A mud volcano erupted Wednesday afternoon in San Juan de Urabá, a municipality in Colombia’s Antioquia department, shooting flames and dense columns of gas into the sky and killing livestock before fire brigades arrived. No humans died.
Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management confirmed the eruption. The Colombian Geological Service clarified that mud volcanoes differ fundamentally from magmatic volcanoes — they expel pressurized mud, brine, and methane from faulted marine sediments rather than molten rock. When methane concentrations run high enough, contact with oxygen ignites the gas.
Authorities evacuated four homes near the blast site. The eruption damaged a municipal aqueduct treatment plant and cracked roads to the Siete Vueltas and Juancito Viejo districts. Fire brigades extinguished residual fires and reported stabilization by Wednesday evening. Geological Service technicians collected mud and gas samples to determine whether a deeper pressurized source sits beneath the site.
Americans have a benchmark. When Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington on May 18, 1980, it killed 57 people and reduced hundreds of square miles to wasteland, causing over $1 billion in damage. The eruption killed approximately 7,000 big game animals and 12 million fish hatchery fingerlings. Lahars destroyed 27 bridges and nearly 200 homes. Ash shut down air traffic across the Pacific Northwest for days.
San Juan de Urabá sits in terrain that has produced eruptions before. The basin is known for previous gas seeps and mud expulsions, and Colombia hosts more than 100 mud volcanoes across multiple departments. The dry season accelerates the problem — low soil moisture drives methane release from shallow deposits. New vents appear often enough that authorities cannot monitor all of them.
The geology ran on gas pressure, not magma. St. Helens ran on both.
Sources: Colombia National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD), Colombian Geological Service (SGC), U.S. Geological Survey, El Colombiano
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