North Korean, Western scientists join forces to solve bizarre volcano mystery
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0416/North-Korean-Western-scientists-join-forces-to-solve-bizarre-volcano-mysteryTake, for example, Mount Paektu, which sits on the border of North Korea and China. This massive volcano, called Changbaishan in China, erupted in one of the biggest, most violent eruptions in human history.
And recently it rumbled again.
These new tremors have prompted an unprecedented international scientific study of the mountain. A team of Western, Chinese, and North Korean scientists deployed six seismometers on the North Korean side of the volcano for the first time, in an effort to better understand the rocky beast. The team jointly published their first paper Friday in the journal Science Advances, describing the never-before-studied structures beneath the North Korean side.
"To understand a volcano, you need to look at it from all sides," says study co-author James Hammond, a seismologist at Birkbeck College, University of London, in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor.
"It's the first glimpse of the volcano on the Korean side. It gives us a much better picture of what's going on beneath the volcano."
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It’s rare to see a partially melted type of magma with such a large fluid component throughout the whole crust, he says.
At the moment, though, there’s no pool of liquid magma gathering near the surface – often a prelude to an eruption.
“One of the challenges now is to go beyond simply saying there’s magma in the crust, discovering instead how it’s sitting, how much there is and what are the implications,” says Hammond. “It’s only when it gets to a certain amount and a certain overpressure that it will erupt.”
At present, the researchers are not sure how much has to accumulate before the volcano erupts, he says.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2084529-waking-supervolcano-makes-north-korea-and-west-join-forces/
This one must be currently malfunctioning (where's Bond?)
The Shoshone River, near Yellowstone National Park, suddenly and without warning started boiling, changed color and began to emit a sulfuric odor on March 25. Nearby witnesses wondered if they were “all going to die.” The current consensus among geologists and other experts is that a portion of the Shoshone River began to boil, located near Cody, Wyoming, and a new Yellowstone vent has opened up.
It’s difficult to say whether or not the recent boiling of the river near Yellowstone is an indication of something concerning or just, as geologists claim to believe, another of many vents related to the caldera doing what they do, as they’ve always done. Much of our current understanding of the Yellowstone supervolcano has come to light over the last century, and new information and data is being compiled and poured over daily.
Only time will tell whether or not the boiling in the Shoshone River near Yellowstone National Park is part of a bigger trend of geologic change in the region.
http://www.inquisitr.com/3001963/river-near-yellowstone-national-park-begins-to-boil-sparks-concerns-video/
