Giant Mudpots

In my previous post I showed you the Salton Sea mud volcanoes, which are ULTRA cool. (YOU should go there. REALLY!)

I also knew there was another, similar mud-active field in the area, but it took me a while to find it (especially since I was approaching it from the wrong direction and didn’t have my copy of the directions with me).

I eventually got there and discovered that, unlike the previous field I visited, it didn’t have any mud volcanoes. (AWWW!)

It did, however, have GIANT mudpots. (WOO-HOO!)

In fact, the main mudpots were so large that they’d built a fence around them with a viewing platform.

I took this photo from a distance, over the fence. But you’ll notice in the picture below that one slat in the fence is missing . . .


I mean, that’s just an OPEN INVITATION, soooooo . . .

Here’s a picture down the gullet of the closest giant mudpot:


It’s BIG–so big that it can’t all fit in my camera frame when I’m standing on its edge (sorry for the lack of scale). It’s easily big enough for a man (or several men at once) to fall down it if they were to do something Y-chromosomy like go through the gap in the fence and stand right on its edge, but there’s not a lot of muddy, bubbly activity down there at the moment.

There’s also some interesting texture on the ground, like these mud fault lines between the giant mudpots.

Or this fracture texture.

I was particularly intruigued by this, which is a fractured green rock. Why is it green? How did it get factured? What forces was it subject to that could fracture it in the midst of this sea of soft mud?

I’ll probably never know this side of heaven.


But here’s the gullet of the other giant mudpot that’s inside the fence. It actually DOES have some bubbly, muddy activity down at the bottom (as well as some timbers–possibly including one stripped from the fence by some Y-chromosome vandals in the not too distant past)–but it’s so far down that you can’t really see the activity in the pictures I took.

MORE ON MUDPOTS. (Including how to get to them and the mud volcanoes at the Salton Sea.)

So: Giant mudpots. . . . Cool, but not nearly as cool as the mud volcanoes.

Still . . . a rewarding trip to the obsidian and pumice-butted, mud volcanoed, giant mudpotted, giant, radioactive snail monster-infested, foul-smelling Salton Sea!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin