Early this millennium, on the sweltering north coast of Java, a lake of toxic mud has spread over four square miles of landscape, gouting out of a central crater from which a plume of foul-smelling gas also rises, and burying twelve villages. This mud volcano began to erupt ten years previously, shortly after a multinational corporation, drilling for oil in a Late Miocene stratum some two miles below ground, ruptured a high-pressure aquifer and opened a series of blowout vents on the surface – from which ever since has flowed this torrent of ancient, poisonous sludge. By some the mud volcano
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