Radiation Map of the World
127 points by slater 5 days ago | 40 comments

defrost 13 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.

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DJBunnies 12 hours ago
I see you've played knifey-spoony before.
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tialaramex 8 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?"

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NoPicklez 3 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
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defrost 2 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.

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blincoln 9 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.

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glitchc 11 hours ago
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moffkalast 9 hours ago
> Video unavailable It was blocked due to the claimed content by VA Media.

Crikey

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bluecollarworke 12 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.

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andy99 12 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.
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Grombobulous 7 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.
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moffkalast 9 hours ago
I removed the ToS overlay with ublock and frankly you're not missing much, very sparse data, mostly just green everywhere.
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goodmythical 10 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.

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pugworthy 9 hours ago
I think I finally know how The Prisoner was recorded in the database.
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Stitch4223 13 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.

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Karliss 10 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.

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Noaidi 9 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.

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phyzome 13 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.

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zhivota 12 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.
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nomel 11 minutes 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! ;)

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defrost 12 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 )

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iterance 10 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.

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defrost 2 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 )

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schiffern 12 hours ago

  >THE WORLD’S RADIATION MAP, MEASURED BY ITS PEOPLE
I'm waiting for the one by others, but thanks.
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ethanj8011 9 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.

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DivingForGold 13 hours ago
Just more NAG SCREENS !
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clara04 4 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.
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leonidasrup 10 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-...

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assimpleaspossi 4 hours ago
Only 403 contribute in the USA. Is that enough to be of value now?
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RonanSoleste 4 hours ago
3 popups about consent later i just closed the site
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jareklupinski 12 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 :)

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adonovan 4 hours ago
What’s the source? The museum’s granite facing?
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lovich 10 hours ago
I’m surprised no one visited this site

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

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laxisOp 7 hours ago
This is cool. What are the other cool maps exists like this?
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groestl 3 hours ago
> Keeping the map honest

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

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Noaidi 10 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.
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Zeruxe 9 hours ago
This is quite interesting.
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woodpanel 12 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

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Onavo 11 hours ago
Any more affordable alternatives to the radiacode scintillator devices?
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waltervc 12 hours ago
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paultnylund 4 hours ago
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