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This article talks about how the Australian government is considering building one of the world's largest coal mines. They have asked for a loan of $800 million to complete this large project, and promise job opportunities in return. The mine is said to produce up to 66 million tons of coal per year, doubling the coal output in Australia. The construction of this mine has been up for debate in Australia, and many people are protesting it too. Even more Australians oppose the mine than favor it. People favor this idea because it will create approximately 10,000 jobs in the region.

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Adani has proposed building six open-cut pits and five underground complexes capable of producing as much as 66 million tons of coal a year. New infrastructure to support the mine - a rail line to the coast and an expanded port - would also make it economically feasible to extract coal from at least eight additional sites in the Galilee Basin.

That could more than double coal output in Australia, which already produces more coal than any other nation except China, the United States and India. About 88 percent of the 487 million tons of coal mined annually in Australia is exported.

For many environmentalists, what happens in this mining case is a test of the world's commitment to fighting climate change. Its failure would register as an unmistakable sign of an international shift away from the fossil fuels behind climate change. But if Australia agrees to subsidize the mine - even though several commercial banks have shunned it - the project would demonstrate the lasting allure and influence of the coal industry.

"How it can be constructed - at a time when the whole world is committed to move away from fossil fuels - is madness that most people just can't understand," said Geoffrey Cousins, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

The project, known as the Carmichael mine, has provoked strong resistance in part because of its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef, a natural wonder that is already dying because of overheated seawater blamed on climate change. Adani plans to deliver most of the coal to India on shipping routes that critics say would further damage the ecosystem of the world's greatest system of reefs.

The debate over the mine has dominated headlines in Australia for months and fueled one of the most fervent environmental campaigns in the nation's history. Protests have grown in size and frequency, and polls show Australians who oppose the mine outnumber those who support it by more than two-to-one.

A group of Indigenous Australians is also challenging Adani's claim to the land.

But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull supports the project, and it just needs financing to proceed. A government agency established to support private-sector infrastructure investment is reviewing Adani's loan request, and the company has said it is also lining up money overseas.

"This is a tipping point," said Maree Dibella, a coordinator of the North Queensland Conservation Council, referring to the mine's role in the global campaign against coal.

Around the Galilee Basin, where a population of less than 20,000 is scattered across an area the size of Britain, opinion is divided.

Bruce Currie, a cattle farmer who lives near the site and has traveled to India to investigate Adani's record, said he is worried the mine will drain too much groundwater, calling it "yet another burden our small business has to bear."

Several hours drive north in Collinsville, one of the area's oldest mining communities, Roderick Macdonald, 57, a retired miner, said Adani had come to the town promising to build mining camps and employ local people.

"From what I can hear and see, Mr. Adani's going to do nothing for this town," Mr. Macdonald said, referring to Gautam Adani, the billionaire founder and chairman of the company.

But others in the region are more hopeful. Mining accounts for as much as 7 percent of the Australian economy, and the northeastern state of Queensland, where the Galilee Basin lies, has suffered a downturn in recent years because of slowing demand for natural resources, especially from China.

"I need jobs for Queenslanders," said the state's premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, of the Adani proposal.

Towns along the coast have been vying for potential contracts with the mine for maintenance work, construction and other services. "People are really rooting for this because of the economy," said Stephen Smyth, a local union leader, who started working in underground mines at 17.

The Carmichael mine, he added, is "offering that thing of hope, hope for a better life, secure employment and better wages so people can live a reasonable life."

Adani has said the project will create as many as 10,000 jobs in the region. But a consultant hired by Adani said the employment claim was overstated in court testimony given in a case where a conservation group was looking to block the mine. Critics have also noted that other mines in Australia may need to scale back production if Carmichael opens, meaning job losses elsewhere.

A host of Australian celebrities - including the rock band Midnight Oil - and international groups have urged Mr. Turnbull to kill the project, arguing that such a large mine would violate Australia's commitment in the Paris climate accord to work to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

In April, Mr. Turnbull met with Mr. Adani and later told reporters that the mine "will create tens of thousands of jobs," adding, "Plainly, there is a huge economic benefit from a big project of this kind, assuming it's built and it proceeds."

If Adani and other mines in the Galilee Basin go ahead and reach maximum production, coal from the region would release as much as 700 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, or nearly as much as Germany generates in emissions, according to a study by Greenpeace.

Australia has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, but the coal it sells to India and other countries would not be counted in its total.

It is unclear if India even needs the extra coal. After years of big increases in coal consumption, the growth rate slowed last year as the nation has improved energy efficiency and shifted to solar, wind and hydropower. India's coal-fired power plants are running below 60 percent of capacity, a record low, experts say.

That has raised questions about the economics of the Carmichael mine. Australia's four largest banks have publicly ruled out financing it, and analysts have argued that the mine would face stiff competition from local sources of coal in India and elsewhere.

Globally, coal consumption actually decreased by 1.7 percent in 2016, according to a BP report on energy trends, leading the company to declare that "the fortunes of coal appear to have taken a decisive break from the past."

Critics worry Adani could default on the government's loan or flood the market, lowering prices worldwide and allowing coal to make a comeback as an energy source.

The Adani Group's business record has also drawn scrutiny. The conglomerate, whose interests span natural resources, logistics, energy and agriculture, has faced allegations in India of environmental degradation, money laundering and bribery, but it has denied any illegal activity.

Adani leased about 460 square miles of land in the Galilee Basin nearly a decade ago. It can take two to three days to get to the site from the coast, with the last leg of the trip on unpaved roads. Surveying, soil testing and design work has begun, including on an airstrip, mining camp, access roads and the rail link, said Ron Watson, a spokesman for Adani Australia.

Coal from the mine would be transported by rail about 240 miles through grazing land to Abbot Point, the nation's most northern deep water coal port, which is already used to ship coal to China, Japan and South Korea. Adani has signed a 99-year lease of the port and plans an expansion that would allow it to double the amount of coal going through.

From the air, the piles of coal and equipment at Abbot Point are a striking contrast with the turquoise waters of the Coral Sea. The closest coral of the Great Barrier Reef is just 12 miles away.

A 30-minute drive southeast from Abbot Point is the seaside town of Bowen, where parts of the Nicole Kidman epic "Australia" was filmed a decade ago during better times. Now, the streets are dotted with "For Sale" signs beyond the main drag.

"We had miners living in the high parts of town," or the most expensive neighborhoods, said Mike Brunker, who represents Bowen in the Whitsunday regional council and is a supporter of the mine for the jobs it is projected to bring. "That was the boom time. They had to leave, they had to go to other mines, or they've just gone broke."

Further up the coast is Townsville, home to Adani's headquarters in Australia, where protesters sometimes congregate and residents exemplify the conflicts felt by many in the region.

"You don't know what's good for us," one man snapped at an environmental activist conducting a survey recently.

Not too long after, another resident told the activist, "I oppose the mine even though I applied for a job."

Correction: October 15, 2017

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Australia Debates: Does a Warming Planet Really Need More Coal?

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Adani has proposed building six open-cut pits and five underground complexes capable of producing as much as 66 million tons of coal a year. New infrastructure to support the mine - a rail line to the coast and an expanded port - would also make it economically feasible to extract coal from at least eight additional sites in the Galilee Basin.

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This article discusses how scientists examined the skin cells of dolphins to learn more about the length of the marine food chain. Dolphins occupy the top of the food chain because they are large predators. The marine food chain was always thought to be stable, but these recent studies have shown that the food web is very dynamic and changes constantly, depending on the ecosystem around it. During the 1997-1999 El Nino Southern Oscillation. the food chain in California shortened dramatically. This was caused because of the unusual warm temperatures in the water.

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Environmental disturbances such as El Niño shake up the marine food web off Southern California, new research shows, countering conventional thinking that the hierarchy of who-eats-who in the ocean remains largely constant over time.

The new research published in the journal Science Advances examined the skin cells of common dolphins for chemical clues about the length of the marine food chain, which begins with tiny plankton and continues as species eat them, and other species eat those species. Large predators such as dolphins occupy the top of the food chain, their cells carrying chemical information from all the species beneath them.

Many scientists have long considered the length of the food chain in the open sea to be relatively stable, with roughly the same animal species feeding on each other through time. But the chemical signatures in the skin of Southern California dolphins collected over two decades now show otherwise, report scientists from NOAA Fisheries, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

"We documented for first time marked changes in the pelagic food web length in response to various natural and anthropogenic related stressors," said lead author Rocio I. Ruiz-Cooley, formerly of NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center and now at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. "This tells us that the food web is very dynamic, and reveals changes with the ecosystem around it."

The finding helps scientists understand the health and resilience of the ecosystem, she said. A longer food chain is more typical, and reflects a relatively diverse community, while shorter chains occur during extreme environmental conditions and suggest a decline in that diversity.

During strong climate perturbations such as the 1997-1999 El Niño Southern Oscillation that included the most intense El Niño event of the century, which brought unusual warming to the U.S. West Coast, the food chain in the California Current shortened sharply, the scientists found. That coincided with declines in ocean productivity such as reduced growth of plankton, declines of some fish and birds and expanded ranges of some species such as jumbo squid, perhaps as they searched for scarce food or followed favorable temperatures.

"These changes in life history traits and population dynamics likely reduced and/or removed populations of many species, including important components of the food web," in turn shrinking the food chain, scientists wrote in the new report. Predators may have exacerbated this impact as they fed on what was left and reduced the length of the food chain that supported them. Although some species such as jellyfish and tunicates such as salp may multiply quickly to fill such gaps, they provide so little nutrition that most predators do not pursue them and the food chain remains short.

The research demonstrates that top predators such as the common dolphin can serve as important indicators of the length of the food chain, which in turn provides insight into the ecosystem, Ruiz-Cooley said. The study drew upon the Southwest Fisheries Science Center's collection of skin tissue samples gathered from dolphins inadvertently entangled in gillnets off Southern California from 1991 to 2008, highlighting the value of that collection over time.

"This research, and the results it has produced, illustrate the great value of this time series reflected in the cell samples," said Lisa Ballance, director of the Science Center's Marine Mammal and Turtle Division, and coauthor on this paper. "As technology advances, we can extract even more information from the time series as a window into the past, and a baseline to address tomorrow's emerging issues."

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food; fish; food and agriculture; marine biology; ecology; environmental awareness; oceanography; exotic species

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Climate shifts shorten marine food chain off California: Research counters earlier thinking that food chains remain constant through time

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Environmental disturbances such as El Niño shake up the marine food web off Southern California, new research shows, countering conventional thinking that the hierarchy of who-eats-who in the ocean remains largely constant over time.

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In this report, scientists have discovered that the rising sea levels due to global warming are going to have a major impact on New York City. The warming climate has caused a large sea-level rise which will cause storms to be more harmful to places along the coast. The changes in storm surge are very important, causing NYC to be at risk of major storms and flooding. Humans will also have a major impact on this issue. If we make the right decisions about how energy will be used, accurate analysis of the storms before hand will assist in making these storms less harmful and destructive to the city.

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Rising sea levels caused by a warming climate threaten greater future storm damage to New York City, but the paths of stronger future storms may shift offshore, changing the coastal risk for the city, according to a team of climate scientists.

"If we cause large sea-level rise, that dominates future risks, but if we could prevent sea-level rise and just have the storm surge to worry about, our projections show little change in coastal risk from today during most years," said Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center. "While those storms that strike New York City might be bigger and stronger, there may be fewer of them as changing storm tracks increasingly steer the storms away from NYC and toward other regions."

Coastal damage increases if the sea level is higher before a storm, and if the extra surge caused by the storm is higher.

The researchers looked at the history and future of both sea level and storm surge, from preindustrial times through 2300, in models that had been run for the full period. The researchers focused on results from simulations with rapid carbon dioxide release, often referred to as "business-as-usual" simulations. They reported their results online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Future changes in sea level and storms would be smaller if actions were taken to slow climate change, such as the Paris Accord's goal of limiting warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea level has been rising, and this is expected to continue as warming causes ocean water to expand and ice on land to melt and release water into the ocean. But, rapid change in the behavior of parts of the Antarctic ice sheet might cause much greater rise than is often included in coastal planning.

The researchers first calibrated their sea-level models to simulate the rates of historic sea-level rise. Then they ran simulations for the future, with and without results of a recent study that projects large future Antarctic ice sheet melt with business-as-usual increases in levels of greenhouse gases. Such large Antarctic melt implies large increases in sea level, globally and at New York City.

If this Antarctic instability occurs, the future risk to New York City is dominated by sea level rise. Then, according to Andra J. Gardner, postdoctoral fellow, Rutgers University, by 2100 the estimated 500-year flood height would be 17 feet, and by 2300 the 500-year flood height would be about 50 feet. A 500-year flood is one that has a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in any given year. Reducing warming enough to preserve the Antarctic ice thus would greatly reduce risk to New York City.

If sea-level rise remains small, then changes in storm surge are the most important concern for future coastal risk to New York City. In agreement with previous work, the models show that warmer future conditions allow stronger storms. But the models also show that the warming causes storm tracks to shift offshore and northward, away from New York City.

"If a shift occurs toward less common but possibly larger storms, it poses special challenges for coastal planners, and highlights the value of additional progress in understanding and projecting the tracks as well as the strength of these storms," said Mann.

The paper describes the general agreement among the models studied that storms will strengthen and shift offshore with warming, but identifies important differences that could be reduced with further research.

"Sea level is rising and higher sea level increases the damages from coastal storms," said Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Penn State. "Human decisions about energy will be important in determining how much the sea rises and thus how much damage we face, and accurate projections of storms will help in minimizing the risks."

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global warming; floods; severe weather; storms; resource shortage; ocean policy; environmental policies; disaster plan

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Sea-level rise, not stronger storm surge, will cause future NYC flooding

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Rising sea levels caused by a warming climate threaten greater future storm damage to New York City, but the paths of stronger future storms may shift offshore, changing the coastal risk for the city, according to a team of climate scientists.

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This article tells us how every amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is either absorbed by land or the ocean, or remains in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide that remains in the atmosphere raises global temperatures, increasing global warming. But, the unanswered question that scientists want to discover is what parts of the ocean take in more carbon dioxide than they emit. To find the answer to this question, they launched satellites to monitor the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The satellite captured an El Nino cycle that showed where the carbon dioxide came from and where it then went to. These are just the beginning steps on figuring out the carbon cycle and how it works.

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For every ton of carbon dioxide emitted by a power plant's smokestack or a car's exhaust pipe, some portion will stay in the Earth's atmosphere, raising global temperatures, while the rest is absorbed by the oceans or ecosystems on land.

But which parts of the ocean or biosphere act as net sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) and which take up more than they emit into the atmosphere, has been an open question. Figuring that out, as well as understanding what mechanisms govern that interplay and how they might change along with the climate, has been an open question and one that is key to understanding how global warming will progress.

The 2014 launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite was aimed at beginning to piece together some answers by monitoring the comings and goings of CO2 from the atmosphere with unprecedented precision and over large regions. [ The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

So far, the mission has done that and has turned up some surprises along the way. The mission serendipitously coincided with one of the strongest El Niños (an ocean and atmosphere cycle that impacts global weather) on record, allowing scientists to see how the carbon cycle responded and pinpoint exactly where the resulting record pulse of CO2 that entered the atmosphere came from. The satellite's instruments also unexpectedly proved capable of distinguishing the relatively small CO2 signatures of cities and even volcano plumes.

An artist's rendition of the OCO-2 Observatory.

Credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

"We're very, very happy with these results," deputy project scientist Annmarie Eldering, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science.

But the findings, described in series of five papers in the Oct. 13 issue of the journal Science, are just the first steps at getting a better handle on the carbon cycle (how carbon flows through land and sea ecosystems and the atmosphere), as OCO-2 heads into an expected extended mission and other space-based projects are scheduled to follow in its wake.

Carbon dioxide is added to and removed from the atmosphere by a range of competing processes. On land, for example, the photosynthesis of plants takes up CO2, while the decay of plant matter and wildfires release it back into the atmosphere. [ Here's How Carbon Dioxide Warms the Planet]

Scientists knew that El Niños were another factor that caused more CO2 to build up in the Earth's atmosphere, and from the 1997-1998 major El Niño, they had some suspicions on why that was. For one thing, El Niño tends to lead to drying in parts of the tropics, resulting in less photosynthesis and less uptake of carbon dioxide.

What project scientists couldn't know when the satellite rocketed into space on July 2, 2014, was that it would be perfectly poised to observe how one of the strongest El Niños in the books affected the carbon cycle.

"Sometimes you get really lucky," said Galen McKinley, a carbon cycle scientist at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

These effects were in evidence during the 2015-2016 event, which caused the biggest year-over-year jump in global CO2 concentrations on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But OCO-2 revealed, as is so often the case in science, that the picture was more complicated than previously thought. [ CO2 Satellite: NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 Mission in Photos]

This artist's rendition reveals a column of carbon dioxide as the OCO-2 satellite monitors it.

Credit: Debbi McLean/GSFC, Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

The satellite's observations let project scientists piece together the sequence of events of the carbon cycle's response as the El Niño geared up and then reached its peak. They saw that at first there was a tiny dip in carbon dioxide levels over the tropical Pacific because of changes in the structure of the underlying ocean that meant waters gave off less CO2. But that slight decrease was quickly overtaken by the much larger response from terrestrial biomass as drought, heat and wildfires took a toll and caused less CO2 to be absorbed and more to be released. [ Top 10 Deadliest Natural Disasters in History]

The ocean signal "was really a big surprise to us," said Abhishek Chatterjee, a scientist with University Space Research Association working at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center. The response had been inferred before, "but it was never observed to the degree that we could" with OCO-2, he said.

The team was able to take the analysis a step further by using OCO-2's capability to detect a signature of photosynthesis, which is a marker of the productivity of land plants. Together, the data showed that while the tropical areas of Southeast Asia, South America and Africa all added about the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, they did so for different reasons. In Southeast Asia, the hot, dry conditions brought on by El Niño made the region more vulnerable to fire, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere. In South America, dry conditions tamped down plant productivity, meaning the biosphere took up less carbon dioxide, so that the region became a net source of CO2. And in Africa, while rainfall was about normal, exceptional heat increased plant respiration, which caused more CO2 emissions.

Illustration of an OCO-2 data collection over the Los Angeles Basin.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

OCO-2 sensors were also surprisingly good at picking out much smaller CO2 signatures, such as the plume of Vanuatu's Yasur volcano and the contrast between Los Angeles' relatively higher CO2 levels compared with the surrounding suburban and rural areas. [ Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit]

The satellite could also see how the difference between the urban core and rural areas declined in the summer because plants in the region took up some of the excess.

The ability of satellites to pinpoint these signatures has implications for a wide range of applications, including monitoring emissions to make sure cities and countries are complying with their pledges to reduce CO2. Satellite CO2 measurements could also provide earlier warnings of volcanic eruptions, said Florian Schwandner, also of NASA's JPL, as CO2 emissions from volcanoes increase before an eruption.

OCO-2 has completed its initial two-year planned mission and is expected to begin a three-year extended mission once NASA officials sign off on it, said Eldering, the deputy project scientist.

Scientists are also hoping that two other planned missions go as scheduled to build on OCO-2's work. One, called OCO-3, will use leftover spare parts from OCO-2 and would be mounted on the International Space Station to allow scientists to point at features of interest. That mission has been slated to be cut by the Trump administration, though it remains to be seen whether Congress will go along with that plan.

The other, called the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory, would be able to measure CO2 over continuous areas, such as the U.S., something OCO-2 can't do.

"It's very exciting science, [but] there's a lot more work to do," McKinley said.

Original article on Live Science.

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NASA Satellite Reveals Source of El Niño-Fueled Carbon Dioxide Spike

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For every ton of carbon dioxide emitted by a power plant's smokestack or a car's exhaust pipe, some portion will stay in the Earth's atmosphere, raising global temperatures, while the rest is absorbed by the oceans or ecosystems on land.

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In this article, I learned about what caused the world's largest mud volcano to erupt. This eruption was fueled by an underground connection to other volcanoes close by. This is an extremely powerful process where hot materials travel underground and sit on top of the overlying sediment, causing eruption. Some scientists believe that an earthquake triggered this eruption, and even some think it occurred because an oil well. This mud volcanic eruption showed no early signs or warnings of eruption, so it was a surprise for all of the people and places nearby. There are still studies going on to try and figure out how and why this eruption occurred, to prevent such destructive surprises like this.

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An aerial view taken on May 26, 2010, of the "Lusi" mud volcano and the mud it has spewed across surrounding villages in Porong, Sidoarjo district, on East Java.

Credit: ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images

On May 29, 2006, a torrent of mud spewed from vents that opened up in the ground in a densely populated area of the Indonesian island of Java. That mudflow eventually buried houses, businesses and roads over an area twice the size of Central Park in New York and drove tens of thousands of people from their homes. More than 11 years later, mud, rocks and gases still sputter from the gashes in the earth there.

A group of scientists now said they've figured out what's fueling the world's largest known mud eruption: an underground connection to nearby volcanoes that funneled hot water and other material below the area where the mud erupted. That piping-hot material baked the overlying sediment, priming it for an eruption; an earthquake lit the final fuse, and the mud spewed forth that spring day, the researchers said.

"This study shows that the whole system was powerful, naturally prepared and ready to come out to the surface," study co-author Adriano Mazzini, of the University of Oslo, told Live Science. [ 7 Ways the Earth Changes in the Blink of an Eye]

The work, detailed online Oct. 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, is the latest salvo in a scientific debate over what triggered the eruption. That debate began nearly the moment the first mud shot up from the ground. While the researchers behind the new study favor the explanation of an earthquake trigger, another group thinks a nearby, improperly drilled oil well set things in motion.

On May 29, 2006, mud started erupting from several vents on the Indonesian island of Java and hasn't stopped since. The eruption, known as Lusi, is history's most destructive ongoing mud eruption.

Credit: Adriano Mazzini/The Lusi Lab Project

One of the scientists in the latter group also disputed the findings of the new study, though another seismologist not involved with any work on the mud volcano said the new findings were plausible, but not definitive without further evidence.

Even though Indonesia is one of the most seismically and volcanically active areas on the planet, the mud volcano eruption came as a surprise, because there were no warning signs.

Villagers were forced to quickly flee, and the government eventually built levees to contain the tidal wave of mud. In the first few months, that material flowed at a rate that could fill 72 Olympic-size swimming pools every day. The eruption was dubbed "Lusi," a portmanteau of "lumpur," the Indonesian word for mud, and Sidoarjo, the region where the event occurred. [ Image Gallery: This Millennium's Destructive Earthquakes]

Today, visitors can walk on the dried-up pool of mud and see roofs sticking out from the material. The still-erupting vents are fenced off, though "you can see these big mud blasts," Mazzini said, with "huge bubbles" like boiling yogurt. The area smells of oil and other hydrocarbons found below the surface, he said.

Lusi's relentless sea of mud has buried some villages 130 feet (40 meters) deep and forced nearly 60,000 people from their homes.

Credit: Adriano Mazzini/The Lusi Lab Project

In the days after the mud volcano erupted, Mazzini and other geologists and seismologists set out to figure out what had set it off.

Some suspected the oil well almost immediately. The Indonesian company Lapindo Brantas was drilling for natural gas about a tenth of a mile from where the eruption occurred. According to the drilling logbooks, workers were having trouble controlling the pressure in the well the day before the eruption, Richard Davies, a petroleum geologist at Newcastle University in England, told Live Science. Drilling mud is put into such wells to keep the pressurized mud, natural gas and other material located below the Earth's surface from shooting up through the well.

The workers pulled out the drill bit, Davies said. The well, however, had a blowout preventer - the same apparatus whose failure led to the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 - that kept the contents from blasting out of the well. But because the preventer worked, all that pressurized material trying to push up through the well fractured the surrounding rock, bursting forth via the Lusi eruption instead, Davies and his colleagues contended.

While the new study doesn't specifically address the final spark that caused the eruption, the study authors said they favor a different trigger: a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck the city of Yogyakarta 150 miles (240 kilometers) away two days before the eruption. Davies and his colleagues said the temblor was too far away and too weak to be the trigger.

Davies said he does agree with the authors on one point, that the fluids that led to the eruption likely traveled along a local fault system. And it is this fault system that researchers explored in the new study, which lays out the background setup for the eruption.

To get a look at what was happening under the ground in the area of the mud volcano, Mazzini and his colleagues set up a network of 31 seismometers. Seismic waves bounce off different types of rocks, fluids and even voids in different ways, and so scientists can use the waves to detect underground features, such as faults and volcanic magma chambers.

Adriano Mazzini stands on top of dried mud from the Lusi eruption.

Credit: Adriano Mazzini/The Lusi Lab Project

The scientists saw features they interpreted as a magma chamber under the Arjuno-Welirang volcanic complex, located a few miles away from the Lusi eruption, and a large feature under the mud volcano that appeared to connect to a tunnel. [ Sights and Sounds: Cali's Gurgling Mud Volcanoes]

The researchers said they suspect the tunnel acted as a conduit to funnel material from the volcanic complex to the area under the mud volcano. As the material built up, it baked the surrounding, hydrocarbon-rich sediment, generating gases that built up pressure, priming the area to blow with the right trigger.

The connection makes Lusi a hybrid system, Mazzini said: Not a purely sedimentary mud volcano, nor a hydrothermal volcanic system, but a meeting of the two.

Davies said he disagrees with that interpretation of what the images show. He has done similar imaging under mud volcanoes near the Caspian Sea and said he thinks the researchers are simply seeing the typical jumble of faults and mixed-up sediments that have shown up under other mud volcanoes.

"I'm highly, highly skeptical of this paper," he said.

Bill Menke, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, has done similar studies, though not in Indonesia, and said the authors' interpretation is entirely plausible because of the strength of the seismic wave signal they're seeing.

"I thought this was an excellent paper," Menke said.

The indirect nature of the images means that the results are somewhat ambiguous, though, he said. Other tests, such as one that measures how electricity travels through the ground, could back up the team's interpretation, as hot water is a good electrical conductor, Menke said.

Mazzini and his colleagues also pointed to other evidence to bolster their interpretation. That includes the high temperature - more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) - of the mud coming out of the vent and a match between the chemical composition of the gas coming out of the mud eruption and the nearby volcanic complex.

Neither side in the debate over the cause of the Lusi eruption looks to budge anytime soon, though the drilling company has been ordered to compensate the victims, according to news reports.

And regardless of the trigger, Lusi looks to keep leaking mud to the surface for a long time to come, keeping residents wary and the government working to control the onslaught.

Original article on Live Science.

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What Caused the Eruption of the World's Largest Mud Volcano?

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On May 29, 2006, a torrent of mud spewed from vents that opened up in the ground in a densely populated area of the Indonesian island of Java. That mudflow eventually buried houses, businesses and roads over an area twice the size of Central Park in New York and drove tens of thousands of people from their homes.

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I learned in this article how scientists are developing new and improved ways to gather more accurate forecasts. To do this, NASA is preparing to launch a satellite that will provide more environmental forecasts than ever before. This new satellite is called JPSS-1. It will be able to gather information about forest fires and drought and more accurate warnings on natural disasters. The satellite is planned to launch on November 10 and is predicted to orbit for approximately 10 years. In these 10 years, the satellite will determine many crucial things even such as harmful waters and poor air quality. This new satellite is going to change how forecasts work forever, positively impacted the environmental science field.

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JPSS-1 to Provide More Accurate Environmental Forecasts

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JPSS-1 to Provide More Accurate Environmental Forecasts