If I'm understanding correctly, they have the exact hour of signal loses. Ships have predictable and registered routes, (except military). First thing to do should be to take a look to the ships in the area around this timestamp.
If trying to save people and all nations with science was not enough difficult, now with a 30% more of sabotage. Fantastic.
It is only really traceable through radiation, because our instruments are very accurate and the signal is very clean - it does not change much through natural causes.
Russia was my first thought, but you can't hide a submarine depth of 22 meters.
Conversely, get a small boat, commodity diving gear and 3 dudes, and this is easy to do. You get this kit for a few grand.
The depth is an issue because a submarine can't go deep enough to be undetected there. It'd be visible to aircraft and boats in water that shallow.
In this paragraph I was including the possibility of somebody blowing deliberately the station with dynamite for example.
Those things are expensive so the question to ask here is if the station is still lying in the seafloor or was removed by somebody. If is possible to recover it, even partially, could make a big difference for the research team.
I remember putting into the ocean a cylinder full of sensors. It was relatively small, an R2-D2 sized thing or so. The main researcher of the oceanographic campaign was literally sweating with the idea of some chain breaking in the process and losing the small cube property of the university. Each time it was used was like dumping the economic equivalent to a luxury car in the open sea hanging on a chain and hoping that all went ok, several times in a day.
Speed of temperature, speed of water would be possible results of a nuclear detonation, no?
And methane could be a side effect of dislodging some barrier to a deposit?
I’m admittedly out of my element, but it seems like those are metrics that could be affected by an accident (or test) of that nature.
It's roughly a thousand mile trip by water from Kiel, Germany to Nenoksa, Russia... and the incident in Russia wasn't a nuclear explosion of the sort you'd see in a bomb, it was an explosion that involved radioactive material.
Doesn't seem like this thing would've collected much interesting data about a nuclear explosion.