The Lusi

Image from the BBC website

The BBC is reporting that 74 leading geologists have concluded that the eruption of the Lusi, Indonesia, mud volcano was caused by oil and gas drilling, rather than an earthquake as claimed by the drilling company.
Lusi erupted in May 2006 and continues to spew out boiling mud, displacing around 30,000 people in East Java.

In Google maps, the big featureless area is the mud volcano. It has been erupting since May 2006, and the town around it it slowly subsiding into the slowly forming caldera. It is expected that the area around the volcano will drop up to 140 metres and it may take decades for the volcano to stop spewing mud.It appears that this volcano is well known among geologist (particularly, I would think, petroleum geologists), but seems to have been missed by the rest of us.

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