North Korean, Western scientists join forces to solve bizarre volcano mystery [View all]

[WhiteTara]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0416/North-Korean-Western-scientists-join-forces-to-solve-bizarre-volcano-mystery

Take, 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."