  An outstanding problem in Earth science is understanding the method of
transport of magma in the Earth's mantle. Models for this process, transport in
a viscously deformable porous media, give rise to scalar degenerate,
dispersive, nonlinear wave equations. We establish a general local
well-posedness for a physical class of data (roughly $H^1$) via fixed point
methods. The strategy requires positive lower bounds on the solution. This is
extended to global existence for a subset of possible nonlinearities by making
use of certain conservation laws associated with the equations. Furthermore, we
construct a Lyapunov energy functional, which is locally convex about the
uniform state, and prove (global in time) nonlinear dynamic stability of the
uniform state for any choice of nonlinearity. We compare the dynamics to that
of other problems and discuss open questions concerning a larger range of
nonlinearities, for which we conjecture global existence.
