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Indonesia Disaster Shows Risks of Mud Volcanoes
Written by SerenaStargazer
Monday, 23 October 2006
Fri Oct 20, 2006 3:50 PM BST

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - In a village in Indonesia's East Java province, a man is struggling to watch television with a volcano erupting in his living room.

Risks from volcanoes that ooze mud rather than spew lava have long been underestimated worldwide, even with a cataclysmic mudflow in another part of Java that has swamped an area the size of Monaco and forced 10,000 people from their homes.
Experts say the disaster, flooding the Sidoarjo region since May 29, highlights lack of knowledge about mud volcanoes, thousands of which have been found from Alaska to Australia. They range from tiny seeps to cones 500 meters (1,640 ft) tall.



"In Java nobody ever studied mud volcanoes," said Adriano Mazzini, a leading Italian volcano expert at the University of Oslo who says the Indonesian disaster may signal the first time people have recorded the birth of a mud volcano.


"In Indonesia they have other priorities -- magmatic volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis," he told Reuters.

On Java, villages about 10-20 km (6-12 miles) north of the mud eruption -- Gununganyar, Kalanganyar and Pulungan -- are built on old, near-dormant mud volcanoes that must have seemed attractive-looking mounds to village founders.


Pulungan was the most vivid example of ignoring the risks of mud volcanoes, such as subsidence.

"We went to one house where a man took us into his living room. He opened the cupboard beneath the television, and there were seeps erupting," Mazzini said after a recent trip.


Experts say the disaster, flooding the Sidoarjo region since May 29, highlights lack of knowledge about mud volcanoes, thousands of which have been found from Alaska to Australia. They range from tiny seeps to cones 500 meters (1,640 ft) tall.



"In Java nobody ever studied mud volcanoes," said Adriano Mazzini, a leading Italian volcano expert at the University of Oslo who says the Indonesian disaster may signal the first time people have recorded the birth of a mud volcano.


"In Indonesia they have other priorities -- magmatic volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis," he told Reuters.

On Java, villages about 10-20 km (6-12 miles) north of the mud eruption -- Gununganyar, Kalanganyar and Pulungan -- are built on old, near-dormant mud volcanoes that must have seemed attractive-looking mounds to village founders.


Pulungan was the most vivid example of ignoring the risks of mud volcanoes, such as subsidence.


"We went to one house where a man took us into his living room. He opened the cupboard beneath the television, and there were seeps erupting," Mazzini said after a recent trip.

Source: Reuters UK
 
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