Living in Indonesia must be very trying these days: “First came the 2004 tsunami. Then Indonesia was afflicted by the Merapi volcano and a major earthquake in Yogyakarta. Now, a heavily populated region of East Java has been consumed by an unstoppable 'mud volcano' that may have been caused by a gas- and oil-drilling project.”


(Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.)

“The geyser,” we are told (in fantastically descriptive prose, by the way), “bubbles, gurgles and occasionally emits loud bursts, constantly spurting steaming, inky dark mud from the bowels of the earth. The putrid stench is sometimes interspersed with the odor of petroleum. The plume occasionally contains larger amounts of hydrogen sulfide, producing sulfur's telltale odor of rotten eggs.”

But no one knows for certain what's causing the eruption; how long it will continue; who's to blame, i.e., how much is the drilling company to blame; and how to stop it. If anything, it may take “[m]ore than 100 magicians, shamans, and witches,” the “Queen of Bali,” and “hordes of engineers and scientists” to plug the hole.

In a totally unrelated but nevertheless visually related event, here finally is the answer to a long-standing question here on Pruned: what if Busby Berkeley had a handful of depth charges?



And still yet another completely different but visually related phenomenon, “geysers spewing sand and dust hundreds of feet into the 'air' have been discovered on Mars.”



All they need now are some “environmentally sound” boardwalk, one or two interplanetary park rangers, and vacationing Martian terraformers.

And finally, since we obviously cannot help ourselves, the unmistakably man-made gushing wound in the geological bowels of a comet:



In the Archives:
Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers
Geoff's Earth-Fountain©