Pandora's Hole: A Mud Volcano !!??!!

One fine day about a year and 3 months back, a paddy field in indonesia caved in, revealing a large hole. Soon mud started spurting out of that hole. Is this werid....??? Well initially the hole was vomiting 5000 cubic meters of mud per day. That hole is still, as i type, excreting mud and now at the rate of 150,000 cubic meters per day!!!
An area of radius 10km is submerged under that mud including villages, factories, schools everything. 11000 people have already been evacuated. And There are more people and villages in the path of this mud.

Is this an isolated incident?? Weird as it may sound it is not and such mud volacanoes have been obsrved in the past. However this volcano takes the credit of starting before our eyes and is the largest of em all!!!

The mud it throws out is 70% water and comes from a depth of more than 3 kms under ground. The mud is actually a mixture of ground water and sediments from below, even fossils have been obtained from that mud.

So what triggered it??? Scientists are still not sure. 2 days before eruption the area witnessed some tectonic activity and in a near by area an earthquake was recorded touching 6 point something on the richter. 1 day before the eruption there was an accident (rather an incident) at ground zero. An oil exploration company was drilling at that very site looking for oil and they wanted to drill through a limestone block, however as they were drilling they experienced a kick back. Now generally at such depths pressures are very high and so to balance outside pressure the dril bit has pressurised oil inside it. If for some reason the outside pressure increases drastically the drillbit recieves a kick back. To counter a kick back the pressure inside the drill is increased even more, and thats what they did. Now as they were removing the drill bit they removed it a bit too fast which meant that there was a vaccumm created in the drill coloumn.

It has been hypothesized that the drill bit actually cracked the limestone bedrock inside which was a pressurised chamber of gases, water and sediments. The partial vaccuum created inside coloumn further accelerated the process of fissure formation and by next day the gases had blasted ways through the earth above to create that hole in the field. The company obviously blames the earthquake and the labels this as a natural disaster. However there is evidence that drilling might have been the cause, though it hasnt been proved conclusively. None the less the company has paid up around 400 million US$ to people in damages for their inconviniene, property and bought all land covered by mud. The company is keeping all its drilling data secret, which is crucial to find the real cause of the phenomenon.

Access to the site is restricted by the govt, but the mud is a bigger barrier. Structural studies have been carried out using sonar and the dimensions of the hole and some of its branches have been deciphered. As a solution the govt is planning to drop in 300 strategically designed hyperdense concrete balls which will decrease the rate of flow and buy time to move people and property.

Scientists are having a ball (pun not intended) since such a rare phenomenon is happening beore their eyes but as the indonesian PM has reminded people are suffering!!!.... only 12-13 deaths have been reported dead that too due to accidents involving heavy equipment, no one has died cause of mud.

This data typed in here is a personal recreation from a news article in Nature (forgot the month, 2007) and may not be 100% accurate. For more information visit - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidoarjo_mud_flow
Material here is to be cited at your own risk though i will be very happy if you do!!!

(I am posting this here cause i want ur views on it)