Earthquake cleared of causing Lusi mud volcano

It seems earthquakes have been cleared of causing the Lusi mud volcano in Indonesia:

The two-year old mud volcano called Lusi spews huge volumes of mud and has displaced more than 30,000 people and caused millions of dollars worth of damage. An international team of scientists has now concluded that it was caused by the drilling of a gas exploration well and not by an earthquake that happened two-days before the mud volcano erupted in East Java, Indonesia.

This result, contested at first and now confirmed, comes shortly after the publication in Nature Geoscience of a study suggesting earthquake triggering is a ubiquitous phenomenon, at least for earthquakes of magnitude 7. The main argument against earthquake triggering being the cause of the Lusi mud eruption is precisely a magnitude argument:

Prof Michael Manga, of University of California, Berkeley, said: “We have known for hundreds of years that earthquakes can trigger eruptions. In this case, the earthquake was simply too small and too far away.”

Read more about Lusi and its possible collapse here.