Most natural disasters are just that: completely natural. They force us to try to make peace with an unforgiving world, but the answers are simple. But when the Earth spews noxious, bubbling mud for decades consuming everything in its wake, people are less forgiving because they know you’ve summoned a shit demon.
In today’s Moment of Science… The Sidoarjo Mud Volcano, or Lusi if we want to get all cute about it.
Mud volcanoes are a naturally occurring phenomenon that happen when one of your jerk friends sends you a link to tub girl (if you don’t know…. For the love of Sobek, don’t google it). Ahem. More accurately, mud volcanoes are formed when some combination of hot water, sediment, and gas are displaced from deep in the earth’s crust, causing a hot muddy eruption. A planetary shart, if you will. Like regular volcanoes, they tend to fall along fault lines, but that’s about where the similarities end with their magma based cousins. Deep below the surface of the earth, hot water mixes with sand and clay deposits. After enough pressure has built up, and sometimes aided by a catalyst from geological activity, the mud can rip the earth a new asshole. Scientifically speaking, of course.
In some parts of the world mud volcanoes are a fairly common occurrence and normally nothing to be concerned about.
But then some fuckers decided to go drilling.
The East Java province in Indonesia falls along a fault line and is rich in oil reserves. In May of 2006, the oil company PT Lapindo Brantas was drilling in an area that was already suspected to be unstable. But, you know… there could be dead dinosaur goo down there, so what are you gonna do, not cause an ecological disaster?
Pfft.
So drill they did. But on removing the drill, they experienced a ‘kick,’ or an influx of water into the well. This blasted fluids several hundred feet into the air, and broke the surrounding rock.
The next day, a few hundred meters away, the biggest motherfucking mud volcano on Earth erupted. It’s ebbed and flowed, but it’s continually spewed around 50 olympic swimming pools worth of steamy hot mud from the depths of its bottom every goddamn day.
What exactly caused the mud volcano? Well, there was the Yogyakarta earthquake two days before and 260km away, and seismic activity had been shown to cause mud volcanoes in the area before. Then there’s the giant fucking drill they were probing into the planet right here, mere meters from the shit spewing behemoth.
Now, new evidence suggests the mud is linked to a nearby volcano system, with magma chambers that are continuously heating the mud slurry deep in the most depressing set up for mud wrestling ever.
If that’s accurate, the area could have been primed and ready to blast open at any time. But the question we’re left with; would it ever have erupted without humans drilling holes in the earth? There isn’t perfect consensus about what caused this even among experts, but the lion’s share of support seems to be behind the hypothesis that drilling caused the mud volcano.
Thirteen villages have been swallowed whole, over 60,000 people have been displaced, and dozens have been killed from various accidents the mud has caused.
Lumpur Sidoarjo, aka “Lusi,” the mud volcano will likely end itself in another thirty years or so. And much like so many other things, the people most affected didn’t cause it, warned against it, and are gonna have to battle this shit demon for the rest of their natural lives.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, and your reminder that far too many horror movies start with a scientist pleading with a businessman not to do a stupid thing. Photos from: environmentandsociety.org
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