By David Cyranoski
It seemed like an open-and-shut case. In May, two months after the South Korean warship Cheonan suddenly sank in the Yellow Sea, the country released the findings of its investigation, blaming a torpedo attack by its northern neighbor.
The evidence included a smoking gun: parts of a torpedo found near the ship had the same dimensions as those in North Korean munitions pamphlets, and ink marks identified the torpedo as North Korean.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
But North Korea has consistently denied the attack, demanding that the United Nations (UN) coordinate a joint North-South investigation. The UN released a long-awaited statement on July 9, condemning the incident, which led to 46 deaths, but it conspicuously failed to blame North Korea.
On the same day, at a press conference in Tokyo, scientists raised issues about the South Korean investigation that they believe cast doubt on North Korea's involvement. Seung-Hun Lee, a South Korean-born physicist who works at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, says that the most problematic point is the claim that material from the Cheonan was adsorbed onto the torpedo's propeller. Although electron-dispersive spectroscopy found a match between the adsorbed material and the ship, X-ray diffraction analysis found no sign of the expected aluminum or aluminum oxide from the ship.
To explain this discrepancy, the investigation team suggested that, after the explosion, the material cooled rapidly into an amorphous form that cannot be detected by X-ray diffraction. But this supercooling is a delicate process, says Lee. "It's impossible that 100 percent of it would be amorphous." Lee's experiments show that aluminum left over from a detonation would mainly be crystalline.
Lee's analysis, posted online on June 3, was soon bolstered by independent work from Panseok Yang, a laboratory manager specializing in mass spectrometry at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Yang's data, added on June 28 to Lee's report, show that the ratio of oxygen to metal in rapidly cooled aluminum oxides would be much lower than that found by South Korea's investigation, and that the material identified
Lee also says that it is unclear how the ink, which apparently identified the torpedo as North Korean, could have survived the heat of the detonation. He suggests that the Cheonan might have been hit by a mine or rammed by another ship--a suggestion also raised by Shin Sang-chul, a former officer in the South Korean navy who was part of the investigation team.
This week, a U.S.-led UN team plans to meet North Korean military representatives to discuss the sinking. The South Korean government has adamantly denied fabrication or major problems with its interpretation of the data. Others also doubt that there is an alternative interpretation. "Aside from the science, it is consistent with North Korea's behavior in the past," says James Schoff, an Asian regional security expert at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Referring to South Korea's investigation, he says: "I have no doubts personally that the conclusion is correct."