Sidoarjo Village

A mud eruption in Java, Indonesia, has flooded villages and forced more than 11,000 people to abandon their homes. The eruption started on May 29th when hot mud cracked the surface and was ejected several meters into the air. The eruption site was close to a hydrocarbon exploration well. It is not clear if the eruption was triggered by the drilling or by an earthquake striking two days earlier.

Since the initial rupture, incredible amounts of mud, water and gas has continued to erupt, reaching more than 160,000 cubic meters per day. Today, an area of several km2 is covered by mud which thickness exceeds 7 meters in the perimeter around the 30-40 m wide crater. Surely a much large region would have been covered if it wasn't for the dams that are frantically been built to contain the mud and avoid further flood in the Sidoarjo village.

Researchers from Physics of Geological Processes, a Center of Excellence at the University of Oslo, returned this week from an expedition to East Java, bringing mud, water, gas samples, pictures, and videos for analysis in order to determine the origin and the mechanisms governing the mud eruption.

Adriano Mazzini, PGP, the expedition leader: "This ongoing mud eruption gives a unique opportunity to observe the evolution of a newly born vent structure. The access to the crater allows us to combine detailed sampling and observations with the geological data from the area. Combining direct observations with numerical and analogue modeling will help us to understand the activity of the mud eruption."

The PGP team has extensive experience in studying mud volcanoes and fluid eruption features. These are processes that are occurring naturally in many places in the world. Mud volcanoes are often closely related to seeps of oil and gas, e.g., onshore around Baku in Azerbaijan, in Crimea, along fault planes in Trinidad, or offshore in the Norwegian Sea, Barents Sea, along the Mediterranean Ridge, and the Gulf of Cadiz. The mud eruption in Java occurred in an area where there are several dormant mud volcanoes that have had large eruptions in the past.

Professor Anders Malthe-Sørenssen, the project leader at PGP, "We expect that the expertise we are building up by studying ancient and active mud volcanoes will be relevant for petroleum exploration and can be used to address how to deal with the catastrophic consequences of eruptions when they occur in populated areas."

Inside the Grasberg Mine

"Months of investigation by The New York Times revealed a level of contacts and financial support to the military not fully disclosed by Freeport, despite years of requests by shareholders concerned about potential violations of American laws and the company's relations with a military whose human rights record is so blighted that the United States severed ties for a dozen years until November."

An exasperating New York Times key feature investigation on West Papua's Freeport Mine. Published in December 2005, the article is already found on dozens of locations on the internet, and perhaps it's a study that will break the stranglehold on a situation that's both environmentally unsustainable, politically corrupt and an abhorrence in terms of human rights and ecological responsibility.

Editors - Even if this deal does not happen, the Russian company has two things for sure - global ambitions and cash. Please, read the Reuters story about this new business development:

The Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom wants to buy any available natural gas produced by Libya and some of the country’s oil, the top Libyan oil official said on Wednesday. “Gazprom has expressed its willingness to buy Libyan oil and any available quantities of gas,” the official, Shokri Ghanem, told Reuters, adding that it did not mean Gazprom would buy all of Libya’s oil.

Gazprom’s chief, Alexei B. Miller, met with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, after which the company said in a statement that it hoped to buy, at market prices, “all future volumes” of gas, oil and liquefied natural gas available for export. A cooperation agreement signed in 2006 between Gazprom, which supplies about a quarter of Europe’s gas, and Algeria led to fears that Europe’s biggest two suppliers could work together like the OPEC group of oil exporters.

Americans Should Care about Russia

The war in South Ossetia and Georgia, though appalling, resulted in fewer deaths and damage than originally reported. It is still not "over" and probably won't be for some time. Meanwhile, it definitely did serious damage to Russia's relationship with the West. In some ways, relations are worse than at any time since well before the collapse of the USSR--in other words, in roughly a quarter century.

We are going to say a lot more on this, and we are not inclined to be particularly laudatory to any of the players. The war has not made any country look good.

Meanwhile, before the war we wrote a report on Ten Reasons Americans Should Care About Russia. It follows, and, as you will see, it remains valid. Perhaps as tempers cool, people of good will can consider what is at stake; what there is to gain, and what there is to lose.