http://www.wjla.com/blogs/weather/2011/03/sidoarjo-mud-volcano-is-world-s-largest-no-sign-of-stopping-soon-9695.html
March 22, 2011 - 02:31 PM
By John Metcalfe (Twitter @hurricalfe)
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Animals did not help plug up the world's biggest mud volcano in Indonesia. (Photo: Associated Press)
When the mud volcano first erupted in 2006 in Sidoarjo, Indonesia, the locals tried to appease it by tossing a sacrificial goat into its burbling, reeking maw.
When that didn’t work, engineers dropped huge concrete balls into it to choke it to death. The balls sank into the volcano’s muddy underbelly, which retaliated by vomiting up even more sulfurous muck.
Today, probably thanks to some careless drilling by an oil-well company, the anomaly in East Java has transmogrified from an exploratory borehole into the world’s largest mud volcano. Sidoarjo residents call it Lusi – a portmanteau of Sidoarjo and lumpur, the Indonesian word for mud – a beguiling nickname that underplays just how damaging this sloppy spew-hole has been. By its fifth-year anniversary in May, the mud volcano will have caused more than 13,000 families to become homeless and buried about 3 square miles of schools and cropland in sediment that’s 65 feet deep in places.
And it will only get deeper. Lusi is expected to keep erupting for the next 26 years, according to a study published February in the Journal of the Geological Society.
In the study, researchers at Durham University pinned the likely cause of the eruption on a mismanaged drilling blowout by Indonesian energy company PT Lapindo Brantas, and not on an earthquake that struck two days earlier. One of the company’s boreholes punched into an aquifer that released carbonated water and loads of sulfuric sludge, the researchers said. Lapindo Brantas has agreed to compensate 50,000 displaced Indonesians without admitting liability for the mudflow.
When Lusi first erupted, oil-well technicians tried to clog it by pumping concrete into the borehole.
Then came the goat and the giant balls and, at the peak of locals’ frustration with the unstoppable mudflow, a hostage situation involving a government minister in charge of mitigating the disaster. (Police eventually freed him.)
Indonesians have since thrown up their hands in surrender and come to accept living with the weird new Sidoarjo. It’s a place where one’s home might suddenly experience geysers exploding from the floor, as mud-driven pressure underground pushes water upward. Residents live in fear of gas bubbles floating up from ground cracks that explode into 10 foot-tall pillars of flame around anybody unfortunate enough to be smoking a cigarette. For that reason, the government has cautioned travelers on a nearby train line to not throw butts out the windows.)
The hot mud, colored gray and thick as wet concrete, is creating strange land features as it flows and hardens into “mudstone” – extending a delta and creating an island in a nearby river, for instance. Take a look at what Sidoarjo looked like in 2004:
And this is what it looked like in Feb. 2010:
Here are some more scenes from the ground of the world’s biggest mud volcano, courtesy of the Associated Press (more can be found at National Geographic):