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this is a mud volcano and i spent four hours dragging my production team around the desert looking for mud volcanoes that were right off the side of the road for a little context we had driven out to the salton sea which if you haven't heard of it is this really weird man-made pseudo accident of a lake that used to be a huge attraction for the hollywood star types i've never been there and so i see this like huge sea i'm like wow that is pretty impressive and then you know you put your window down and you smell it you're like i don't actually need to go up to it or do anything near it that's carolina zamora the geologist who you might remember from my last video on the strange mud puddle moving across the desert we were in the area to film that
video because how could you not what a bizarre thing but i soon found out about these really cool mud volcanoes which are holes in the ground that let up co2 that then drags water through dusty sediment and forms these bubbling muddy holes in the ground and then if they don't move they slowly build up mounds like a volcano which sounded awesome unless you're hannah she gave them one star the thing that really did deserve one star was my role as expedition leader here's how it went down as a person living in the year 2021 i pulled up a map on my phone of the route to get to the mud volcanoes but the main road to them was gated off we talked to the person who managed that area who told us that the original closed gated road was correct so we
drove back parked outside and decided to try to hike the two miles down the road and we soon realized why it was closed see there's something unique about this area that can create mud pots check this out there's a really cool site called topographicmap.com where you can click around and see the elevation for example there's an impressive 2000 feet of difference from just here to here and then you click here and it goes negative and that's not an error that's a basin the sultan trough which is over 200 feet below sea level how does something in the middle of a continent get below sea level so over the last five million years the pacific and north american plates tectonic plates have
actually been sliding past one another so that los angeles is moving towards san francisco and this is still happening at about the same rate as your nails grow but it's not constant it's as if your nails didn't grow for a hundred years and then boom they grow 20 feet in a day and that's disruptive that's when big earthquakes happen like this one in san francisco in that ignited a three-day fire that destroyed 500 city blocks the san andreas fault it doesn't just shake the ground it does something else a little unusual so when you have this strike slip motion you'll start to move the faults will move and then you'll actually get some extension you'll get some opening this extension process creates a graben
which is a word that means a sunken area of land that comes from the german word for a grave the sinking process is so violent and vast that this area should actually be thousands of feet deep into the earth but then the colorado river came in and brought sediment and then the plates pulled apart and the river came and bought sediment plates pulled apart and so on and so forth for so many millennia that some areas have actually been filled with up to 20 000 feet of sediment 20 000 feet and that's just all under your feet as you're walking around there it's honestly kind of surprising that the area is only 200 feet below sea level the thing about an area below sea level is that it can flood well any flat dry area can flood
yeah he agrees so we're walking down the road on our mud pot mission to find that the road had flooded you'd step on the ground and this black tar water would come up and cover your shoes and my next mistake was that i was following satellite imagery on the phone but we get to a place where we just cannot go any farther because what the satellite didn't show is that the entire area had flooded and turned into a massive wetland and it's all marshes and there's almost overhead high stocks of grassy stuff that were unpassable so it's three hours later and i had just about given up and we resigned to go check out these little mud mounds right off the main road that i thought were dormant mud volcanoes it was the end of
the day we'd given up so we parked the car and walk over and as we get closer i'm hearing what i think is faint bubbling no way we get up to them and they are going off there's what looked like a fresh eruption from that day there were these bubbling bursting small burblers and big giant bubbles and it was so cool so after all that hiking the bushes they were right there literally visible from the road whatever mud pots are so random they're so cool and because of the san andreas fault line and the five million years of sediment forming here it's the perfect location for the sediment to make beautifully erupting mud pots but they don't usually move
