Significance of Mississippi River Delta “Mud Lumps” to “Mud Volcanoes” and the New Madrid (MO) Earthquake Zone

The mouth of the Mississippi River contains a curious, little known, and underappreciated geologic edifice called a “mud lump” or “mudlump” by Mississippi and Louisiana locals. Mud lumps are mounds of clay of various sizes ranging from knee-high to hill high, and are best seen outside of “South Pass”, one of the main distributaries of the Mississippi River as it breaks apart in the delta to merge with the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes mud lumps spew gasses. Mud lumps in the Mississippi River delta have been documented for almost 200 years, as described below, yet their relationship to “mud volcanoes” found globally and earthquakes in the nearby New Madrid seismic zone have not been well studied.

I. Historical Accounts of Mississippi Mud Lumps Spewing Gasses and Liquid Mud

1. Mississippi delta mud lumps can “rise suddenly enough to lift a ship as it passe[s], and they usually [have] a volcano-like cone spewing gasses and liquid mud,” wrote John M. Barry in his 1998 epic “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America”. (1)

2. About 125 years earlier, in the 1861 Army Corps of Engineers professional paper titled “Report upon the physics and hydraulics of the Mississippi river; upon the protection of the alluvial region against overflow; and upon the deepening of the mouths”, its engineer authors AA Humphreys and HL Abbot wrote the following about Mississippi River delta mud lumps (2):

“Mud lumps.--All of the changes and modifications that the bars undergo have now been enumerated except one, which, so far as it affects navigation, is of great importance. This change is the sudden rising, upon or near the crests of the bars, of masses of tough clay, varying in size from ‘mere protuberances looking like logs sticking out of the water,’ to islands several acres in extent. They attain heights varying from 3 to 10 (in one instance 18) feet above the surface of the gulf. Salt springs are found upon them, which emit flammable gas. After the lapse of a considerable time, many of these springs cease emitting gas and water, and the lump is worn away by the currents of the river and gulf.

Humphreys continued: “By some their source is supposed to lie at a great distance inland; by others, in the river itself; the communication between the lumps and their source being maintained by permeable strata. Others have concluded that their origin was due to the generation of carbureted hydrogen gas in the vegetable matter which forms a part or the sedimentary material brought down by the river and deposited in the gulf. This gas constantly increases in quantity, and being covered by the tenacious clayey mud of the bar…forms constantly expanding reservoirs. These extend until the increase of size and escape of gas adjust themselves to the supply of the latter. After a time the material for the generation of gas begins to fail, and the activity of the mud lump to diminish.
“In the operations of the contractors for the removal of obstructions to navigation in 1858, some of these lumps upon the bar of the Southwest pass, which had not yet reached the surface of the gulf, were broken by explosions of gunpowder. A strong ebullition of gas over a wide space continued for more than twenty minutes after the explosion; and the surface of the bar, within an area 100 feet in diameter, was found to have sunk, and to have assumed the shape of the crater of an extinct volcano. This fact favors the views of those who have attributed the origin of the mud lumps to the material [gas] existing in the bar.” (2)

3. Thirty years earlier, in 1828, Major AH Bowman of the United States Corps of Engineers, stated “that he burned gas collected from these mud lumps.” Mr. WH Sidell, one of the principal assistants in the survey of the Mississippi delta made by a Captain Talcott, stated “specifically that the gas escaping from them was flammable.” (2)

4. The peripatetic Scottish knowledge manufacturer Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), known to some readers as the father of geology, made two trips to North America in 1845 and 1849. (3) As a result of those two trips he produced two works not exclusively geological, “Travels in North America” and “A Second Visit to the United States”. When he was visiting the Mississippi Delta during one of these trips, we learn via AA Humphreys, that “Sir Charles notes…that during the excavation of the new canal, flammable gas escaped from the disturbed earth.” (2)

5. Environmental scientists at Loyola University in New Orleans post on their 2005 “Center for Environment” website the following imaginative metaphors of Mississippi River delta mud lumps as either “chocolate pudding” or “a zit”, as follows:

“Sometimes the dynamics of a river change and there may be rapid localized loading of incompressible sands over less dense, and highly plastic, clays. This causes the movement of the clays, just like pressing down on the surface of chocolate pudding. You push on one end, and the other rises. When the sand loads thickly over the clays, the clays move upward in zones where there is less sand cover. If the localized loading is heavy enough, clay may actually extrude above the surface of the sand (much as one pops a zit - yuk!). This clay extrusion is called a mudlump, some of which can be 200 m [meters, about 600 feet] in height above their clay base. A mudlump's growth rate depends directly on the speed of the sediment deposition. They may grow several meters per year or not at all. It is known that some have grown four feet in 24 hr!” (4)

The website then posts 50 year-old diagrams of the origin of mud lumps, available for viewing at (5). The same website states, “Mud volcanoesare places where marsh gases erupt through a mud lump.” (4)

6. Mississippi River delta anglers are avid students of mud lumps because a) huge speckled trout like to live in their vicinity and b) sub-surface mud lumps are not mapped (because they come and go so often) and often loom up suddenly to strand boats at their summits until tides or human help arrive to disengage the vessel. (Why are large fish associated with mud lumps—are they areas of warmth or are they high in mineral or food nutrients?) (6)

II. Are Mississippi Mud Lumps a Type of Mud Volcano?

The term “mud volcano” refers to formations created by geologically excreted liquids and gases, which are much cooler than temperatures typically associated with “igneous” processes. “Igneous” means “molten” and “molten” means “liquefied or melted by heat.” Mississippi mud lumps have been poorly studied; thus, it is not known for sure how they relate to mud volcanoes. It is, however, not unreasonable to postulate a connection based on the little that is known for sure about mud lumps, e.g., they come up quickly and spew gases.

About 86% of gases released by mud volcanoes are slurries containing mostly methane (i.e., ubiquitous natural gas often used by humans for home heating), some water, fine solids, some carbon dioxide and a bit of nitrogen. (7) To date, about 1,100 mud volcanoes have been identified on land and in shallow water, and scientists are estimating that hundreds of thousands more may exist on continental shelves and deep ocean plains. Mud volcanoes are often associated with large petroleum deposits, such as in the Gulf of Mexico and tectonic subduction zones, such as off the coasts of California, Oregon and the Gulf States (e.g., Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas).

The eruptions of mud volcanoes are not always benign. The “eruptions of mud volcanoes have liberated such large quantities of methane that even the most prolific gas field underneath should have been exhausted long ago, said Russian petroleum geologist Nikolai Kudryavtsev (1893-1971). Kudryavtsev and the late Thomas Gold, among others, postulate that petroleum is formed from non-biological sources of hydrocarbons located deep in the Earth's crust and mantle (8-10)

Kudryavtsev further postulates that the quantities of mud deposited in some cases would have required eruptions of much more gas than is known in any gas field anywhere. That mud volcanoes may suddenly and violently emit huge quantities of methane (and other gases) has been proposed as a cause of major life extinctions on earth. (11) Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin, author of “Did Methane Explosions Cause Mass Extinctions?” (2003), postulates that mud volcanoes in areas such as the bottom of the Black Sea, could repeat their ominous performance in the future. (12)

III. More on Mud Volcanoes

The water coming up from mud volcanoes in some instances carries such substances as iodine, bromine and boron that could not have been derived from local sediments, and that exceed the concentrations in seawater one hundred fold. Mud volcanoes are often associated with lava volcanoes, and the typical relationship is where they are close, the mud volcanoes emit flammable gases, while the ones further away emit methane. The origin of gases (methane, helium) and hydrocarbons emitted from mud volcanoes remains unknown. Kudryavtsev and Thomas Gold, among others, speculate that emission of the gases probably relate to connections through deep faults to earth’s mantle.

IV. Significance of Mud Lumps/Volcanoes in the Mississippi Delta and the Nearby New Madrid Earthquake

New Madrid, Missouri lies at the confluence of the two huge arms of the Mississippi River. One vast arm of the Mississippi River extends northeast, draining regions as far east and north as the state of New York. The other arm extends northwest, draining regions as far west and north as Montana, North Dakota and even southern Canada.

New Madrid is 50 miles south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which, interestingly, is the location of the original mouth of the Mississippi River. New Madrid is only about 500 miles from New Orleans, which is due south. New Madrid, Mo, is also only about 50 miles south of Cairo, Illinois, which is at the confluence of the mighty Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The series of one major and many minor quakes that occurred over a period of several months during the winter of 1811-1812 in New Madrid created a scene of desolation that delayed settlement by several decades. The earth sank in places 15 to 20 feet, and rose in others, destroying the channel of the St. Francis River, which is a main tributary of the Mississippi River.

The New Madrid earthquake has never been adequately explained by conventional geologists who believe in the conventional plate tectonics theory of earthquakes, i.e., plates diving and sliding over one another. No known plates exist in the middle of the United States. The late astrophysicist Thomas Gold postulated that a tremendous outgassing from deep in the earth caused the New Madrid earthquake (10, 13).

University of Arkansas researcher Margaret Guccione linked shifts in the course of the Mississippi River and its tributaries to earthquakes and landscape changes in the New Madrid seismic zone, helping to more accurately date past earthquakes. She examined several loops of the Mississippi River in this region that have been abandoned by the river in the past 2,400 years and used radiocarbon techniques to date the organic matter found in sediments at different levels. Some of this sediment had rapidly accumulated because of the shift in drainage direction that dates to A.D. 1470, which suggests the occurrence of another possibly huge earthquake 350 years before the one in 1811-1812. (14)

In conclusion, the significance of “mud lumps” of the Mississippi River delta increases when viewed from the perspective of what we are learning about a) globally-distributed land and marine mud volcanoes and b) nearby New Madrid seismic zone. The City of New Orleans is in the path of Gulf of Mexico storms coming from the south, Mississippi River floods coming from the north, and earthquakes caused by deep earth outgassings coming from below.

Sources:

1. John M. Barry: “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.” Simon & Schuster, 1998, p. 69. This is a very good book dealing with a huge amount of information. Its title, however, is perplexing, as it deals with flooding caused by rains from the northeast and northwest, not from ocean or Gulf tides.

2. Humphreys, A. A. (Andrew Atkinson), 1810-1883. “Report upon the physics and hydraulics of the Mississippi river; upon the protection of the alluvial region against overflow; and upon the deepening of the mouths ... Prepared by Captain A.A. Humphreys and Lieut. H.L. Abbot. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, 2005, p. 452. Available free of charge at:
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AHE3908.0013.001; accessed January 4, 2006.

3. Sir Charles Lyell.http://www.gennet.org/facts/lyell.html; accessed January 4, 2006.

4. “Ecology of the Mississippi River System” at: http://www.loyno.edu/lucec/mrdsediment.html; accessed January 4, 2006.

5. “How Mudlumps are formed” at: http://www.loyno.edu/lucec/mrdmudlump.html; accessed January 4, 2006.

6. Jerry Labella: “Mud Lump Specks” at http://www.fintalk.com/moxie/1/1_1/trout-fishing.shtml; accessed January 4, 2006.

7. “Mud Volcanoes” at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_volcano; accessed January 4, 2006.

8. JF Kenney: “An introduction to the modern petroleum science, and to the Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins” at: http://www.gasresources.net/Introduction.htm; accessed January 4, 2006.

9. “Nikolai Kudryavtsev” at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kudryavtsev; accessed January 4, 2006.

10. SEMP Biot #182: “Oil Doesn’t Come from Squashed Ferns and Fish??”at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_182.html; accessed January 3, 2006.
11. Michael J. Benton: “When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of all Time.” Thames & Hudson Publishers, 2003, chapter 11, pp. 282-283.
12. Gregory Ryskin” “Did Methane Explosions Cause Mass Extinctions?” at: http://www.northwestern.edu/univ-relations/broadcast/9_2003/ryskinmethane.html; accessed January 4, 2006.

13. Thomas Gold: “The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels”. Springer-Verlag, 2001, pp. 150-153.

14. “New Madrid Seismic Zone and the Mississippi River” at: http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=40736; accessed January 4, 2006.