Uncovering the secrets of Mount Paektu on the China, North Korea border
Its location on the border between China and North Korea means little is known about a volcano responsible for one of history's biggest eruptions
More than 1,000 years ago, a huge volcano straddling the border between North Korea and China was the site of one of the biggest eruptions in human history, blanketing eastern Asia in its ash.
But unlike other major volcanoes around the world, the remote and politically sensitive Mount Paektu remains almost a complete mystery to foreign scientists who have - until recently - been unable to conduct on-site studies.
Building the models of what happened previously allows us to address what might happen in the future
Fresh off their third visit to the volcano, two British scientists studying the mountain in an unprecedented joint project with North Korea say they may soon be able to reveal some of its secrets, including its likelihood of erupting again. They are collecting seismic data and studying rocks ejected in Paektu's "millennium eruption" sometime in the 10th century.
"It's one of the biggest eruptions in the last few thousands of years and we don't have yet a historical date for it," Clive Oppenheimer, a professor of vulcanology at Cambridge University, said after returning to Pyongyang last week from an eight-day trip to the volcano. "The rocks are a bit like the black box of a flight recording. There's so much that we can read from the field site itself."
For researchers, studying Paektu is a golden opportunity to break new ground because so much about it remains a puzzle.
Oppenheimer said it was not located along any of the tectonic locations that often explain volcanic activity, so just figuring out why it exists at all was one question that needed to be answered.
