14 DAY TRIAL // Mud volcanoes appear mostly when gas pockets or gas deposits associated with oil manage to seep to the surface, transporting up water mixed with solid material (mud).
Of course, these volcanoes (in the photo, one in Romania) are not hot at all, on the contrary, they can have temperatures near the freezing point.
Recently, in Java island (Indonesia) a new mud volcano emerged, flooding with material about 10 square kilometer (which are now uninhabitable) and displacing 11,000 people. An investigation found that this new volcano might have been triggered by commercial gas drilling, disagreeing with the official Indonesian statement which insists it was a natural disaster.
The researchers found "very likely'' that the mud flow, which has expelled a million barrels of mud a day for eight months, was manmade.
But the welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie, whose family possesses the involved drilling company, insists that the phenomenon was provoked by a May 27, 2006 earthquake, so that his company bears no guilt. But the British research suspects that the drilling at more than one mile (1.6 km) broke off a highly pressurized pocket of hot gas and water which made itself way out to the surface in a bed of porous limestone. "Once initiated, the fractures would have propagated to the surface, driven by the deep pressure. It would be highly coincidental for an earthquake-induced fracture to form 200 meters away from this well and provide the entire fracture network required for an eruption on the earth's surface.''
Since May, 2006 the volcano spited off around 163,000 cubic yards of sediment (about 50 Olympic swimming pools). The smelly mud has swallowed till now four villages and 25 factories. In November, a natural gas pipeline broke off under the weight of a dam built to channel the mud to the sea, provoking a huge blast that killed 13 people and injured a dozen others. The dead persons were found only after several days of emergency efforts.
The government will sanction the guilty company with an initial $420 million in damages, including $276 million paid to the victims, by March 2007.