The mysterious volcano that got Western scientists a rare invite to North Korea
With a roar that sounded like the pounding of a divine drum, the peak of towering Mount Paektu was blasted into the air. The resulting plume of volcanic material turned daytime into darkness and blanketed the landscape for hundreds of miles in a thick layer of snow-white ash. Meanwhile, a fast-moving flow of toxic gas and superheated rock rolled down the mountainside, obliterating everything in its path. An ancient emperor was said to be so alarmed by the devastation he set all convicts in the country free.
The “Millennium eruption”, thought to have occurred somewhere around 946 AD, was one of the largest in recorded history – second only to a blast from Mount Tambora in 1815. But little is known about its source, a 2740-metre volcano straddling the divide between China and North Korea. The mountain, like so much else beyond that border, has long been a mystery.
That is, until it started rumbling again in the early 2000s. Faced with the possibility of an eruption like it hasn’t seen in 1,000 years, the insular North Korean government took an almost unprecedented step: it asked for help from the rest of the world.
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It would take years – not to mention some intense scientific diplomacy – to get researchers out on Mount Paektu to map the layers of rock and magma beneath its surface.
“It was quite a special experience the first time,” co-author James Hammond of the University of London told CBS in 2014. “Very much a voyage into the unknown.”
On Friday, the unknown became a little less so. In the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers from North Korea, China, the US and Britain published the first-ever survey of the volcano’s subsurface structure.
First, the good news: the researchers failed to find any liquid magma pooling near the surface – which might have indicated that another catastrophic blow-up was in the works.
But they did find a significant layer of partially melted rock beneath the mountain that begs to be studied further.