BOSTON » When North Korea detonated its third nuclear test bomb last week, the blast was picked up by seismic sensors all over the world.

That included 96 of 170 stations operated under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a pact adopted by the United Nations in 1996.

While the treaty — still missing key participants — has yet to go into force, its huge $1 billion network of sensors routinely takes the pulse of the planet, measuring such events as the meteor over Russia on Friday and the magnitude-8.0 earthquake in the South Pacific on Feb. 6.

Now scientists are lauding the treaty’s Vienna-based implementing organization for expanding its nontreaty role to more closely monitor the environment and better measure and help manage natural disasters.

"In the stretch of just nine days in February, we had three major events that have demonstrated how the monitoring system of the CTBT is used and can be used," said Lassina Zerbo, director of the treaty organization’s International Data Center. "Those three events were significantly recorded by our system and show how we can be useful for civilian and scientific applications."

Zerbo, a native of Burkina Faso in West Africa, spoke Sunday at a session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center.

The session addressed how nuclear test sensors — rarely used these days for their intended purpose — can be directed toward disaster warning and science.

For instance, the system’s radioactivity sensors picked up the atmospheric plume from the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster after the devastating Japanese quake and tsunami in March 2011.

It also detected the collapse of a coal mine in Crandall, Utah, in 2007 that killed six miners and three rescue workers.

That disaster "showed how exquisitely refined the technology is," said panelist Raymond Jeanloz, an earth sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The treaty organization’s International Monitoring System showed the event was not an explosion, implosion, nor the result of an earthquake, he said.

"It was really, very distinctly, two surfaces slapping together, like a ceiling collapsing onto the ground of an underground cavity," he said. "The seismologists at considerable distance from the mine knew better than the people on the ground at the mine what was going on underground."

In September the operator of the mine reached a $1.1 million settlement with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration over safety violations.

Jeanloz said the treaty organization first began to address civilian needs after the December 2004 South Asian tsunami, "which literally was recorded roaring across the Indian Ocean."

He added, "In hindsight, it became evident that the capability that the IMS has and the CTBT has — and quite broadly the research community — could have saved lives, perhaps hundreds if not thousands of lives."

Since then the monitoring system has joined the tsunami warning network, he said.

But there is much more that can be done in terms of monitoring earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, climate change, water and other resource management, detecting and controlling pollution and tracking the spread of dust and microbes in the atmosphere.

The system easily tracked the Russian meteorite, which he said now looks like a once-in-a-century event.

Another panelist, David Strangway, former chief of NASA’s Geophysics Branch, said the scientific and disaster response applications of the nuclear test sensors could rival the civilian spinoffs from the Apollo moon program.

And panelist Miaki Ishii of Harvard University said the system has already revealed new information about the deepest regions of the planet.

The monitoring system, which the organization says is about 90 percent complete, consists of 337 facilities around the globe, including 170 seismic stations, 80 "radionuclide" or radioactivity-sensing stations, 11 hydro-acoustic stations for detecting noises underwater, and 60 "infrasound" stations that can detect volcanic eruptions, chemical explosions, meteorites and severe storms. It also has a number of affiliated laboratories.

Hawaii has two stations, infrasound station 59 in a forested area in West Hawaii island, and a radionuclide station (RN79) on Oahu.

The infrasound station recorded the low-frequency signal from the Russian meteorite, station chief Milton Garces, an associate researcher with the University of Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, confirmed Wednesday after poring through data.

"Think of the earth as a spherical gong," he said by telephone. "It’s hit by a space rock and it just rings. One of the ringing modalities of the earth is the sound wave we got here."

He added, "The last time we saw something like this was after the Japanese earthquake, which we picked up loud and clear in Hawaii."

Jeanloz, who is also chairman of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on International Security and Arms Control, said the system has proven that it can monitor compliance to the treaty if it ever goes into effect.

"How do we know it’s proven?" he said. "The point is there is a whole background of volcanic eruptions, of earthquakes and other kinds of explosions that constantly pulse the system and allow us to characterize the system. So we are quite confident about this capability."

The system can even discern earthquakes that take place near nuclear test sites like the one in North Korea by studying the waves that ripple through the earth’s crust, he said.

"Just as you and I are looking at each other, I don’t have to focus a beam of light on you in order to be able to see you," he said. "I can see you from the secondary scattering from the light rays in the room. And that is exactly the methodology our seismology colleagues have been able to use."

The test ban treaty has been signed by 183 nations and ratified by 159.

The United States has signed but not ratified it. Other nations that need to take action before the pact can go into effect are China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.