Watch mud volcano erupt beneath a crown of flames in Taiwan

A mud volcano has roared to life in front of a temple in Taiwan, with mesmerizing videos capturing the moments mud shot out of the ground beneath a crown of fire.

The Wandan mud volcano, located in the Wandan Township of southern Taiwan, spat bubbling mud out of four separate vents on Thursday (June 26) as ejected material reached a height of 6.6 feet (2 meters), Formosa Television (FTV) News reported.

Footage from the roughly 10-hour-long eruption shows flames igniting above the bubbling mud. However, while mud volcanoes can ignite naturally, the Wandan flames were deliberately set by local people to burn off ejected methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, according to Reddit posts by Mark Tingay, an adjunct associate professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

“Local folks ignite these vents by throwing burning rags into them,” Tingay wrote in response to one Reddit user asking about the flames. “They do it mostly to flare off the gases, but partly because it looks awesome!”

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Mud volcanoes usually don’t have anything to do with regular volcanoes, which eject molten rock and hot gases. Some mud volcanoes are linked to hot geothermal activity, like those in Yellowstone National Park. However, Wandan’s mud volcano is the more common type of this geological feature.

“These mud volcanoes in Taiwan are driven by high fluid pressures that can form deep underground, rather than by magmatic influence,” Tingay wrote in another Reddit comment.

Tingay studies mud volcanoes and regularly shares information about eruptions on social media. In his latest posts, he described the Wandan event alongside a video taken by 張寶惠, the mud volcano temple’s caretaker. 張寶惠 also shared videos on Facebook, showing the mud volcano violently erupting from different angles.

The latest eruption began at around 5 a.m. local time and continued until around 3.40 p.m. This is the 10th time the Wandan mud volcano has erupted within the last three years, according to Tingay’s posts.

Wandan’s mud volcano isn’t in a single fixed location, but can erupt over a 0.6-mile-wide (1 kilometer) area, according to Tingay. In previous years, the volcano has erupted underneath the temple, with mud shooting up the outside wall and flowing inside, covering the floor.

Mud volcanoes vary in size and shape, and in some cases, form massive cone-like structures very similar in appearance to regular volcanoes. They can naturally produce flames when erupting rocks strike against each other, creating a spark that ignites ejected flammable gases. Researchers believe this is what produced a towering inferno above a mud volcano in the Caspian Sea in 2021, Live Science previously reported.

Patrick Pester is the trending news writer at Live Science. His work has appeared on other science websites, such as BBC Science Focus and Scientific American. Patrick retrained as a journalist after spending his early career working in zoos and wildlife conservation. He was awarded the Master’s Excellence Scholarship to study at Cardiff University where he completed a master’s degree in international journalism. He also has a second master’s degree in biodiversity, evolution and conservation in action from Middlesex University London. When he isn’t writing news, Patrick investigates the sale of human remains.