North Korea have reached out to the West and asked them for help in preventing a potentially cataclysmic volcanic eruption from occurring, after one of world’s most dangerous volcano’s began rumbling again recently. Mount Paektu, a 9,000 foot volcano on the border between China and North Korea, last erupted in 946 AD – causing one of the world’s largest eruptions in the last 2,000 years. According to a 2010 study, that same volcano is about to blow again, which is capable of “rapidly producing catastrophic, explosive eruptions in the foreseeable future.” Vice reports: Those rumbles, absent at the moment, prompted a rare collaboration between the reclusive North Korean state, who had a pressing interest in understanding the risk that it presented, and the West. The first of the studies to come from this joint effort was published Friday in the journal Science Advances. James Hammond, one of the authors on the new study and a volcanologist at the University of London, says he was surprised when, back in 2011, he got a call asking if he was interested in participating on a research project in North Korea. This call was the last link in a long chain of communications that originated with [...]