Soap holes, mud holes, mud boils, quicksand/quickclay, or mud volcanoes are common for our area.

Also referred to as pingles in Saskatchewan, these are holes in the ground that seep out a fine grain, liquid clay, which is very slippery, hence the name soap holes.

Not much is known about how these soap holes are formed, so a University of Calgary master’s candidate in geo-science wants to change that, and is coming to our area next month to study these slippery phenomena.

Dylan Cunningham is on a fact finding mission to learn more about them, and says there is not much information about them out now, besides farmer stories of horses going lame, or kids ruining their clothing.

“No one has really looked into them, they’ve been mentioned a couple times in a couple publications done by the government of Alberta and some other master’s students, but they’ve never really been extensively studied. So it’s myself, and one other person working on the project, are kind of the first to spearhead an effort looking into these features specifically in Alberta.”

Cunningham says they don't form at lower elevations like a bog or swamp, and the mud seems to come directly from the ground, like a slow acting volcano. 

“They do also occur on higher areas which may differentiate them from bogs and muskeg. Something interesting we seem to find with them is that they vary greatly in their depth, some of them only go down maybe a meter or two, but some people have been interested in them and stuck entire telephone poles down them…one guy stuck a cement bucket with a wire on it, and it went down 45 feet before he had to stop and pull it up because he couldn’t go any further with it.”

He is looking for any local resident who has a story about a soap hole or is interested in participating in his study to get in touch with him. His goal is to map the locations of the soap holes to try and determine if there is any rhythm or reason why they are formed where they are.

You can contact Dylan be email at dzcunnin@ucalgary.ca, or you can visit his Facebook page, Soap Holes Research.