(SCMP)The single mountain under which North Korea most likely conducted its five most recent nuclear bomb tests, including the latest and most powerful on Sunday, could be at risk of collapsing, a Chinese scientist said.<\/p>\n
By measuring and analyzing the shock waves caused by the blasts, and picked up by quake stations in China and neighboring countries, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui province, said they were confident that they were all carried out from under the same mountain at the Punggye-ri test site.<\/p>\n
The team from the seismic and deep earth physics laboratory made the claim in a statement posted on their website on Monday. Its leader, geophysicist Wen Lianxing, said that based on data collected by more than 100 earthquake monitoring centres in China, the margin of error was no more than 100 metres.
\nWang Naiyan, the former chairman of the China Nuclear Society and senior researcher on China\u2019s nuclear weapons programme, said that if Wen\u2019s findings were reliable, there was a risk of a major environmental disaster.<\/p>\n
Another test might cause the whole mountain to cave in on itself, leaving only a hole from which radiation could escape and drift across the region, including China, he said.
\n\u201cWe call it \u2018taking the roof off\u2019. If the mountain collapses and the hole is exposed, it will let out many bad things.\u201d
\nSunday\u2019s blast was followed by an earthquake eight minutes later, which China\u2019s seismic authorities interpreted as a cave-in triggered by the explosion.<\/p>\n
Not every mountain was suitable for nuclear bomb testing. Wang said, adding that the peak had to be high, but the slopes relatively flat.
\nBased on the fact that North Korea has a limited land area and bearing in mind the sensitivity of its nuclear programme, it most likely does not have too many suitable peaks to choose from.
\nHow long the mountain would continue to stand would also depend on where the North Koreans placed the bombs, Wang said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the bombs were planted at the bottom of vertically drilled tunnels, the explosion would do less damage,\u201d he said.
\nBut vertical tunnels were difficult and expensive to build, and it was not easy to lay cables and sensors to collect data from the explosion, he said. Much easier was to bore a horizontal tunnel into the heart of the mountain, but this increased the risk of blowing off the top, he said.
\nThe increasing size of North Korea\u2019s nuclear bombs was also making \u201ctopping\u201d more likely, Wang said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA 100 kiloton bomb is a relatively large bomb. The North Korean government should stop the tests as they pose a huge threat not only to North Korea but to other countries, especially China,\u201d he said.
\nWang added a caveat, however, saying that the calculations made by Wen and his team could be wrong. Quake waves travel at different speeds through different rocks, so it was not easy to make precise predictions based on seismic data, he said.
\nIn the meantime, Chinese authorities, including the National Nuclear Safety Administration, would continue to closely monitor every nuclear test conducted by North Korea, Wang said.<\/p>\n
Radiation readings taken by the government on Monday showed nothing out of the ordinary.
\nWen\u2019s team estimated that the energy released in the latest test was about 108.3 kilotons of TNT, or 7.8 times the amount released by the atomic bomb dropped by the US on the Japanese city Hiroshima in 1945. It also dwarfed all previous bombs tested by the North Korean military.<\/p>\n
A team of scientists in Norway estimated the amount of energy released by the blast at Punggye-ri on Sunday at 10 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
\nWen, who is also a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University in New York state, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(SCMP)The single mountain under which North Korea most likely conducted its five most recent nuclear bomb tests, including the latest and most powerful on Sunday, could be at risk of collapsing, a Chinese scientist said. By measuring and analyzing the shock waves caused by the blasts, and picked up by quake stations in China and neighboring countries, researchers at the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":663,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}