What is a mud volcano?

This is a mud volcano. And I spent 4 hours dragging my production team around the desert looking for mud volcanoes that were right off the side of the road. 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 2,000 ft 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 ft 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 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 100 years and then boom, they grow 20 ft in a day. And that's disruptive. That's when big earthquakes happen, like this one in San Francisco in 1906 that ignited a 3-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 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 ft of sediment. 20,000 ft. And that's just all under your feet as you're walking around there. 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. It was the end of the day, we'd given up. So, we parked the car and walked 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 invisible from the road. Mud pots 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.