Fallout from the world's first nuclear bomb test may have stretched far further than originally thought, reaching at least 46 states, plus Canada and Mexico, according to a new, preliminary study involving a national team of researchers released just before the debut of a major movie chronicling that test.

The U.S. conducted more than 100 nuclear tests on its own soil between 1945 and 1962, but it's difficult to track exposure risks associated with the tests because data has often been inaccessible to researchers. In other cases, there were few monitors to collect the data in the first place.

The scientists combined government data, historical weather fields, and atmospheric modeling to track 94 tests in New Mexico and Nevada that were powerful enough to create mushroom clouds — including the famous "Trinity" test, the world's first nuclear detonation that turned out to be far more powerful than scientists had originally estimated.

The irradiated cloud that was produced by the Trinity detonation, which took place in New Mexico in July 1945 and was overseen by Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called "father of the atomic bomb" who is the subject of the new Christopher Nolan movie of the same name, likely rose 50,000 to 70,000 feet into the atmosphere.

“It’s a huge finding and, at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise anyone,” Sébastien Philippe, a scientist at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and the study's lead author, told the New York Times.

The study considers how nuclear fallout moved through North America in the direct aftermath of the detonations, but the researchers warned that they haven't yet determined how much of that radiation remains in areas of the country with historically high levels of fallout.

The study is currently being submitted to journals for peer review, but the researchers told the Times that they also eventually plan to study the more than 100 nuclear tests that the U.S. conducted in the Marshall Islands and other Pacific sites in the mid-20th century.

The scientists said they determined that plutonium fallout from Trinity reached as far as Crawford Lake outside of Toronto, offering more evidence for recent claims that the Anthropocene — the epoch in which humans began having a direct impact on climate change and species loss — began there in the early 1950s.