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IPFS News Link • Korea/North Korea

North Korea Is So Afraid of This Volcano, It Asked Western Scientists for Help

• motherboard.vice.com

It was in the trees and valleys below this peak that, North Korean histories also claim, his father, Kim Il-Sung, lead an army of guerilla fighters based out of a secret mountain encampment on dangerous missions against colonizing Japanese forces.

But Mount Paektu also has a much broader, and perhaps even more violent, place in global history. Around 946 AD, this towering volcano caused one of the largest eruptions of the past couple millennia and spewed ash as far as Japan. A decade ago, it started rumbling once again. A 2010 study suggested that the volcano is "capable of rapidly producing catastrophic, explosive eruptions in the foreseeable future."

Those rumbles, absent at the moment, prompted a rare collaboration between the reclusive North Korean state, who had a pressing interest in understanding the risk that it presented, and the West. The first of the studies to come from this joint effort was published Friday in the journal Science Advances.


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