Weeks after North Korea’s sixth and largest nuclear test, the ground is still rumbling. Two small earthquakes have occurred since then.
Mt. Paektu is an active volcano that occupies a revered place in Korean legend as the birthplace of the Korean people. But it may be paying a price for their division.
Located on the border of North Korea and China, the volcano has been appropriated by Pyongyang as the “sacred mountain of the revolution.” Propagandists for the Communist state spin a tale, most likely apocryphal, that the late leader Kim Jong Il was born there while his father was a guerrilla fighting the Japanese.
The sacred mountain, however, is just 60 miles from the site where North Korea, now led by Kim’s son, Kim Jong Un, tested its sixth and most powerful nuclear weapon on Sept. 3.
Shortly afterward, Chinese authorities closed part of the tourist park on their side of the border because of rock slides. Chinese authorities would not say definitively whether the nuclear test was to blame, but seismologists think it is likely. The explosion registered as a 6.3 magnitude earthquake and was blamed for water bottles rolling off tables and furniture toppling in China, and apartment buildings rattling all the way to the Russian port city of Vladivostok.
It is just one example of the way that North Korea’s headlong rush to become a nuclear power is degrading the environment in and around the country’s borders.
The first casualty is inside North Korea itself, around the rugged, granite mountains of North Hamgyong province. All six of North Korea’s nuclear tests have taken place there at a site known as Punggye-Ri. Satellite images taken after the last test show numerous landslides around the site as well as water leaking from the entrance to one of the tunnels, according to 38 North, an academic website on Korea run by John Hopkins University.
“These disturbances are more numerous and widespread than seen after any of the North’s previous five tests, and include additional slippage in pre-existing landslide scars and a possible subsidence crater,’’ the report said.
Another analysis of satellite data found that Mt. Mantap, a 7,000-foot peak above the test site, actually lost a little elevation from the force of the underground explosion.
“It did move the mountain,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Middlebury center’s East Asia Nonproliferation Program. He believes, however, that there has been no significant leakage of radiation because the test took place in a tunnel more than 3,000 feet below and notes that the visible damage was less extensive than after underground tests in Pakistan. “The North Koreans seem to be pretty good at this. They’ve buried their test site well,” he said.
After the nuclear test, the ground around the test site continued to rumble. Seismologists were particularly stumped by a tremor recorded Sept.
