The latest from Lusi
I’ve just come across an excellent article in Time about Lusi, the mud volcano currently engulfing eastern Java. Entitled ‘A Wound In the Earth’, it’s a good summary of the human impacts, the attempts to contain the mud, and the wrangling over whether it was the result of natural causes or human incompetence. This seemed like a good prompt to seek out the latest satellite photo from the University of Singapore’s Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (shown together with some older ones from the same source):
It seems that the ever-higher holding dams are largely keeping the eruption contained – for now, anyway. But as the Time article mentions, past experience suggests that even after almost two years, this operation is only just beginning:
In 1979, the oil company Shell set off a similar eruption while drilling off the shore of Brunei. That mudflow took 20 years and 20 relief wells to halt.
Categories: geohazards, Lusi
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