Maria Brumm has a Master's degree... in Science! She wrote her thesis on 
So sand is just little weensy rocks, anyway. And this is a weensy volcano made of sand, in Peru. It’s about a meter (0.33% 0.9% of a football field thanks LL!) across.
Normally, layers of sand and silt underground bear the weight of whatever’s on top of them through a network of contacts between individual soil grains. During an earthquake, this network is disrupted. But the stuff on top is still there, bein' all heavy. Wacky hijinks ensue!
If the jiggling sand happens to be wet, all that overburden pressure is transferred to the water. Water, being incompressible, is not happy about being squeezed like this; if it finds a suitable weak spot, it will squirt out. And voilà, a pretty sand boil!
This picture is totally going in my thesis.
Environment
Physical Science
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Yay! Sand "boil" ... I like that ... I've always called them sand volcano, but I think I like boil better.
These conglomerate injection complexes we documented in Patagonia always made me wonder if there was a conglomerate boil on the sea floor ... how awesome would that be.
Posted by: BrianR | March 21, 2008 11:25 AM
There are pooploads of submarine mud volcanoes, of course, but I'm not sure what the max observed grain size is.
Posted by: Maria Brumm | March 21, 2008 2:40 PM
The seafloor mud volcanoes cough up boulders, of serpentinite.
At the GSA section meeting yesterday, Hannah Wolf (a high-school student who won in the Westinghouse Science Fair last year) showed her poster about a fossilized sand volcano in southern Utah. She has a budding specialty in paleoseismites, and you'd all be proud of her.
Posted by: Andrew Alden | March 21, 2008 11:37 PM
Thanks - I never knew what to call those things.
I giggled at your "metre = 0.33 of a football field". It's been a longtime annoyance of mine, the convention of comparing anything of size with football fields. I know how big a metre is, or a yard, or any part of either measurement. But like a whole huge number of people, I never watch football, have never attended a game, and have no clue what size a football field may be... might as well say "big as a hayfield" - I've seen plenty of those.
Posted by: Bee | March 24, 2008 9:50 AM
Are you sure that shouldn't be 0.009 football fields long? Because although the word 'football' can refer to more than half a dozen different codes of ball sports, I don't think any of them have 300 meter fields...
Posted by: Lab Lemming | March 25, 2008 2:49 AM
Just in case you hadn't heard yet, I live in Indiana and there have been reports of sand boils popping up along many of our rivers and creeks since the earthquake in Southern Illinois a couple of weeks ago. Students and scientists around here are now studying them to see what kind of meaning they have and are asking farmers to report any sightings of them. You might be interested in finding out more about what's going on around here since it's so current.
Posted by: Kadi | April 25, 2008 10:41 AM