst

boxed 5 hours ago [-]
Germans are particularly paranoid about nuclear power, that's why they shut down nuclear reactors during an energy crisis. Ironically this meant using coal which spreads far more radioactive material into the air than their nuclear power plants.
9 hours ago [-]
waltervc 19 hours ago [-]
[dead]
paultnylund 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact
Rendered at 09:22:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.