Trinidad Mud Volcanoes Attract Tourists, Unsettle Residents

MAYARO, Trinidad and Tobago — It looks more like a kid's muddy playground than anything remotely menacing, but farmer Vishnu Gopieow doesn't let that slow down his barker's patter.

"If they tell us to evacuate I might be scared," said the barefoot amateur tour guide. "But it's been here since I was born, and I don't mind showing it to people like yourself. Ten dollars a carload, please."

With their booming economy built on oil and gas production, residents of the island of Trinidad near the northern coast of South America are accustomed to geologic phenomena, and the mud volcano that has quietly bubbled away in Gopieow's field for the past four decades is not uncommon.

But when a very large underwater mud volcano suddenly rose from the ocean floor a few miles away off the eastern shore this spring, some fishermen were unsettled, with one telling a visiting reporter he feared it might be a sign of the Almighty's displeasure with today's troubling times.

"People are a little worried," said Anthony Clarke, 41, a fisherman from this tiny village about two hour's drive from the capital of Port-of-Spain. "It looks dangerous, but we have to live with it."

So far, the offshore mud volcano has not risen above the surface, although it has reached an impressive size, measuring some 150 feet across. Fishermen say its activity has decreased in recent weeks, and hope the relentless action of the Atlantic's waves might wash it away before it grows high enough to interfere with navigation.

Trinidad officials have investigated the offshore mud volcano, and disaster workers have assured Mayaro residents there is nothing to worry about, although fishermen have been warned to steer clear.

"There's no great amount of heat and only limited energy," said Rod Stewart, a seismologist at the University of West Indies in Port-of-Spain. "This is an oil-producing area and there is gas trapped in the rocks of the Earth's upper crust. It's triggered when the gas finds a way to escape to the surface."

Stewart said the name — mud volcano — is a bit unfortunate, triggering associations with the violent mountains of molten rock that sometimes explode and wreak havoc in other parts of the globe.

"There are features similar to real volcanoes, but that term can cause problems dealing with the general public," he said. "There is no lava or molten rock. It's methane gas and mud. I wouldn't light a cigarette on top of it, but there's really no danger."

Trinidad supplies about three-fourths of the liquefied natural gas used in the U.S., and offshore production platforms dot the waters around the twin-island nation, which shares its name with neighboring Tobago.

Over the decades, several mud volcanoes have popped up in the main island's southern region. In 1997 a very large eruption buried several homes and vehicles in the village of Piparo. Fortunately, no one was injured, but gooey mud quickly coated an area of about a square mile, hardening into a rock-like substance.

None of the activity in or around Trinidad has ever remotely matched the scale — or danger — of the Soufriere Hills volcano a few hundred miles to the north on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat. A 1995 eruption there killed 19 people and nearly half the island, including the buried capital city of Plymouth, has been declared an exclusion zone because of repeated flows of mud, ash and gas.

Even though it's not a "real" volcano like Soufriere Hills, the offshore mud volcano near Mayaro has drawn a few tourists, many of them weekend visitors from the capital who come to the island's eastern shore to enjoy weekends on the beach. Some have even hired fishermen to take them out to see the growing mud shelf, which is only barely visible from land as a slight churning of the ocean's surface where swells roil over the subsurface plateau.

"We first noticed it this spring," said Nigel Williams, a Mayaro resident who works on an offshore petroleum platform. "We flew over it in our helicopter on the way to the platform and the water was rough all around it. But it's been less active lately."

Gopieow, for one, hopes the public's fascination won't wane. With the offshore volcano impossible to reach except by boat, he has seen an upswing in visitors to the 6-foot mud mound that bubbles away on a hillside a few steps away from his dilapidated home.

"It's nothing to fret about," he said. "It's just the Earth taking a breather, you understand? It's a living, breathing thing."