The World's Largest Shotgun...

...and I do mean the absolute largest, may be in the making and yet its creators may not even realize what they are doing. As you may or may not be aware shotguns fire different types of projectiles, one of them being known simply as 'shot'. Shot, or a load of it, is usually and basically made up of a number of pellets. When you fire the shotgun, the ignition and very rapid burning of the gunpowder in the shotgun shell creates gasses that rapidly expand, this expansion of gasses in essence pushes the pellets out of the barrel at a high speed.

In Indonesia, authorities have created hundreds of concrete balls that in a way resemble
shotgun pellets. The fact that the authorities there intend to take hundreds of these concrete balls and place them into a fissure that has been erupting and spewing hot noxious mud is sort of analogous to them loading a shotgun. You see the fissure has been spewing that hot noxious mud has been spouting out enough of it to fill over 50 Olympic swiming pools a day for over 9 months according to the article: Giant Weights to Be Dropped Into Indonesian Mud Volcano Friday, Officials Say at FoxNews.com, see: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,253831,00.html.

In other words, it appears as if the fissure has been venting an awful lot of pressure. The hope is, of course, that the heavy concrete balls dropped into the fissure will prevent it from spewing forth any more mud. My concern is that all the pressure that has been vented over that 9 month period, still has a lot of pressure coming behind it, or in other words that there is a lot more left to come out of that hole. Filling the hole with 550 pound pellets may just turn it into a large shotgun, and when enough pressure builds up under the concrete balls, the whole thing may just go kaboom sending those balls into flight.

Now, there is a chance that this plugging up of the hole will work. There is also a chance that if it does not work it will not go kaboom either, but will rather just crack open some distance away and continue to spew mud. My imaginative guess is though, that there is a chance it could go kaboom and turn those concrete balls into deadly projectiles coming out of the world's largest shotgun. That is a scary thought and I hope someone has already figured out that there virtually is no chance of that happening. I must say though, if it does go kaboom, I hope to be in the comfort of my living room - safe at home - watching it on the evening news when it blows.

All the best,
Glenn B