California Creepin'

November 9, 2018 1:04 PM

Refusing to stay in place, a roiling mass of carbon dioxide and slurry-like soil is migrating across the state at a pace of 20 feet a year. So far, it’s carved a 24,000-square-foot basin out of the earth, and it’s set to continue its crusade until whatever’s driving it dies out.

Scientists currently have no real idea why it’s moving or if it can be stopped.

posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The (48 comments total)

I feel compelled to add that this piece of geological performance art sure seems like a metaphor for something, I'm just not quite sure what.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:11 PM on November 9, 2018 [18 favorites]

Multiplication makes things sound bigger than they are. 24000 square feet is 160 feet by 150 feet, or half a football field. Not *small*, but not as big as my intuition lead me to think initially.
posted by explosion at 1:15 PM on November 9, 2018 [13 favorites]

This is the same species as that thing that killed Tasha Yar, isn't it?
posted by tobascodagama at 1:15 PM on November 9, 2018 [43 favorites]

well now we can add "devoured by chthonic deity" to the list of things to be stressed out about in 2018, and isn't it nice to have options
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:16 PM on November 9, 2018 [36 favorites]

I am both thrilled and terrified at the existence of this thing.
posted by nubs at 1:22 PM on November 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

Today I learned what a shoo-fly track is.
posted by Midnight Skulker at 1:22 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Neat!

It's nice to have nonthreatening news about California nature and geology, for a change. I got lightheaded walking around in wildfire smoke today, so creeping mud seems totally tame in comparison.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:23 PM on November 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

Speaking of performance art, I spend a bunch of weekends near Niland during winter (playing with art), and this has me itching to find out if I can visit the mud hole.
posted by itesser at 1:25 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

PICARD: “How long have you been here?”
posted by Fizz at 1:30 PM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

I know it probably isn't that interesting visually, but I'm still disappointed that there are no pictures.
posted by tavella at 1:34 PM on November 9, 2018 [25 favorites]

This is the same species as that thing that killed Tasha Yar, isn't it?

Ecccchhhh, my thought too!
posted by notsnot at 1:37 PM on November 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm also disappointed there are no pictures. I tried finding it in satellite photos, but I'm not sure what to look for except for "Just north of Niland" and "encroaching on the train line." It puts out a lot of water, so maybe it would look like the head of a stream.
posted by lostburner at 1:37 PM on November 9, 2018

Aha! The Los Angeles Times has video.
posted by tavella at 1:39 PM on November 9, 2018 [13 favorites]

Let it fight the fires.
posted by Artw at 1:42 PM on November 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

Oh that video is great, thanks! They also have a map of how the geyser / mudpot has moved. Really the LA Times story is way better than the NatGeo one.

California's own version of Scientists are at a loss to explain the freak showers of tiny cubes of ice.
posted by Nelson at 1:43 PM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

Man, I don't know why I'm filled with a weird sense of state pride over this. "Yeah, we're on fire, and real estate is out of control, and my building will probably collapse in the next big earthquate, but check out this weird creeping mud we got!"
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:45 PM on November 9, 2018 [20 favorites]

I found it on Google Maps, it's at 33.284926, -115.577302.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:48 PM on November 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

Yeah, someone has nicely even marked it as a natural preserve!
posted by tavella at 1:50 PM on November 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

Here's a link to google maps:
posted by cron at 1:51 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Bah, I got beaten to the coordinates and Google Maps link :-) I tried looking at historical aerial footage in Google Earth desktop but it's not super interesting, the pond doesn't really move. From the article it sounds like it only started moving quickly very recently.
posted by Nelson at 1:53 PM on November 9, 2018

What we need is an aerial webcam so that we can check in on the mud pot's inexorable progress as it implacably reveals the folly of mankind.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:56 PM on November 9, 2018 [13 favorites]

I'm surprised there isn't more greenery around the outflow path in the satellite view. 40k gallons a day, I'd expect to see a little copse of trees or at least bushes.
posted by tavella at 1:57 PM on November 9, 2018

I'm also wondering what the series of manmade pools just to the north east is. A failed subdivision? Water park?
posted by tavella at 2:21 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm surprised there isn't more greenery around the outflow path

If the ground is saturated with CO2, that will kill trees and vegetation. And I wouldn't be surprised if the water was also very salty, given the area.
posted by ryanrs at 2:27 PM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

A well dug to depressurize the source of the gas had no effect. Steel walls driven 80 feet into the ground were also nonchalantly circumvented; the mud pot simply ducked under them and continued its freakishly linear path of destruction. "No one has seen a moving mud pot before," says David Lynch

I thought I was clever, coming up with all these Welcome To Night Vale jokes in my head, and then reality upstaged me. DAVID LYNCH!
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:30 PM on November 9, 2018 [16 favorites]

Forget it Jake, it’s Carbonic Town.
posted by Artw at 2:35 PM on November 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

DAVID LYNCH!

aw it's nice to see The 2018 Writers dabbling in fun side projects once in a while
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:37 PM on November 9, 2018 [17 favorites]

“Creeping mud” what is this a 1950’s horror movie?
posted by nikaspark at 3:44 PM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

Countdown starts now for the discovery that this is fracking related.
posted by ga$money at 3:46 PM on November 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

My guess about the funky little ponds to the NE is that they are involved in some form of aquaculture, perhaps a fish nursery or a shrimp farm. Not totally sure.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:17 PM on November 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

The freight in the LA Times video (somthing and howitzers?) and the calm commentary in a post-apocalyptic looking setting gave the report a surreal feeling.
posted by Botanizer at 4:47 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

“Creeping mud” what is this a 1950’s horror movie?

Yes! Specifically, X the Unknown (1956). "A radioactive, mud-like creature terrorizes a Scottish village."
posted by SPrintF at 4:51 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

explosion: "Multiplication makes things sound bigger than they are. 24000 square feet is 160 feet by 150 feet, or half a football field. Not *small*, but not as big as my intuition lead me to think initially."

The Slurry Funding Bill is passed. The CO2 system goes online August 4th, 2019. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. The slurry begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:16 PM on November 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wow, I wouldn't be surprised if they start seeing more of these features in the area just because of what's going on with the Salton Sea. What an interesting geological problem! This is just my swing at it, but 2 things: Geophysicists are lovely and all and I adore them, but they do tend to have a specific nails because of their kind of hammers, so I don't find it surprising that none of them really brought up a) more immediate subsurface activity that is not seismically related and b) the possibility of human interference affecting or even outright causing this cute little mud volcano's movement.

The area's quite interesting geologically. Of course it's active seismically and there's some magma in one area quite close to the surface, which causes hydrothermal activity as well as a lot of lovely fractures from which pressure can escape. But activity in the earth's crust isn't the only force acting on fluids and sediments in the area. While the creation of the extant Salton Sea was human error, there have been similar outflows from the Colorado River into the valley before, for millions of years, leaving behind freshwater turned saltwater lakes many times in the past as well as thousands of feet of sediment - very wet sediment. When you get wet sediment you get pore fluids - water and gases - that need to be released somehow, sometimes almost "explosively" if pressure builds quite quickly (in the rock record they're sometimes called water escape structures). And pressure can build quickly enough if you have high sedimentation rates (indeed, there are records of flood and storm deposits causing not only such structures but also what's called "soft sediment injection" or deformation). Sometimes you have liquification; sometimes fluids get forced into underlying beds and cause collapse of loosely deposited sediments above them that have a lot of space around the grains.

But there's something else in the area: evaporites. It's "duh" to say that of course the water from those oft-formed freshwater lakes got more saline as they dried up, but what's not obvious is both the order and the kind of minerals that precipitate out. In marine basins there's a specific order (quite simply) called the evaporite sequence in which calcium minerals precipitate first, then your sulfur salts, then halite, and finally your potassium and magnesium salts. Ah, but not so with non-marine evaporation! There's a few different pathways there, with a different suite of minerals, all depending on what ions are present in fluvial/lake system and on what can be leached from the basin itself, and though I'm not going to go into it, they can be quite complex and diverse. I have no idea what kind of brines have been left in the Salton Sink, though I'd be willing to bet that since brines also vary due to climate and tectonics they have left behind a fascinating record of climate/tectonic change in the American west. But they're there.

*cough* Er, okay, ANYWAY. The thing about salt is that it is FUCKING WEIRD. Unlike all the other sediments around it which become harder and more compressed with additional pressure and heat, salt gets more buoyant. It wants to move, it wants to consolidate, it can be incredibly ductile, and it wants to rise to the surface like a goddamn fucking balloon if there's enough of it, and the more heat and pressure that builds the more it wants to do those things. Salt will go through layers of rock like a herd of wild horses. Salt's also impermeable, which means a small layer of salt will act as a great seal on all those fluids below it wanting to escape. And some salts act even more funky with pressure/temperature and will start dehydrating and it's beautiful and complex as hell. In short, salt in a basin means you've got the possibility of some wild mechanics and deformation behaviors of everything around them.

So in this basin with who knows what kinds of salts, and where these various salt layers are, along with thousands of feet of wet, heavy sediment, surrounded by crust stretching itself apart. . . my my my. Due to my particular prejudices (my own hammer and nails, so to speak) and having seen some mind boggling clastic and fluid injection systems due to salt tectonics, I would like somebody to bring up the possibility that unlike its hydrothermal cousins elsewhere, this particular feature, while hydrothermal, could be related to some activity underground due to salt movement underground just because it is moving.

But. But. But. But. Not only is that a possibility, we have to consider how humans have affected all of those natural processes. There's been enormous changes to elements like water tables, salinity levels, and sedimentation accumulation due to irrigation of a valley that quite frankly should not be irrigated but can be with as much ~1 billion gallons of water from the Colorado, as well as just plain halting the natural cycle of the Colorado River changing courses/flooding. There's books written about that, it's so huge. I'm not going to go near claiming a full grasp of history of this particular version of the Salton Sea, but I do know that after the 2003 agreement to reduce irrigation intake from the Colorado (in the future) that some locals did start to prepare for the reduction of irrigation water by becoming more efficient even if not much else happened at other levels except studies and planning. All the changes that have occurred since then, including the increased rate of the lake shrinking and how drought has affected both the area and the poor over-used Colorado River, has got to be affecting the water table on the south side of the lake, which could also mean that all those processes I just described below and interacting with it - water's heavy! - are affected as well.

Anyway, this is just my seat of the pants swag at it, so don't take my hypotheses tooooo seriously. And I want to be very clear that I don't think it has to be due to just these things or that I think that seismic activity/that this is an active hydrothermal area have nothing to do with it. Of course those seismic processes do because, c'mon, the San Andreas practically almost runs through the mud pit, and there's been some interesting work done that have connected earthquake activity in the area with earthquakes elsewhere, though delayed. We've seen an uptick in larger magnitude events globally recently, and one of the few areas in the last 20 years that hasn't seen an unusually large earthquake - within the limits of what the faults can produce because not every fault can produce a 8.0+, and the sourthern San Andreas can produce at most an 8.1 (IIRC) - is the west coast of the U.S. (That's a purposefully broad, generalized statement, so please don't beanplate it.) There could be some good reasons for that, and one of the reasons could be a lot of little earthquakes have/are reducing strain. However! We do know that sediment weight/pressure - vertical loading, if you will - can affect faulting and seismic activity, so it's not just the other way around. And we definitely know the San Andreas has been set off by sudden fluctuations in lake levels in the past.

tl;dr: If they are serious about investigating causes in effort to stop it, I do hope they look at it holistically, which would include/not denying human activity in the area.
posted by barchan at 5:39 PM on November 9, 2018 [78 favorites]

Woo! Thanks barchan, that was very interesting, especially the part about salt.
posted by tavella at 6:03 PM on November 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wow barchan, that's completely wild and I think I even understood what you were on about. Of course, as I understand it anyway, none of that stuff, if true, would seem to make this little geological anomaly any more tractable. It's just going to do its thing for a while, until it runs its course? Any guesses as to how long it's likely to run for? Do you think it's apt to do anything like speed up or change course at some point?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:26 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm still disappointed that there are no pictures.

Me too. Try these.
Page on the Niland mud pot
15-minute video visit to Salton mud pits by Wayne Christmas
posted by Twang at 6:47 PM on November 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't know! It will probably have to run its course. But I do find it EXTREMELY thought provoking that it really started moving in 2015, just at the end of the worst drought in California in 1200 years. . . but then really took off afterwards (I don't know about southern CA, but I do know northern CA had its wettest winter ever recorded in 2016-17). Correlation doesn't equal causation etc. etc. but it's very interesting. What if were simply a giant desiccation crack - a mudcrack! - that eventually worked its way down to the water table? That's a lot of water being brought up! And you have to wonder, what's really being forced up from what pressure? Is it just a lot of water with some sediment and gas included? Is it sediment that's suspended in water? Is it gas being forced up that just happens to be in solution (in the water)? Is it all of the above? What neat questions one can ask about this!

While that's just having fun with science, it's probably a pretty good guess this curiosity definitely will change speed and flow just because of how its erratic it's been, but if a connection could be made with climate conditions and/or human activity that could help with future forecasting. But if there's anything we know, mud volcanoes can be extremely unpredictable.

But if is related to human activity, there IS a possibility we could do something about it. Unless it's at the scale of causes that are climate change related (see drought above) in which case local actions would be difficult.

tavella, thanks! My first thought when I saw it was "holy shit, that's a goddamn clastic dike in action due to salt related processes" so glad the salt part made sense

especially because I blathered on about salt for 3 more now deleted paragraphs
posted by barchan at 7:25 PM on November 9, 2018 [22 favorites]

especially because I blathered on about salt for 3 more now deleted paragraphs

I flagged it as fantastic, and would have even if you continued. I loved that deep-dive into the topic ( heh ).
posted by mikelieman at 7:35 PM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

The google maps pin has a review, because of course it does.
posted by zinful at 7:37 PM on November 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Let it fight the fires.

Do you want Kaiju? Because I'm pretty sure this is how you get Kaiju.

Additionally, I've known mutants, oogies and crusty punks that have wallowed and bathed in some of those Salton Sea mud pots and holes, particularly around the slabs. I wasn't there but have seen pics and been around the Salton Sea and ewwww gross.

Chances are well above non-zero that one of these people has made music you've purchased or heard, made you coffee and/or had the ability to theoretically read your email either officially or not.

So, when the Salton Sea starts real drying up and based on what barchan is saying I'm assuming the whole area is going to flip over like some kind of weird, oozing geologic salty scab pancake and then the C.H.U.D. will flood out and pour into Los Angeles and...

Actually I don't think anyone would even notice. It might even be an improvement.
posted by loquacious at 11:58 PM on November 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

My main take home: maybe don't build pipelines in seismically active areas.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:26 AM on November 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

The mud's trying to leave California because it can't afford the property taxes.
posted by Tailkinker to-Ennien at 2:29 PM on November 10, 2018 [4 favorites]

Thinking about it, I'm wondering why the railroad thought 80 feet of wall had any chance of stopping a flow that was coming from hundreds or even thousands of feet down?
posted by tavella at 10:13 PM on November 10, 2018

Having worked for a while in construction, I've learned that sometimes you have to just try some shit. Just throw whatever ideas you've got at a problem, generally in ascending order of how expensive they are to do, until either the problem is solved or you decide to cut bait and walk away. I assume that's basically what the railroad was doing.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:08 AM on November 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

This gives me the same unsettled, weird feeling as reading Annihilation (from The Southern Reach (?) series) did. Strange and other worldly and a bit sinister.
posted by naturesgreatestmiracle at 1:58 PM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's much more interesting until you look at the Google map...

No creeping horror visible, just an empty muddy field...
posted by Windopaene at 8:35 PM on November 11, 2018

Alas, can't find any links online anymore to Terry Bisson's story "Smoother."
posted by straight at 2:43 PM on November 12, 2018