The paper by a Durham University-led team and published in the February issue of GSA Today, reveals that the eruption was almost certainly manmade and caused by the drilling of a nearby exploratory borehole looking for gas, reinforcing the possible explanation in a UN report from July last year.
The mud volcano, known locally as `Lusi’, has been erupting for 239 days and has continued to spew between 7,000 and 150,000 cubic meters of mud out every day, destroying infrastructure, razing four villages and 25 factories. Thirteen people have also died as a result of a rupture in a natural gas pipeline that lay underneath one of the holding dams built to retain the mud. It first erupted on 29 May 2006 in the Porong subdistrict of Sidoarjo in Eastern Java, close to Indonesia’s second city of Surabaya.
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