- [Worker] Hey! Let's pull the train out of here.
- [Worker] 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 Niland right now.
So state route 111 goes all the way
from down in Mexico, up past the Salton Sea.
Wow, look, there's the...
Ooh, I just got it.
- It does smell pretty rough.
Yeah, it's a rotten egg smell. - 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, like- - Well there's a perched
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 mud spring came to be.
And along the way, I noted three particularly crazy moments.
One was a time when the mud spring
was over a hundred feet across,
another was a time when the mud spring
jumped 60 feet in a day.
And the third was the most terrifying moment,
when the mud spring blew water a hundred feet in the air.
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 the 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.
- 1953, it was about 3 or 4 hundred yards that way.
And it sat there for decades.
- This is Shawn Rizzutto,
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 Niland 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.
And so I think we would all classify it
as a mobile mud spring.
- It was eventually named the Niland 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 Yellowstone.
But there's also steam, so there's some heat to it.
This, there is no heat.
You're not gonna touch it and, you know,
your hands are not gonna boil.
- One day in 2016,
the farmer noticed it had started to move.
So by 2018, it had carved out such a large
sunken crumble basin that it covered an area
half the size of a football field.
This is the first moment that I mentioned,
cause in 2018, the mud spring,
just the water part was well over a hundred 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 tracks,
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 mud spring.
- 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 Niland 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 mud spring had moved
dangerously close to the railroad tracks.
So Union Pacific installed 140 foot wide sheet 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 onsite 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 Niland 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.
- In the morning sometimes - Yeah.
- [Shawn] 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
bright up against the sheet pile wall
and they noticed 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.
- [Worker] Get this train out of here.
- [Other worker] Yeah, move this train now.
- [Worker] The train has to leave.
Hey! Let's pull the train out of here!
- [Other worker] Get the train out of here!
- [Travis] It is about 1:20.
This just happened here in the last five minutes,
there was receded by a bunch of gas coming out.
We backed up, and this whole area just collapsed.
- [Worker] It's cracking right here.
We're still losing it.
- And sure enough, there was a huge explosion.
And the mud spring had gone beneath the sheet piles
and eroded, eroded, 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 is this new mud spring
on the other side of the sheet pile walls.
- The mud spring had jumped
beneath a 75 foot deep sheet pile wall.
That's what the crack that 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've got to have an ending
to the biography of Kyle so far.
So it passed the sheet pile wall, which was crazy.
And then eventually got to the railroad and pass 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 Shawn about.
Who's so interesting.
The specifics of the issues that they solve.
- There's no other location in California.
Actually, to my knowledge.
This 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'd never thought about
whether you had to consider
the permeability of asphalt or concrete for gases,
but is this something that you already-
- No, that's unique.
Normally we don't worry about that,
it's not an issue.
With the amount of gas being vented through here,
that's the solution that we came up with.
- I didn't consider that they might
wanna 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.
There's really no solution for this.
- The Niland 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.
We were at about 325 feet below the ground surface,
then all of a sudden, (Carolina imitates explosion)
drilling mud just came out of the hole over 60 feet.
I mean, 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,
that drilling mud would be so heavy
that it would allow us to keep drilling.
Well, that obviously did not happen.
(Mud roaring loudly)
Because it shot out of the hole.
- Now, there's only one important question left.
Why did the Niland 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
"Ooh, I can get over here and I can get up,
but wait, I'm sourced over here.
So now I wanna try and get back to over here".
- It's a really creative theory,
but it's not necessarily right.
- [Carolina] 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 was 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
and I was 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 physicsy,
but also some physics, of course.
If you want a teaser 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 a hundred years ago.
So if you wanna 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.
(cheerful music)