Abstract

This talk will reflect on some of the challenges of working across difficult international borders on active volcanoes. It will focus in particular on Paektusan (Changbaishan) on the border between China and the DPRK (North Korea). This active volcano hosts a summit caldera with a lake, across which the international border runs, with about 1/3 of the edifice being in DPRK. With colleagues in both countries, we have been working on a project to try to understand better the past eruptive activity of the volcano. While a lot of work has been published on the Chinese side, there is very little from the Korean side, and yet some of the most substantial deposits are there. There are also important questions about the tectonic origins of the volcanism. This presentation will focus on the eruptive products and efforts to reconstruct the most recent activity, but will also draw on some of the complexities of working in borderlands more generally, particularly for volcano monitoring.