- This is a mud volcano.
(mud bubbling)
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 geologists 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,
cause, 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 mudpots.
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 Salton 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 5 million years,
the Pacific and North American plates,
tectonic plates,
have actually been sliding past one another.
So that, Los Angeles is moving toward 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 1906,
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 strikes up motion,
you'll start to move,
the faults will move,
and then, you'll actually get some extension.
You'll get some, 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 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 brought 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.
(bird squawking)
Yeah, he agrees.
So we're walking down the road on our mudpot mission,
to find that the road had flooded.
We'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 over head high stocks
of grassy stuff that were un-passable.
So it's three hours later,
and I had just about given up,
and we resigned to go check out these
little mud mountains,
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.
(mud bubbling)
So after all that hiking,
the bushes,
they were right there.
Literally visible from the road,
whatever.
Mudpots are so random,
they're so cool.
And because of the San Andreas fault line,
and the 5 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.