National news is filled with stories about how North Korean despot Kim Jong Un has announced that his nation will no longer conduct nuclear tests and will be shutting down its primary site at the 7,200 foot-high Mount Mantap. World political leaders are applauding the news and are portraying Kim as making a bold and decisive step towards peace. Is the gesture by Kim, however, based on a genuine interest in lofty goals of peace or is it based on a more grounded development?
The Dangers of Stress Live Science reports that what is being sold as a gesture of peace may be glossing over realities on, or rather, in the ground of Mount Mantap.
Some scientists are noting that repeated nuclear tests deep in the bowels of the mountain have exerted enormous stress on the landscape feature. “The accumulated effect of these explosions that weaken rocks and create that fracturing [farther away from the point of explosion] is what we call tired mountain syndrome,” Dale Anderson, a seismologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Live Science. Fissures formed by massive explosions allow gases and forms of radiation to leak from the mountain through a process called barometric pumping.
YouTube[/caption] Chinese Alarmed On April 25, Chinese scientists reported that testing facility in Mt. Mantap had in fact collapsed and that the mountain was in shambles. The site, which sits close to the Chinese border, is said to have Chinese authorities concerned over radiation plumes traveling into the China. But American scientists have dismissed the report, saying that the mountain is tired, but not to the point of being unusable.
North Korea’s last test came in September 2017 at Punggye-ri and was reportedly “17 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, according to The Washington Post.” The test, which unleashed a blast equivalent to a magnitude-6.3 earthquake, is said to have caused ‘visible movement’ on the mountain.
The Independent[/caption] A Lot of Mountain Left? The energy from such subterranean explosions shatters surrounding rock as the energy wave travels out like a ripple on water. As additional tests are conducted at the same site, the damage to the rock spreads further and further out until the site has to be abandoned or collapses. Anderson told the Canadian Broadcast Company last year that Mt. Mantap is not tired and “that’s because they’ve only had, as far as we know, six underground nuclear explosions, and there’s a lot of mountain left there.”
The Independent[/caption] But Anderson did acknowledge that mountains “with this condition become much more permeable, meaning that more pathways open up for gas and liquid to travel through the rock. This means there’s a greater chance for radioactive gas — with the most concerning being xenon — to escape the rock and seep out to the surface.” Anderson states that the site, if weakened, could still be used by adjusting the “mathematical equations they [nuclear scientists] use so that the final magnitude of explosion takes tired mountain syndrome into account.”
The Independent[/caption] While North Korea is an infamously ‘hermit kingdom’ with information from within unable to escape, like light from a black hole, the West does have the ability to uncover what truly happened at Mount Mantap.
What do you think?
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