The next test could trigger the volcanic eruption of Mount Paektu.
North Korea has been testing its
nuclear bombs along with its ICBM’s at a rapid pace to match the
increasing belligerence of its dictator, Kim Jong Un.
However, North Korea’s top scientists did not factor in the
geologic consequences of their continued testing.
A mountain in North Korea believed to have served as the site of
five of the rogue regime’s nuclear tests — including Sunday’s
supposed hydrogen bomb explosion — is at risk of collapsing and
leaking radiation into the region, a Chinese scientist said Monday.
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China
in Hefei, Anhui province, examined the Punggye-ri site and said they
“were confident” underground detonations were occurring underneath
the mountain, South China Morning Post reported. Wang Naiyan, a
former chairman of the China Nuclear Society and a researcher on
China’s own nuclear weapons program, said another test underneath
the mountain can cause an “environmental disaster” if the site caves
in on itself, allowing radiation to escape and “drift across the
region,” including into China.
“We call it ‘taking the roof off.’ If the mountain collapses and
the hole is exposed, it will let out many bad things.” Wang told the
South China Morning Post.
Any geologist will tell you that extreme heat and pressure will cause
enormous changes in the surrounding rock. In the case of a nuclear
explosion, the rock immediately surrounding the detonation will entirely
vaporize, forming a cavity. Adjacent to the detonation zone, there will
be areas of fractured, weakened, and irreversibly strained rock. As
North Korea has tested 5 bombs, the area under that mountain must look
like the geologic equivalent of Swiss cheese.
In fact, preliminary analysis of the area around the site show
troubling
signs of instability.
38 North said lower resolution satellite images posted on its
site appear to show numerous landslides and surface disturbances in
the mountain’s gravel and broken rock fields. The website is a
clearing house for North Korea analysis and is part of the
U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies.
While it might be fun to think of Pyongyang self-irradiating into
oblivion, it appears that there is an additional component to this
scenario that may cause real man-made global climate change. The testing
may be impacting the magma chambers associated with a
volcano named Mount Paektu (located on the border of North Korea and
China).
The rare international scientific collaboration revealed that the
magma chamber plumbing system beneath this mountain is far from
dead; seismic imaging suggests that it has a fiery soul that’s tens
of kilometres across and several kilometres deep. Someday, all that
magma is going to burst forth at the surface. The key question here,
as always, is when?
Well, bizarrely, thanks to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program,
it might be any day now. According to a separate study conducted
over the last couple of years, the country’s underground weapons
tests are sending powerful pressure waves towards Paektu’s massive
magma chamber. This pressure is essentially being transferred to the
magma, and at a certain point, it could cause the rock surrounding
the partly liquid doom to crack, and thereby trigger an eruption.
The last massive eruption of Mt. Pektu was hundreds of years ago, but
was powerful enough to spew debris as far as Japan. The mountain has
been long dormant, but a series of earthquake swarms between 2002 and
2005 indicated that the
magma may be rising again.
As a reminder of what a mountain collapse can look like, I turn to
1980’s Mt. St. Helens:
Imagine this, with airborne debris mixed with radioactive
particulates.
With the recent geologic input, no wonder the China seems to be
taking a more robust interest in containing and controlling its neighbor
to the north.