A meizanologist's diary (123)

5 April: On the way to KIX via the southern route, we're flying across Korea about as close to its northern border as is legal or wise. Alas, window seats in these buffs are a bit of a toss-up. Either the windows freeze up on you, or – as in the case of Seat 41A today – there is no window at all, as the plane’s engineers didn’t seem to trust themselves with one in this part of the fuselage.

Fortunately, by leaning forward into somebody else’s airspace, I can just see above the cloud deck a distant and solitary peak to the north, surmounted by an eyebrow wisp of lenticular cloud. Judging by the direction and altitude, this can be none other than Mt Paektu (2,744 metres), the Paradeberg of North Korea.

Sorry, there’s no question of bringing a camera to bear – to do so, I’d have to mug the passenger in front – but it’s gratifying even to have managed a glimpse of this elusive peak. Few Europeans get closer than this. 

One who did, though, is Clive Oppenheimer, professor of volcanology at Cambridge, who worked with DPRK scientists to establish exactly when the volcano’s last great outburst, the devastating “Millennium Eruption”, took place.

The scientists went about this task by taking a carbon sample from a larch tree buried in that cataclysm. With the help of a lab in Zurich, this helped to establish the year as between CE 946 and 947. A researcher in Japan then supplied the missing clue: a chronicle maintained by the Kōfukuji in Kyoto records that, on 3 November in that year, “white ash fell gently like snow”…

For the full story of this volcanological detective work – the time-chronicling varves of Lake Suigetsu also get a look-in – it’s best to read the lively write-up in Professor Oppenheimer’s Mountains of Fire. Subtitled The Secret Lives of Volcanoes, the book will give you a much better close-up view of North Korea’s secretive volcano than any window seat on a bucketing buff.