Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

A re­cent mud ex­tru­sion has been dis­cov­ered at Pa­lo Seco Bay, the lat­est ge­o­log­i­cal fea­ture to emerge along Trinidad’s south-west­ern coast­line fol­low­ing the re­cent pow­er­ful twin earth­quakes off Venezuela. It is be­lieved the ex­tru­sion may have oc­curred around the same time the coast­line at Gal­fa Beach in Ce­dros was up­lift­ed by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 20 feet.

Yes­ter­day, the Val­lence Ramb­harat-led Hunters’ Search and Res­cue Team led a team of ex­perts, in­clud­ing Touch­stone Ex­plo­ration man­ag­er Xavier Moo­nan and ge­ol­o­gist Kassie Ba­boolal, to the Pa­lo Seco shore­line to ex­am­ine the for­ma­tion, which was two and a half me­tres in height.

A high odour of hy­dro­car­bons was al­so de­tect­ed, along with bub­bles, at the site.

Moo­nan said the ex­tru­sion con­sists main­ly of mud with boul­ders em­bed­ded with­in it, a char­ac­ter­is­tic of a mud flow.

“It’s got some boul­ders en­trained in the mud. That’s typ­i­cal of mud flow. What we see here is that it’s con­stant­ly erod­ing away. Even from the ini­tial videos, we saw it much big­ger than this. So, judg­ing based on that and how fast these tides are and where this thing is lo­cat­ed with ex­pect­ing tides, this must have been a very re­cent oc­cur­rence and must have been trig­gered by the earth­quake back in Venezuela.”

Moo­nan ex­plained that the for­ma­tion is the re­sult of mud be­ing forced to the sur­face along an un­der­ground fault. Not­ing that the San­ta Flo­ra fault ero­sion is less than a kilo­me­tre from the Pa­lo Seco site, he said there are sev­er­al splays near the mud for­ma­tion.

“So, there’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty that along one of these faults, we may have had some de­vel­op­ment or ex­pul­sion of mud ma­te­r­i­al, which would have led to this. The beach it­self is very flat, undis­turbed, as far east as we can see and as far west as we can see. The head­land it­self does not show any glar­ing signs of a land­slip to at­tribute this up­lift to the land­slip and the beach it­self is flat. So most like­ly this is some­thing that oc­curred right here along a fault it­self.”

Mean­while, the Gal­fa land up­lift has be­come a ma­jor at­trac­tion for ex­perts, ad­ven­ture seek­ers and cu­ri­ous mem­bers of the pub­lic.