The signals underneath the news.

A live query of the USGS earthquake catalog for the Fordow box (34.4-35.4N, 50.4-51.5E) across 13-24 June returns zero events. The 22 June GBU-57 strikes did not register teleseismically.

The independent European-Mediterranean network returns no cataloged event at Fordow either; its only nearby events in the window were natural M3.2 and M3.3 quakes 130-150 km away.

Mehdi Zare of Iran's Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology said local stations recorded over 1,500 explosion-induced tremors during the 12 days; blasts near Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan reached only about magnitude 2.

A widely-shared claim that stations recorded magnitude 4.3 from the strikes appears in no primary seismic catalog and is attributed to no named agency. Treat it as an unverified viral number.

The magnitude-2.5 tremor near Qom that many outlets pinned on the US strike was reported by Iran's Seismological Center on 16 June, coinciding with Israeli airstrikes near Fordow, not the 22 June US strike.

A genuine earthquake on 20 June, magnitude 4.9 in the USGS catalog and 5.1 in EMSC's, was a natural tectonic event near Semnan, about 200 km east of Fordow, unrelated to any strike and widely misreported as being at the site.

No seismic signal consistent with an underground nuclear explosion was recorded in Iran during June 2025; the absence of any large isotropic event rules out 'accidental nuclear test' speculation, using the same discriminant the CTBTO uses for test-ban monitoring.

Georgia Tech's IODA measured Iranian internet usage collapsing to roughly 97% below normal at the peak of the shutdown around 18 June.

Disruptions began the morning of 13 June, deepened by 16 June, dropped sharply again on the evening of 17 June, and reached a near-total nationwide shutdown by about 12:50 UTC on 18 June.

Unlike 2019, Iran did not withdraw its BGP routes, so it still looked 'reachable' to routing monitors. Access was severed at the border with DNS poisoning, protocol whitelisting and deep packet inspection.

Iran's National Information Network kept government portals and internal platforms working, and the central bank said banking was 'functioning normally' even as foreign sites were unreachable.

WhatsApp, Instagram and the app stores were blocked, with state TV urging Iranians to delete WhatsApp; VPN-related searches spiked about 707% as people tried to get around the wall.

On 14 June Elon Musk said Starlink was activated over Iran; only the estimated 10,000-20,000 users with existing clandestine dishes could connect, and Iran floated a fake Starlink app to bait users.

Traffic began recovering around 21 June and full service appeared restored by about 25 June, after the ceasefire. This war outage is separate from a far longer January 2026 blackout that sources often conflate.

On the night of 15-16 June, 30-plus USAF KC-135 and KC-46 tankers were tracked on public flight software crossing the Atlantic to Europe and onward, a visible force-posture shift days before the strike.

In the early hours of 21 June, two flights of B-2s (callsigns MYTEE 11 and 21) departed Whiteman AFB westbound and were followed by open-source trackers to Guam. This was later confirmed to be a decoy.

The seven B-2s that struck Iran flew east from Whiteman with transponders off, invisible on ADS-B. An enthusiast in Missouri visually counted about nine B-2s heading east while the world watched the westbound decoys.

Operation Midnight Hammer involved 125-plus aircraft; the seven B-2s flew roughly 37 hours round-trip with multiple refuelings that happened outside ADS-B receiver range over open ocean, which is why they went unseen.

Immediately after Israel's opening strikes, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Israel closed their airspace; Flightradar24 imagery showed the region empty of commercial traffic that Friday. Ben Gurion closed and Israeli carriers flew their fleets out empty.

With Iran and Iraq closed, daily overflights of Saudi Arabia jumped from about 700 in mid-May to about 1,400, and flights over Afghanistan spiked nearly 500%, as traffic was funneled around the war.

On 23 June, Qatar closed its airspace before Iran's missiles reached Al Udeid, and the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq followed; the closures reopened about an hour later. Satellite imagery showed Al Udeid pre-evacuated of aircraft.

Maritime intelligence firm Windward found roughly 970-1,000 vessels a day experiencing GPS jamming or spoofing in the Gulf and Strait in mid-June, concentrated near Bandar Abbas.

Spoofing put impossible positions on screens: supertankers circling over dry land, cargo ships crossing airports, vessels drifting through a nuclear power plant. Prof. Todd Humphreys judged it 'almost certainly' Iranian.

On 17 June the crude supertanker Front Eagle collided with the tanker Adalynn near the Strait after sustained GPS/AIS jamming falsely placed Front Eagle inside Iran; there was a deck fire but no casualties.

Daily Strait transits dropped from 147 vessels on 9 June to 111 on 15 June as owners waited outside; tanker CEOs described roughly 20% less passage.

Hull war-risk premiums for the Gulf roughly doubled to 0.2% of vessel value, and VLCC Gulf-to-China freight rates jumped 24% in a single day on 13 June.

After the 22 June US strikes, Iran's parliament backed closing the Strait, but the decision rested with the Supreme National Security Council and Khamenei. The US called closure 'economic suicide'; the Strait was never physically closed.

The Strait is only about 21 miles wide at its narrowest and carries roughly 20% of the world's oil (about 20 million barrels a day) and 20% of its LNG, with 130-150 vessels transiting on an average day.

Brent closed at $70.84 on 12 June, spiked to about $76 as Israel struck on 13 June, peaked at $80.37 on 19 June, then settled at $69.13 by the 24 June ceasefire, below where it started.

WTI fell about 7.2% on 23 June, its biggest one-day drop since April, precisely as Iran struck Al Udeid, because the strike was telegraphed, caused no casualties, and left the Strait and oil facilities untouched.

European TTF gas rose about 18% to its highest since February by 19 June and Asian LNG hit a four-month high, then both fell roughly 20% back toward pre-crisis levels after the ceasefire.

On 13 June Northrop Grumman rose about 4%, Lockheed Martin 3.6% and RTX 3.3% while the S&P 500 fell; Israel's Elbit Systems later ran to record highs on war demand.

The Tel Aviv TA-35 and TA-125 gained about 3.2% over the war week and kept climbing, closing 2025 up roughly 52% at record highs, outpacing global markets.

The rial weakened from about 820,900 to the dollar to roughly 880,000 on the open market, and the Tehran Stock Exchange halted trading for about nine sessions under emergency rules, then fell over 15% after reopening.

Gold climbed to a multi-week high near $3,451 as a safe haven but did not exceed its April 2025 all-time record of $3,500, and eased on the ceasefire.

The IAEA reported that radioactivity outside Natanz stayed 'unchanged and at normal levels,' and Iranian regulators reported no increase outside Fordow, Natanz or Isfahan after the US strikes.

The IAEA said the main concern inside a struck enrichment plant is chemical: uranium hexafluoride reacting with moisture forms hydrogen fluoride, a highly toxic gas, with contamination confined to the damaged buildings.

The IAEA noted contamination stayed limited to damaged buildings; the deep-underground design of Fordow and Natanz both hardened them and trapped dispersed material, reducing off-site risk.

Iran's only operating power reactor was not targeted. It holds thousands of kilograms of nuclear material; Grossi warned a direct hit would cause 'a very high release of radioactivity,' and Russia's Rosatom called it a potential Chernobyl-scale catastrophe.

Analysts framed the physics plainly: enriched uranium is a weak alpha-emitter, while a power reactor contains thousands of kilograms of mobile, persistent fission products like cesium-137 and iodine-131. Hitting the former is contained; hitting the latter is catastrophic.

Because these were conventional munitions, the CTBTO's radionuclide monitoring network had no nuclear-test fission signature to detect. No CTBTO detection of a release from these strikes is on record.

Over 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium fell outside IAEA monitoring after the strikes, enough for roughly ten weapons if further enriched, its location uncertain and likely buried at Isfahan or Fordow. Iran suspended IAEA cooperation on 2 July.

Maxar imagery from 22 June showed six penetration holes in two clusters of three along the ridge over Fordow's underground hall, matching the two targeted ventilation shafts.

Gen. Dan Caine described 12 bombs walked into two shafts: the first removed the concrete cap, weapons two through five entered the shaft at over 1,000 feet per second and detonated inside, and a sixth was a backup. The surface crater pattern corroborated it.

Maxar imagery from 19-20 June showed about 16 cargo trucks at Fordow's tunnel entrance and bulldozers sealing entrances, which analysts read as intentional pre-strike backfilling.

NASA's VIIRS thermal sensor flagged an infrared anomaly about 3 km north of Fordow on the night of 21 June, estimated at about 1,200 K and 2 MW of radiative output, a pre-bombing event visible only from orbit.

Orbital Sidekick's hyperspectral constellation detected subsidence over an area about 315 by 275 m at Fordow, and concrete pushed to the surface, suggesting underground halls collapsed.

CSIS found virtually no rehabilitation at Fordow, Natanz or Isfahan through 30 September, but detected active tunneling at Pickaxe Mountain, about a mile south of Natanz, a possible new site.