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hey let's pull the train out of here just get ready get the train out of here this is me driving across the southern california desert to see a mud puddle i know sounds like a niche interest but this mud puddle is moving on its own going across the desert at 20 feet per year if you think this is weird you're right because no one has ever witnessed this happen ever before it's baffling scientists and it gets crazier because the mud puddle started moving toward a major highway a train track a natural gas pipeline and a high speed fiber optic cable bit of a maniac this mud puddle if it had a name it would be kyle this moving mud puddle has been threatening a bunch of critical infrastructure i got in touch with the
man in charge of saving the highway and one of the geologists who helped save the railroad to figure out what's going on why this is happening what they're all doing about this very unique problem and of course to go beyond the yellow tape and see the mud puddle up close we're just about getting into an island right now so state route 111 goes all the way from down in mexico up past the salton sea wow look there's the is it oh i just got it does smell pretty well yeah it's a rotten egg every once in a while you get that good whiff there it is the world's first mud spring ever documented to move it's basically just this pool of water right here it doesn't oh there's a purse ground water table over on the eastern side
there's a lot of rock that was put there because what the mud spring does is carves up the ground as it travels and leaves behind this giant sunken crater which as you can imagine is a bit dangerous to not fill in as we stood there staring at this giant hole in the ground gurgling like the planet talking to you we learned the story of how the mudspring came to be and along the way i noted three particularly crazy moments one was a time when the mudspring was over a hundred feet across another was a time when the mudspring jumped 60 feet in a day and the third was the most terrifying moment when the mudspring blew water 100 feet in the air and so let's get to the story on our journey to
figuring out why this darn thing is moving i'm diana you're watching physics girl and i love me a geology mystery like the massive magnetic stripe scientists found on the ocean floor that was a whole thing but this story is even more confusing because the mystery is ongoing the mystery all started in 1953 when a bubbling hole of mud popped up through the ground on a farm in 1953 it was about three or four hundred yards that way and it sat there for you know decades this is sean rizzuto senior transportation engineer at caltrans and father to two daughters that he wants to see get interested in science we got along well the farmer was aware of this mud pot but wasn't too
worried because those are actually kind of common in the area there's a large carbon dioxide reservoir in the salton sea area it's found a way up to the surface but it's also hit a water table so now you don't just get gas you get a lot of water so nylon geyser started out as a mud pot but became a mud spring but it turns out scientists have never seen either of these move until this one it's not a typical mud pot or a mud volcano where you just have this like small depression in the ground so i think we would all classify it as a mobile mudspring it was eventually named the nylon geyser not kyle despite the fact that it's neither a geyser nor a mud puddle we're getting continuous flow of
water versus a geyser like yellow stone but there's also steam so there's some heat to it this there is no heat you're not going to touch it you know your hand's not going to boil one day in 2016 the farmer noticed it had started to move so by 2018 it had carved out such a large sunken crumbled basin that it covered an area half the size of a football field this is the first moment that i mentioned because in 2018 the mud spring that just the water part was well over 100 feet across and it was steadily approaching its first human civilization speed bump the union pacific train tracks so obviously the railroad had to act fast to try and save the track so they brought in the engineering firm
shannon wilson who carolina works for that's when she came in and they attempted to stop the mudspring the railroad actually started putting in a large rock and the rock disappeared this is a bucket of smooth sand with an inlet for air to bubble up through the sand watch what happens when i turn on the air some of the rubber duckies and stuff will float around but some of the dense objects will immediately sink to the bottom as the sand starts to act strangely like a fluid now imagine adding some water to this and you would get something perhaps worse than quicksand that's what's going on with the nylon geyser this is one of the many reasons that you wouldn't want to fall
in there so that is why all the rocks that the railroad just threw in disappeared they sunk which meant that there was also no telling how deep the hole was and that terrifying fact would very soon create a massive problem because by june of 2018 the mudspring had moved dangerously close to the railroad tracks so union pacific installed a 140 foot wide sheep pile wall to try and block the mud puddle and they took it down to the insane depth of a five-story building and then they drilled wells to drain water and relieve the hydrostatic pressure and then on the morning of october 3rd engineers on site heard a loud crack now while all of this is going on recall that there's continual co2 bubbling up
there are dangerous gases that come out of it that can be lethal i have another experiment for you watch what happens when i stick a candle in this cup it just goes out can you guess what's in the cup it's carbon dioxide i made the co2 by mixing baking soda and vinegar and co2 is more dense than air so it'll just sit there in my cup or at the nylon geyser it'll just sit there over the hole which means that if you fell in and could miraculously swim you would quickly suffocate due to the lack of oxygen you really don't want to fall in the morning sometimes when it's cold the gas won't rise and so it looks like a fog now that co2 is not only deadly to us it's the unrelenting driving force of
all the erosion digging thousands of square feet and it's now bubbling up against that wall and then the coolest part i actually missed was when the mud spring was right up against the sheet pile wall we'd notice the piles deflecting towards the spring and so i started making observations okay well it's tilted this much or now i'm seeing cracks behind the sheet piles now i'm hearing hissing sound like a gas trying to escape now i'm seeing liquid come out of these cracks i'm gonna get this train out of here yeah move this three now the train has to leave hey let's pull the train out of here just get ready get the train it is about 1 20. um this just happened here in the last five minutes it was preceded by a bunch of gas coming out we backed up
and this whole area just collapsed it's cracking right here we're still losing it and sure enough there was a huge explosion and the mudspring had gone beneath the sheep piles and it eroded to the surface and then let off all of this pressure and i was not there for that within an hour of my leaving the site now there was this new mud spring on the other side of the shoe pile walls the mud spring had jumped beneath a 75-foot deep shea pi wall that's what the crack of the engineers had heard was this whole thing reads like a novel but it wasn't even the craziest part the final moment that i want to share with you was when the water and mud unexpectedly shot 100 feet into the air but first we gotta
have an ending to the biography of kyle so far so it passed the sheet pile wall which was crazy and then it eventually got to the railroad and passed the tracks and so now it's between the tracks and the highway and it's not slowing down so just like the railroad the highway is currently having to get creative and that is what i talked to sean about i was so interesting the specifics of the issues that they solve there's no other location in california actually the my knowledge is the only mud pot that is actually moving in the world it wasn't just like oh dig around a mud puddle the gas comes up and then it goes out these people are coming up with creative solutions for problems i wouldn't even
have thought of not a civil engineer so i've never thought about whether you had to consider the permeability of asphalt or concrete for gases but is this something that you already know that's unique normally we don't worry about that we just it's not an issue but with the amount of gases being vented through here that's the solution that we came up with i didn't consider that they might want to preserve the current road and that there's a school nearby and it would be cut off and the kids wouldn't get to school plus it's a major artery for agriculture and the number of problems just kept on piling on as i listened there's all different types of stuff that we deal with as engineers
that you know we have solutions for um there's really no solution for this the nylon geyser can't be stopped just worked around but sometimes even the workarounds didn't go as planned it was when we were drilling a relief well i think i'd been there almost like 10 hours i was about to change shifts i was explaining to him okay this is the type of material i've been seeing and then we were at about 325 feet below the ground surface then all of a sudden drilling mud just came out of the hole over 60 feet i mean that's that's how much pressure's been built up and we hit a pressure pocket and it just shot all this drilling mud and the drilling mud was there to basically facilitate
the fact that if we did hit a pocket the drilling mud would be so heavy that it would you know we would allow us to keep drilling well that obviously did not happen because it shot out of the hole now there's only one important question left why did the nylon geyser sit there for 63 years and then suddenly move why now all we can say is that you know it started moving i think at the tail end of 2016 which coincided with some earthquake swarms in the area from the brawley seismic zone so since there's a major fault line nearby earthquake swarms happen and then kyle started moving and maybe the earthquakes were the cause we don't know one really good theory for why this is happening is that it's
probably been coming up at an angle so the path underground from the co2 source or the well with the water is probably at an angle and it wants to come straight up because nature wants to take the straightest path it's coming up a structure and it's like oh i can get over here and i can get up but wait i'm sourced over here so now i want to try and get back to over here it's a really creative theory but it's not necessarily right do we have any other ones can we have any other ones why is it unique to this area it just gives you all these other questions we thought we could redivert it or redirect it but you can't you know you can't stop mother nature if you think this is one of the most
unusual topics i've ever investigated you're right it's also my first video back since i parted ways with pbs and went independent i am so nervous about the future of physics girl but going forward i'm super excited you can expect some things like this that are not so physics-y but also some physics of course if you want to tease her for my next video it's all about the crazy questions that pop up when you learn about the universe expanding like what is it expanding into but i want to do that video and the rest of them in the same immersive way as this one so we visited the observatory where it was originally discovered that the universe is expanding by hubble 100 years ago so
if you want to follow along with that and support the journey the biggest thing you can do is to consider subscribing but if you'd like to further support content from a girl who gets weirdly obsessive and curious about things and then cannot help herself but share the things she learns check out my patreon community and if you've been supporting my patreon thank you so much because it's been crucial to i don't know buying some apples and granola for my team when i drag them across the desert to see a mud puddle but i hope you enjoyed this video i had so much fun making it and i'm excited for what's next happy physicsing
