“The quake is small enough to suspect that it could have been caused by a tunnel collapse, and satellite data shows there have been many landslides in the area since the nuclear test.”

China’s official Xinhua News Agency said the country’s seismic service detected a magnitude 3.4 quake in North Korea and saw the likely cause as an explosion. Chinese earthquake officials said the magnitude 3.4 quake detected at 0829 GMT was a "suspected explosion" but both the CTBTO, which monitors nuclear tests, and a South Korean meteorological agency official said they believed it was a natural quake. "A key method is to look at the seismic waves or seismic acoustic waves and the latter can be detected in the case of a manmade earthquake," said the South Korean official, who asked for anonymity. Analysts examining satellite images of North Korea’s mountainous test site after the latest nuclear test said they spotted landslides and surface disturbances that were more numerous and widespread than what was seen from any of the five previous tests. The site of the quake is near where North Korea on Sept. 3 conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test in what it said was the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon. Kim’s foreign minister told reporters this past week that the North’s response to Trump “could be the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb in the Pacific.”

North Korea has said it intends to build a missile capable of striking all parts of the United States with a nuclear bomb. Hours later, Kim responded by saying Trump was “deranged.”

In a speech last week at the United Nations, Trump had issued the warning of potential obliteration and mocked the North’s young autocrat as a “Rocket Man” on a “suicide mission.”

Trump’s executive order expanded the Treasury Department’s ability to target anyone conducting significant trade in goods, services or technology with North Korea, and to ban them from interacting with the U.S. financial system.
An earthquake is detected in North Korea which China's earthquake authority believes is due to a North Korean nuclear test. South Korea states that it could be a natural earthquake.