North Korean volcano may be about to erupt

A mysterious volcano that lies between North Korea and China has brought together western and North Korean forces to study possible future eruptions.

Mount Paektu, a dormant volcano for the time being, has brought together an international team of scientists to study whether or not the volcano is dangerous and if eruption is imminent.

The volcano first showed signs of an eruption in the beginning of the 2000s and it was at this point that the North Korean government decided to break its isolation from the rest of the world to ask for help from outside its borders. The concern came after North Korea feared a similar eruption to that of one back in 946 AD where massive amounts of ash and lava covered 96 cubic kilometers.

Since the more recent forewarning, the team of researchers from the United States, China and the United Kingdom have studied the volcano and published findings in Science Advances discussing in detail the first-ever survey of the volcano’s subsurface structure, according to The Washington Post. 

Seismologists have also been brought in to investigate the region and find out exactly how the volcano came to exist in this particular area. This is because the Mount Paektu volcano is not located where tectonic plates collide which is where volcanos, on Earth and also on other planets, tend to exist.

What they have found is that the volcano isn’t so dormant as first believed and have discovered melted crust and molten magma almost 20km across inside.

The authors suggest that with the amount of energy residing within the volcano will mean that it is getting ready to potentially become active.

“[The study] suggest that partial melt is present in the crust beneath Mt. Paektu. This region of melt represents a potential source of magmas erupted in the last few thousand years and may be associated with an episode of volcanic unrest observed between 2002 and 2005.”

The insularity of North Korea lead to this volcano becoming a great enigma with many volcanologists not even knowing it existed. It has now, however, allowed the rest of the world to see inside North Korea and form scientific ties with the country.