June 1, 2023 • 46 mins
It might surprise you to learn that the oldest raging fires on Earth are actually underground. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the world of eternal flames and coal seam fires. (originally published 04/28/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And Rob and I are out
this week, so we are bringing you some episodes from
the vault. This is part two of our series Fire
from the Rocks. This episode originally aired April twenty eighth,
twenty twenty two. Let's jump into the fire.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two of our series on naturally fueled flames. Now, in
the last episode, Rob, you opened with a question that
we never fully got to the bottom of. The question
was what is the oldest continuously burning fire on Earth?
And or you may have phrased it a little bit differently.
(01:01):
That was one question. I guess another one would be like,
what's the longest a single fire with a single common
origin has ever burned?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Right? Yeah, but essentially getting down to the same question.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, yeah, I guess the last one is really unknowable.
The first, what is the oldest continuous fire still burning today?
Is I don't know maybe still difficult to know, but
easier than the other one. So I don't know if
this question can be answered definitively, but we did at
least establish that all of the oldest eternal flames maintained
(01:32):
by humans at various temples and memorials and so forth
around the world are minuscule in longevity compared to some
sites of naturally fueled burning, places where some chunk of
the earth itself is continuously on fire or smoldering at
the place where it meets oxygen. And one example we
(01:52):
looked at in the last episode is a very strange
and beautiful place in the Northwest Territories of Canada called
the Smoking Hills, where eroding coastal hills and cliff sides
burn by themselves as a result of an exothermic chemical
reaction that happens when pyrite rich mudstones exposed to the air,
(02:15):
so erosion happens, part of the cliff comes away, and
some of this mudstone that has fine grain pyrite in
it oxidizes, It heats up, and then some combustible elements
that are within the mudstone sort of smolder or catch fire,
and that just creates a self sustaining, self igniting burn
that can go on for a long long time. All
(02:37):
evidence points to the conclusion that the Smoking Hills have
been burning for hundreds or even thousands of years. So
there might be a question about whether you'd want to
call this technically an example of fire or not. I mean,
it is smoldering rather, You're not usually seeing like big
sort of dancing flames coming off of it. But it's
smoking and burning for hundreds or thousands of years. It
(02:59):
certainly is a very long burn. But is it the
longest Well, I think the answer is probably not. Again,
this question is hard to answer conclusively, but one site
I have seen proposed as the holder of the title
of the longest burning fire on Earth is a place
in Australia known as the Burning Mountain. The Burning Mountain
(03:23):
is technically known as Mount Wingin spelled Wingin like wing
in its WinGen, which is a name allegedly derived from
a word used by the native Wannerua people meaning fire.
The Burning Mountain is located in the Upper Hunter Valley
of New South Wales what's today about three hundred kilometers
(03:44):
north of Sydney, and the earliest written records of the
mountain trace back to stories published in the Sydney newspapers
in eighteen twenty eight, though the site had been used
and known by the Wannerua going back much longer. To
get a feel for the stint of this site, I
was looking around for photos and videos and I found
a really cool video somebody uploaded to YouTube of aerial
(04:06):
drone footage, So you can look that up if you want.
But if you are peering down at the mountain from
the air, what you will see is a sort of
smooth crest of a mountain peak where a section that
looks to me to be about I'm not so good
at estimating area by site, but it looks like maybe
(04:27):
half the size of a soccer field something like that.
It's been scorched clean, so all of the ground around it.
This is not a bare rock mountaintop. This is a
fully forested and grass covered mountain. So all of the
ground around this burned area is populated with trees and grasses.
But within the burned zone there is only bare earth,
(04:50):
soil and gravel, either bleached white like ash or burned
red like brick. And near the edges of the burn
field there are these pale skeletons of dead trees, some
laying flat. I guess maybe those are the older ones
that have fallen down and some still standing. The ones
that are still upright seem to be the ones that
(05:11):
are a little bit farther away from the center of
the burned region, and all around the area, even in
sections that are now covered in grass and vegetation, presumably
covered in it once again, there are noticeable cracks and
fissures in the earth, like you might see opening up
during an earthquake scene in a disaster movie.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, I would say this, this footage is definitely worth
seeking out because when you hear burning mountain, and even
with that description, you still might be imagining some sort
of mor door esque, very volcanic vision of what we're
talking about here, and the reality is in many ways
more subtle than that extreme vision, but also inherently, you know,
(05:54):
weird when compared to most other environments you're going to encounter.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, totally, And I think think there are indications there
may have been times, even in fairly recent history, where
it looked scarier than it does now, though it certainly
does look very strange. One of the earliest written accounts
that's been widely cited and republished. Was an investigation and
field report called Burning Mountain of Australia by the Reverend
(06:20):
Charles Wilton, published in eighteen twenty nine. I dug up
this article and I wanted to read and mention a
few sections from it because it was interesting. Wilton begins
by acknowledging that he's waiting into a kind of ongoing
controversy and would have to contradict previous reports, including the
earlier reports that Mount WinGen was a volcano with a
(06:42):
crater or caldera. Now Wilton's investigation revealed that the mountain
was probably not a volcano and certainly did not have
a mouth or crater. And he writes as follows, that
portion of the mountain Wingin where the fire is now burning,
and which is a comp packed sandstone rock, comprehends parts
(07:03):
of two declivities of one and the same mountain. The
progress of the fire has of late been down the
northern and highest elevation, and it is now ascending with
great fury the opposite and southern imminence from the situation
of the fire having been in a hollow between two
ridges of the same mountain. Mister Mackie, referring to somebody
(07:24):
who gave an earlier report, was probably induced to give
to the clefts in the mountain the appellation of a crater.
The fact is, the rock, as the subterraneous fire increases,
is rent into several concave chasms of various widths. I
particularly examined the widest of these. The rock, a solid
(07:46):
mass of sandstone, was torn asunder about two feet in width,
leaving its upper and southerly side exposed to view the
parts so torn asunder, having slipped as it were, down
and sunk into a hollow, the forming the convex surface
of the heated rock. I looked down this chasm to
the depth of about fifteen feet. The sides of the
(08:08):
rock were of a white heat, like that of a
lime kiln, while sulfurous and steamy vapors arose from a
depth below, like blasts from the forge of Vulcan himself.
I stood on that portion of the rock which had
been cleft from the part above, and on hurling stones
down into the chasm. The noise they made in their
fall seemed to die away in a vast abyss beneath
(08:31):
my feet. Oh wow, so I love the part where
he starts chucking rocks into the chasms in the earth. So, okay,
he has established this is probably not a volcano. There
is no crater, no caldera. Instead, there is a burned
area on the surface of the mountain producing sulfurous fumes.
And then there are these cracks or chasms in the earth,
(08:52):
and the fire seems to be burning down in the
deep of these cracks.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Now in comparing it to the Forge of Vulcan though,
this comes back to something we touched on in the
last episode that when people encounter these they have no
choice in many cases but to compare them to human
fire technology on one level or another.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, especially industry, right, Like both of the earliest written
accounts of the smoking hills in the Northwest Territories compared
them to compared them to human industry, one to a
chemical factory, the other to a brick manufacturing location. And
that many of the oral traditions of the inuvialuate people
(09:32):
who said that these were the fires coming off of
the hills were the cooking fires or smoke from the
fires of the little people or the invisible people who
lived inside the mountains. There after they'd been driven away
from human companionship. So coming back to Reverend Wilton's account,
he goes on to write that there are a bunch
of these chasms. They're of varying width, and they're constantly
(09:54):
belching out smoke and sulfurous vapor. And the chasms are
also quote beautified with efflorescent crystal of sulfur, varying in
color from the deepest red orange occasioned by a ferruginous mixture.
I think that means containing iron or iron oxide to
the palest straw color where alum predominated. And he said
(10:17):
he could not spend much time near these clefts because
the ground was too hot to stand on, and the
vapors were not quote most grateful to the lungs.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Very polite.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, And he makes a bunch more descriptive observations. He
says that he did not observe any lava or trachite there,
and these would be rocks that would be signs of
volcanic activity, so he seems to be accumulating evidence against
the interpretation of this mountain as any kind of volcano.
He also says that he didn't see any coal at
(10:50):
the Burning Mountain, though he notes that he found coal
in many places nearby, So this region of the country
seems to be coal rich, which is important. We'll come
back to it. And as one weird aside, he's like, Oh,
by the way, right on the other side of the
burning mountain, there's a spring that's great to drink from,
nice cool water, especially after you've been breathing smoke from
(11:12):
the fumes from the chasms. You go and get yourself
some of the water from the spring. It will quinch
thee folks. It is not a good idea to drink
untested or untreated spring water. I can have stuff in it.
It's not good for you, though. I honestly, I don't
know if that's more or less likely if you're getting
your spring water from a mountain that's on fire.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, because I can imagine the water potentially tasting strongly
of sulfur or something. But I don't know. Maybe it's
just a wonderful spring that was quite refreshing.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Now. As a general comment on his observations, Wilton writes, quote,
I have compared the phenomenon presented by this mountain with
written descriptions of volcanic action and subterraneous fire in other
portions of the globe and discover no exact similarity between them.
The Burning Mountain of Australia may I think be pronounced
as unique one other example of nature sports of her
(12:10):
total disregard in this country of those laws which the
philosophers of the old world have since assigned her. I
don't know about that, Wilton. This is certainly not a
unique phenomenon. We can come back to that in a minute.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
But Betty is correct, you know, it depends on what
he's looking to, I guess in history books and other accounts,
because there can be, you know, obviously big differences between
what one could roughly classify as fire erupting from the
ground or burning earth in one part of the world
and something that fits the same description elsewhere in the world.
(12:47):
And we'll get to some examples of that in a bit, right.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So, in the year since, study on the Burning Mountain
is continued, and it is clear that it is in
fact a coal seam fire. So you can imagine there
are masses of coal inside the mountains, sometimes you know,
ribbons of coal running through the rocks, and at some
point in history that coal must have been exposed to
(13:13):
the air to some extent and set on fire and
it has been slowly burning or smoldering ever since. Now,
how is it first ignited? Ultimately, we have no way
of knowing that, but hypotheses include lightning strikes that would
make sense. So lightning strikes exposed coal seam that sets
it ablaze and it just continues throughout the years after that.
(13:34):
It could have been a natural brush fire. Brush fire
gets close and does the same thing. There are some
theories that it could be a kind of spontaneous spontaneous
ignition of exposed coal, because when coal is exposed to
air and gets really hot, maybe baking under the sun,
it can start burning on its own. Or there could
(13:55):
be some kind of chemical reaction, maybe involving sulfur like
we like we observed in the Smoking Hills the oxidation
that kicks off that burning process in Canada.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And then, of course, obviously there's the other possibility, which
I think Smoky Bear would definitely point out to us,
that there's always the chance that human beings have a
hand in setting such things ablaze. Possible, yes, either by
accident or intentionally.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, And so one of the articles I was reading
mentioned the possibility because I think there are some early
reports that make it, that make the burning Mountain sound
more hellish and stupendous than it is even today. I
mean today, you don't see flames anywhere. You just see
and smell the smoke, and you see the scorched earth
(14:44):
on the surface and these chasms leading down below. So
something's happening deep down in there, fires in the deep,
but you're not seeing tongues of flame erupt from the earth.
I think some early reports did say that they observed
like lights and stuff like that, which may have led
to the initial reports that this was some kind of
volcano if they were seeing actual like glowing flames or
(15:07):
something like that coming out of the mountain, which could
have been caused by if there was a section of
the coal seam, it was just closer to the surface, right,
It's closer to the surface, so more oxygen's getting to it.
It's getting really hot, it's producing these flames, and they're
within you know, a distance from the surface that can
be seen with the naked eye.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, because we are dealing with the situation where you know,
geologic processes need to be considered, and also where a
situation where fuel is being consumed and so a certain
amount of change is going to take place there. Like
even in the Wilton quote that you read here, like
he talks about the great fury that is observable here,
(15:46):
and perhaps this is just you know, his his description
being you know, colorful and enthusiastic. But you know that
doesn't necessarily match up with say, you know, these modern
drone images in the modern Tren footage that we were
talking about earlier.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Right, So the surface appearance of a coal seam fire
like this could vary a lot over the ages as
it continues to burn. I think one of the biggest
variables just being like how close is the coal to
the surface. Now, coming back to the question of how
long the fire has been burning and how we could
estimate this as the oldest continuous fire on Earth. It
(16:24):
appears to be burning underground at a depth of roughly
thirty meters below the surface. So while it has an
enormous quantity of fuel that it can access in the
coal seam that feeds it, it's actually burning incredibly slowly.
And I'm pretty sure that the main reason for this
is that it's so deep that it has very little
(16:45):
access to oxygen. So, for a mundane analogy, if you
ever have experience working a grill, Think about getting a
fire going, and maybe you want this fire and the
grill to burn low and slow instead of hot and fast.
What would you do there? You manipulate the vents, right.
You squeeze them down to only the barest crack of
an opening, so that the fire has very little access
(17:08):
to oxygen. You can't close the vents completely, of course,
because then the fire will just go out there's no oxygen.
But if you keep just a little trickle of oxygen
going in, the fire will burn slowly at a lower
temperature and last for a longer time without extinguishing its
fuel source. So I think that's probably what's going on
in this case as well. There's a bunch of coal
(17:30):
down there, but it's burning through the coal very slowly.
It's smoldering over the years because it's deep and the
oxygen not a whole lot of oxygen gets to it
at once. So scientists have actually been able to estimate
the average rate at which the fire spreads within the
burning mountain, and a common estimate I've seen is that
(17:50):
it appears to be going roughly one meter per year.
And because we can track the historical movement of the
burned area through geological markers, we can actually estimate the
age of the fire, as the authors mention in a
paper called Thermal Infrared Imagery of the Burning Mountain coal
Fire published in Remote Sensing Equipment by CD Elliott and
(18:15):
Adrian W. Fleming in nineteen seventy four. And so the
authors of this paper right quote, baked sediments and slag
produced by the burning mountain coal fire have been traced
over a distance of six kilometers to the northeast of
the present chimney. The burning mountain coal fire itself is
of considerable antiquity. If it's assumed that the fire is
(18:36):
burnt continuously and migrated steadily south at the present mean
rate of movement, and again this is estimated to be
roughly one meter per year, it would have taken approximately
six thousand years to cover the distance indicated at the
surface by its effects, though they acknowledge the fire may
in fact have been burning for a much longer period.
(18:57):
But it's kind of nice that that's some nice even
math to round it out, right. So if it's gone
about six kilometers and it's going about one meter per year,
it seems to have been traveling for at least around
six thousand years. And I don't know how credible these
next claims are because I don't know the methodology behind them,
but I've at least seen it stated in some other
articles that the fire could be much older, maybe more
(19:18):
than one hundred thousand years old, but I don't know
why anybody would say that. So, as far as I
can tell, even if only the low end estimate of
six thousand years is true, that would make the Burning
Mountain the longest burning fire on planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah. I mean that dwarfs anything we've discussed thus far,
or we'll discuss after this.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
I was reading about the site on the National Parks
Australia page and they actually summarized a Wannaroua story about
the origin of the mountain, which was that there was
a woman who was waiting for her husband to return
from battle, and she was sitting upon the mountain and
her husband did not return. I guess he was killed
(20:01):
in battle, and when he didn't come back, she was
so distraught that she cried out to the sky god
beyond me, to kill her. And the god did not
kill her. Instead, he turned her into stone, and so
the tears she wept, became fire and set the mountain
itself on fire.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Oh wow. Now this is a site that the people
can go and see. You can be looking it up
on the website here, but you can go to Burning
Mountain Nature Reserve and there's a what a one to
two hour hike you can take and you can go
to this observation platform that's also visible in the drone
(20:41):
footage that we were looking at. So I know we
have a number of listeners out there in Australia. So
if anyone out there has been to this site and
has some first hand experience they would like to share,
we'd love to hear about it.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, totally. If you've been there right in, let us
know what it's like.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah. The website also points out please note remember to
take her by no if you want to birdwatch, because
serious bird watchers are like spurning mountain. No no, no,
are those birds?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Okay? But so this is one type of naturally fueled fire, right.
This is a coal seam fire, and there are other
fires like it, though none that we know of that
are as old as this one. Some of the other
major ones actually have clear human origins, like there are
some famous ones in the coal mining regions of the
United States, like the famous Centralia fire in Pennsylvania. There
(21:38):
are also, I know, a lot of coal seam fires
throughout China where places that have where coal has been mined,
have accidentally been set alight.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
How long has the Springfield tire fire supposed to have
been going on?
Speaker 3 (21:51):
On?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
The simp sells, we wouldn't have our tire fire, hm,
I don't know how long is How many years is
the sim since been on? Oh wow, seventy four years
at this point.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Now.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Coal seam fires have all kinds of interesting characteristics and
also that they can be incredibly troublesome because of course
they're just sitting there belching smoke into the atmosphere without
even being of use. I mean, it's not even like
a coal power plant that is belching this carbon into
the atmosphere and polluting the air, but at least you're
getting power out of it. This is just doing that
(22:26):
and nothing's coming from it. It's just burning, and it's
in many cases hard or even impossible to put these out.
I know there have been various schemes involving dumping like
liquid nitrogen and stuff in and some of these have
just proven pretty much impossible for people to extinguish.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, though it is interesting how it is kind of
the naturally occurring equivalent of human coal industry. You know,
I like it because of it's coal. It's burning. It's
just not doing anything for humans. So a coal, of course,
is a fossil fuel formed from ancient organic matter converted
(23:02):
through heat and pressure. And like we've been saying, coal
seams are just blanket like coal deposits in the rock,
and when exposed in an outcrop or even in an
underground environment, these seams can and will burn.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah, if oxygen can get to the coal, that's dangerous, right,
But of course this is not the only natural fossil
fuel that can be set alight and lead to a
sort of persistent, ongoing fire that stretches beyond human control.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
That's right. One of the big ones here is a
natural gas fueled fire, and this is exactly what it
sounds like. Natural gas is, of course, also a fossil
fuel formed underground due to high temperatures and high compression
of ancient organic matter into flammable thermogenic methane as opposed
to biogenic methane, which is produced by organisms, deposits of
(23:50):
natural gas occurrent smaller amounts at shallower depths near oil deposits,
and in deeper deposits of mostly just natural gas. There
are several different classifications that we can work with here,
and I'm not going to go into detail on these,
but there's conventional gas, there's biogas, deep natural gas, shale
tight gas, coalbad methane, submarine methane, hydrate gas, and geopressurized
(24:15):
zone gas. So the basics though, are that if conditions
are right, natural gas forms within the Earth over geologic time,
and if conditions are also right, that gas can leak
to the surface without human industry playing a hand in
any of it. And if that natural leakage of gas
should encounter a spark a flame, well then you have
(24:38):
yourself potentially a jet of fire emerging from the earth.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Right the earth itself can sort of have a pilot
light going. It's just there is a continuous release of
natural gas, which is flammable, and if the flame gets going,
the heat is there, the fuel is continuously supplied as
it leaks out of the ground, and the oxygen is
there in the atmosphere because it's meeting the surface so
you can just have a flame that comes out of
the ground and just burns and burns and burns and
(25:04):
burns as long as the as long as the gas
is continually escaping.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah, and very shortly here we'll have I think a
great example of this. But another possibility worth mentioning here
is that of peat fires. So PETE is found in
shallow wetlands such as swamps and bogs, large deposits of
plant matter have decomposed under anaerobic conditions. PETE has a
(25:29):
number of different uses for in human technology, including gardening, filtration,
chemical absorption techniques. But it's high in carbon, so if
it drives out enough, it can catch fire.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
And I've read stories about these peat fires that get
out of hand can also be incredibly difficult to deal with.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
But it is interesting because you don't necessarily think of
something in the bog being flammable like this.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
You don't. I don't know why don't you.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
I mean you do think of things like swamp gas.
And you know, we've talked in the past till the wisp,
will of the wisp. Yeah, but you can also imagine
yourself in this environment being like it is so damp here,
it is so wet. How could anything possibly burn on
its own without humans playing a direct hand in it? Right?
All right? So coming back to natural gas powered naturally
(26:19):
fueled flames, I want to come to some what I
thought were just fascinating examples that I don't think I
was really familiar with any of these, because they concern
what is now Azerbaijan on the Abseron Peninsula. This was
a region that was under the domain of Shivan in
(26:39):
ancient times, but came under the domain of Imperial Russia,
the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Soviet Russia during the twentieth century.
And this is an area where there is a lot
of petroleum and also various examples of natural gas emerging
from the ground that I thought we might discuss here, Okay,
(27:02):
all right, So it takes us to what is now
the capital city of Azerbaijan, Baku. It's a host to
numerous sites of interest, including the Maiden Tower, a twelfth
century construction with a very intriguing design. Its origins are
often explained in a tail concerning fire. In particular, there
(27:23):
are a few different Zoroastrian legends about this structure, and
I included a picture here for you, Joe, and I
encourage listeners to look up images of this structure because
it's it's quite picturesque. I don't think I've seen anything
quite like it's it's rather different from other twelfth century
constructions and certainly from other archaeological traditions in other parts
(27:46):
of the world.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And this is also interesting because, of course
fire has very important religious significance within Zoroastrianism. I've sometimes
heard Zoroastrianism, I think incorrectly described as a fire worshiping religion,
and I don't think that's quite right, because fire is
not like a god or the god of Zoroastrianism, like
(28:08):
the god of Zoroastrianism is the Ahura Mazda, you know,
the god of good and light. But fire is an
important religious symbol within their rightship.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
You do see these ancient accounts by foreigners, generally who
come into this region and they're like, oh, yeah, they
worship fire here. But yeah, I think you could very
easily compare that to accounts of say Europeans going into
many other parts of the world and saying, hey, they
worship demons here, they worship devils, they're not Christian at all.
So you know, it's it's ultimately I think more complicated
than that, But there is this element of fire that
(28:43):
does pop up in some of the religious traditions in
this area.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I think maybe this might be a very rough analogy,
but it would be kind of like mistakenly saying that
Christians worship a cross made of wood.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I think I think that that gets
at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Oh, but but I I'm I want to know this legend.
You mentioned a Zoroastrian legend concerning the Maiden Tower, this
intriguing and beautiful building and its origins concerning fire.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yes, and I was I was reading. Central was essentially
a post that was put together by Professor Mahir Khalifa
Zade and Layla Khalifa Zade, and they point out that
there are several different legends tie that concern fire and
concern this to this tower, the Maiden Tower. But the
(29:33):
basic story that really captivated my attention was this idea that, Okay,
you have this very brutal siege that's taking place at
the city of Baku, and the people there they pray
before the holy fires of the Fire Temple to Ahura
Mazda to save them. Again. This is the creator deity
of Zoroastrianism. And I'm going to quote this this bit,
(29:56):
just a bit from the paper here or the post
by Khalifa Zade here. Quote Finally he heard their prayers.
On the next day, the people saw that a large
piece of the Holy Fire was fell down to the
earth from the top of the fire temple tower. A
beautiful girl came up from the fire. She had long
and fire colored hairs. The crowd went down on their
(30:18):
knees and started to pray to her. And so from
here basically what happens. The fire maiden says, Hey, i
am sent here to protect you, but I'm going to
need a sword, and I'm going to need a helmet
to hide my long, beautiful hair from the enemy. The
enemy cannot see my hair, so they outfit her with
these items. She orders the gates thrown open, and then
(30:40):
a great battle ensues and she engages. She winds up
engaging in single combat with the enemy commander, who just
assumes she's just another one of the male soldiers of
the city, dressed in the helmet wielding a sword. So
she ends up knocking the commander down, and then she
pulls a knife and holds it to his throat, and
he asked to see the face of the warrior who
(31:01):
has bested him, so she shows him. She takes the
helm off, and he's shocked to see the face of
a girl and the long, beautiful, flame colored hair of
a girl. And first he realizes, okay, first of all,
if this is what the girls of Baku are capable of,
are you know, if they're this tough, then we don't
have a chance against the rest of the army. But
(31:22):
then he also falls in love with her instantly, and
then she falls in love with him, and then peace
is declared.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Oh didn't see that coming.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, yeah, it kind of has goes in a direction
I didn't. I didn't expect there, and uh, you know,
I mean, who knows stories like this? You can have
multiple stories, I guess, kind of merging together, and it
twisting over time, and at some point someone decides what
if it had a what if it had a romantic ending?
And ultimately Khalifazade shares a few other versions where you know,
(31:52):
various other things occur, and also mentions the tower might
just be called the Maiden Tower because it was never
conquered by the enemy. It's the ideas like this, this
tower is it's a virgin tower. The enemy has never
defiled it.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
I see.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
So you have this history in Baku, you know, concerning
fire and uh and and you know, it's it's the
character of the city seems very much associated with it.
And you see that even in the city's modern wonders.
There's a there there's a trio of skyscrapers. They are
known as the Flame Towers, and they they're they're very
beautiful in the pictures I looked at. They have this
(32:34):
kind of curling flame shape to them, and so you know,
during the day they're you know, reflective glass and steel,
very much like like any other modern skyscrapers. But I've
also seen images where they lighted it like the light
these towers up at night with you know, swirling orange
and yellow and red and and also some blue thrown
(32:54):
in there as well that really make them look like,
you know, strong depictions of flames curling up from the air.
And this comes back to the idea that this is
a region rich in petroleum and natural gas, and you
have various sites of interest here that are associated with that,
including jan Ardagh also known as the Burning Mountain, and
(33:16):
this is where natural gas constantly seeps up through the
ground and has been a flame since at least the
nineteen fifties, when it may have been ignited by shepherds.
So this is an example where ultimately who knows, but
at least one of the stories out there is that, okay,
there's gas leaking up and then some shepherds set it
(33:37):
on fire in the fifties, and by some accounts it
has been burning ever since. Flames reportedly jet about three
meters or nine point eight feet into the air from
this site. And I looked up images of this site,
and this is another one where if you're going into
this expecting something out of Mordor, you're probably going to
(33:58):
be disappointed. It's basically this hillside and there's a there's
an area where there's not any vegetation, and then there's
an area that's really dark, and then here are the
fires springing out of the earth. Now, this area is
also known for its mud volcanoes, which are not true
volcanoes as they don't produce lava instead, And I have
(34:18):
to throw in this wonderful description that I found for
mud volcanoes in general from Brewster at All in a
twenty fifteen article in Geo Echo Marina. They say that
these are geo exuded slurries, usually including water and gases.
So they look like a like a bit like bubbling mud,
(34:40):
like gas rising up through the mud, you know, forming
these big bump bubbles. It has kind of a bog
of eternal stench kind of a look to it. And
you know, some of these also looks very much like
an alien world, like you have this this kind of
barren landscape and here's like the bubbling pool of mud
years ago.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
I think I flagged mud volcanoes as a is a
potential episode topic for us.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Oh yeah, we could easily come back to it.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
But yeah, weird sort of gray clay puke coming up
from these cracked blisters in the earth. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah. Now, this region of Surakzani has long been associated
again often with fire worship or religious practices that concern fire,
and their accounts going back apparently to the tenth century
at least, But as luck would have it, we also
have accounts of this region from German traveler Ingolbert Khompher,
(35:35):
who visited here in sixteen eighty three and has some
wonderful descriptions of what he saw Ingolbert Komper, of course,
popped up in our Vegetable Lamb episode.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Oh yeah, that's right, as one of the early voices
of skepticism about this story, saying that I don't know.
I traveled all over and people don't really seem to
know what these stories are talking about. I do not
think there is a plant that makes lamb.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yes. So the book in question is Exotic Attractions in
Persia sixteen eighty four through sixteen eighty eight, and I
was looking at a translation of this by Villain Floor,
which you can find on an ebook or physical book
out there. So I'm just going to read just a
brief bit from it here where he's talking about these fires.
(36:23):
From there, we continued our march, and after midday we
came to the burning field, covered with white sand and
sprinkled with ashy dust. From numerous fissures, sulfurous spouts burst
from the soil, a varied and pleasant spectacle. Some fissures
made a lot of noise, and with their fires and
their violence, aroused a holy fear among some rare spectators.
(36:46):
Others again emitted less strong flames, allowing everybody to come
quite close. Others exhaled fumes or rather hardly visible vapors,
but which reeked strongly of the spirit of naphtha. This
phenomena appeared in the area of eighty eight paces in
length twenty six wide. The fissures were amazingly narrow, not
(37:07):
wider than one foot or one palm, some shorter and
drawn into a semicircle, and others crooked with a long,
insinuous bend, which I have shown accurately and conform to
reality in the appended illustration to complete this description. The
edges of these cracks and the soil itself, when you
remove the dust, showed a pox marked light stone, almost
(37:30):
like pumice stone. The matter seemed to be a conglomerate
of seashells and minuscule snail shells. We came upon about
a dozen people who stayed there, who, around a fire,
were engaged in all kinds of activities. In fact, some
having placed copper or earthenware pots on a not too
blazing crack, prepared the meals for the inhabitants of the
(37:51):
neighboring village of Sorgani at Swaga, thus named because of
the fire. Others having brought stones from all aroun, and
having heaped them together, were burning a lime and once,
when ready, they made a pile to transport it in
small vessels. Two foreigners, Indian fire worshippers descended from the
ancient Persians, were quietly seated around it enclosure they had constructed.
(38:15):
They watched and venerated the spouting flame, offering prayers to
the eternal God. One of the lime burners had approached us,
proposing to show us something particularly extraordinary. If for this surface,
we offered him some money. When we had counted it,
he placed small cotton balls that he tore from his
dress on a fire shovel and set fire to them.
(38:36):
Then he very quickly took the flame obtained in that
fashion above a fissure at some distance which had neither
fire nor flame. Its vapor was everywhere invisible until it
produced a very high flame. This was a beautiful and
unexpected moment. But the flame disappeared again after a while.
Such is the first appearance of the wonders of nature,
well known in this part of the peninsula, but not
(38:57):
in the same place, and eternally remained in people memory. Wow, yeah,
so yeah, I love everything about that. Account.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
That's oh yeah, yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Though.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
I have to notice Camphor mentions cotton, thinking back to
the vegetable lamb thing, So he knew about he knew
about cotton at least I'm assuming this translation is accurate
and that is what he meant instead of using the
word for wool or something.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
That's a good point. That's a good point. So again,
that is from Exotic Attractions in Persia by Engelbert Komf
and you can pick up a copy of that that
comes out from that's out from Mage Publishers, and there
is a kindle edition. But there's another side of interest
related to all of this, and that is the Atashka
(39:45):
Fire Temple or the Fire Temple of Baku. This is
a square building with pentagonal walls and a domed roof
constructed atop a natural gas leak that provides fuel for
a large flame in the center of the temple, as
well as for four smaller flames on each of the
buildings on the roof. Basically, they're four small, almost like
(40:07):
little towers, one at each corner of the of the roof,
and those are flaming as well.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Oh wow, So this is a temple a religious building
built around a natural gas leak.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah. So I love this because in that comfort account
we had an example of people cooking over one of
these naturally occurring spouts of gas and spouts of flame.
And now we have an actual structure that is not
only like built around this, but seems to be manipulating
the flow of gas so that you can have additional
(40:44):
fires control fires burning at the top of the temple.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yeah, yeah. And you know there's some old woodcuts of this,
and also you know you can find modern photos of
it as well. It's been a place for Hindu, Sikh,
and so Astrian worship, and it seems to be some
debate on who originally worshiped here. And part of this
may be due to what Mary Boyce described in nineteen
(41:11):
seventy five's on the Zoroastrian Temple Cult of Fire, published
in the Journal of the American Oriental Society as quote
the dearth of records of Zoroastrianism at any period before
the seventeenth century Ce. But Boyce points out a few
different ideas about the history of these fire temples. Again
in the particular mainly we're talking about in the Baku region.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
First of all, I see okay. Yeah, I was like, sure,
we know it's older than that. Okay, I see in
this region.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
So, first of all, the history is complex due to
the existence of both Zoroastrian image cults and fire cults,
and there seemed to be an offer a lot of
overlap between the two. So she says that the image
cults seem to have lasted from the fourth century BC
until they were suppressed by an iconoclastic movement under the
(42:05):
Sasanians or the Neo Persian Empire. And so in this
we're getting back into this idea that we explored in
a previous episode about the role of images in worship. Yeah,
so basically, and so the cult of the fire temples
may have been instituted in opposition to quote, this alien
form of worship. And so I believe what she's saying
(42:28):
here is that as the use of images were suppressed
in their worship, they turned to the flame itself as
a focal point of worship. And we can see that
reflected in that story we were discussing earlier, praying to
Aramazda by using the flame as like the focal point
(42:48):
of the worship, right, and Boyce also points out that
this would you could also link this to older traditions
of the veneration of hearth fires, and it goes without
saying I guess as well that this is a region
with natural gas easily linked to natural flames, et cetera.
So there's a local aspect of this going on. But
then in general we also have these traditions of keeping
(43:11):
the fire and to a certain extent, venerating that fire
and protecting it and looking after it. She also points
out that quote, no actual ruins of a fire temple
have been convincingly identified from before the Parthian period, that's
from two forty seven BCE to two twenty four CE.
Now this is another bit that I found quite interesting.
(43:35):
So this is a still I believe, a candidate to
become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the temple of the
Flame temple here. But the temple flame, reportedly according to UNESCO,
went out in eighteen eighty three due to petroleum activity
in the region. So now it's lit via an artificial
(43:55):
gas line instead of natural gas emerging from the earth.
So it's in I seem to think of this, this
site and this date in eighteen eighty three is kind
of a key boundary point between the oil age, the
age of fossil fuel, and the period preceding it, a
time during which the divine fire is extinguished and that
(44:16):
is replaced by technological mastery over fossil fuels and fire.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Oh yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
So I found all this just just ritually interesting. I
have to admit I had not read much about Agerbrajan.
I've never been to Arebajon, but this this is all wonderful.
I absolutely love it, and I would love to hear
from anyone out there listening to the show who is
in Agerbrajan, or as of Agrebrajan, a heritage that, or
(44:45):
is just traveled there and seeing these sits right in,
let us know. I'd love to have you know, some
more insight on all of this. All right, we're going
to go ahead and close it out here, but we're
going to be back, and hey, we might keep talking
on this topic. The is in motion, and there's there's
certainly more we could discuss here.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
The burning continues, the fuel has not been extinguished yet,
so this may go on next week.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
All right. In the meantime, again, we'd love to hear
from everyone out there has additional inside firsthand or otherwise
on the topics we've discussed here, you know, and also
anything about the previous episode or there are other episodes
that have come before, potential episodes we could record in
the future as a reminder. Core episodes of Stuff to
(45:29):
Blow Your Mind air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the
Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed You can get
that wherever you get your podcast these days. On Mondays
we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short
form artifact or Monster Factor. On Fridays we do Weird
House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious
concerns and just talk about a strange film.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to say hello or to suggest it up for the future,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And Rob and I are out
this week, so we are bringing you some episodes from
the vault. This is part two of our series Fire
from the Rocks. This episode originally aired April twenty eighth,
twenty twenty two. Let's jump into the fire.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two of our series on naturally fueled flames. Now, in
the last episode, Rob, you opened with a question that
we never fully got to the bottom of. The question
was what is the oldest continuously burning fire on Earth?
And or you may have phrased it a little bit differently.
(01:01):
That was one question. I guess another one would be like,
what's the longest a single fire with a single common
origin has ever burned?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Right? Yeah, but essentially getting down to the same question.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeah, yeah, I guess the last one is really unknowable.
The first, what is the oldest continuous fire still burning today?
Is I don't know maybe still difficult to know, but
easier than the other one. So I don't know if
this question can be answered definitively, but we did at
least establish that all of the oldest eternal flames maintained
(01:32):
by humans at various temples and memorials and so forth
around the world are minuscule in longevity compared to some
sites of naturally fueled burning, places where some chunk of
the earth itself is continuously on fire or smoldering at
the place where it meets oxygen. And one example we
(01:52):
looked at in the last episode is a very strange
and beautiful place in the Northwest Territories of Canada called
the Smoking Hills, where eroding coastal hills and cliff sides
burn by themselves as a result of an exothermic chemical
reaction that happens when pyrite rich mudstones exposed to the air,
(02:15):
so erosion happens, part of the cliff comes away, and
some of this mudstone that has fine grain pyrite in
it oxidizes, It heats up, and then some combustible elements
that are within the mudstone sort of smolder or catch fire,
and that just creates a self sustaining, self igniting burn
that can go on for a long long time. All
(02:37):
evidence points to the conclusion that the Smoking Hills have
been burning for hundreds or even thousands of years. So
there might be a question about whether you'd want to
call this technically an example of fire or not. I mean,
it is smoldering rather, You're not usually seeing like big
sort of dancing flames coming off of it. But it's
smoking and burning for hundreds or thousands of years. It
(02:59):
certainly is a very long burn. But is it the
longest Well, I think the answer is probably not. Again,
this question is hard to answer conclusively, but one site
I have seen proposed as the holder of the title
of the longest burning fire on Earth is a place
in Australia known as the Burning Mountain. The Burning Mountain
(03:23):
is technically known as Mount Wingin spelled Wingin like wing
in its WinGen, which is a name allegedly derived from
a word used by the native Wannerua people meaning fire.
The Burning Mountain is located in the Upper Hunter Valley
of New South Wales what's today about three hundred kilometers
(03:44):
north of Sydney, and the earliest written records of the
mountain trace back to stories published in the Sydney newspapers
in eighteen twenty eight, though the site had been used
and known by the Wannerua going back much longer. To
get a feel for the stint of this site, I
was looking around for photos and videos and I found
a really cool video somebody uploaded to YouTube of aerial
(04:06):
drone footage, So you can look that up if you want.
But if you are peering down at the mountain from
the air, what you will see is a sort of
smooth crest of a mountain peak where a section that
looks to me to be about I'm not so good
at estimating area by site, but it looks like maybe
(04:27):
half the size of a soccer field something like that.
It's been scorched clean, so all of the ground around it.
This is not a bare rock mountaintop. This is a
fully forested and grass covered mountain. So all of the
ground around this burned area is populated with trees and grasses.
But within the burned zone there is only bare earth,
(04:50):
soil and gravel, either bleached white like ash or burned
red like brick. And near the edges of the burn
field there are these pale skeletons of dead trees, some
laying flat. I guess maybe those are the older ones
that have fallen down and some still standing. The ones
that are still upright seem to be the ones that
(05:11):
are a little bit farther away from the center of
the burned region, and all around the area, even in
sections that are now covered in grass and vegetation, presumably
covered in it once again, there are noticeable cracks and
fissures in the earth, like you might see opening up
during an earthquake scene in a disaster movie.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, I would say this, this footage is definitely worth
seeking out because when you hear burning mountain, and even
with that description, you still might be imagining some sort
of mor door esque, very volcanic vision of what we're
talking about here, and the reality is in many ways
more subtle than that extreme vision, but also inherently, you know,
(05:54):
weird when compared to most other environments you're going to encounter.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, totally, And I think think there are indications there
may have been times, even in fairly recent history, where
it looked scarier than it does now, though it certainly
does look very strange. One of the earliest written accounts
that's been widely cited and republished. Was an investigation and
field report called Burning Mountain of Australia by the Reverend
(06:20):
Charles Wilton, published in eighteen twenty nine. I dug up
this article and I wanted to read and mention a
few sections from it because it was interesting. Wilton begins
by acknowledging that he's waiting into a kind of ongoing
controversy and would have to contradict previous reports, including the
earlier reports that Mount WinGen was a volcano with a
(06:42):
crater or caldera. Now Wilton's investigation revealed that the mountain
was probably not a volcano and certainly did not have
a mouth or crater. And he writes as follows, that
portion of the mountain Wingin where the fire is now burning,
and which is a comp packed sandstone rock, comprehends parts
(07:03):
of two declivities of one and the same mountain. The
progress of the fire has of late been down the
northern and highest elevation, and it is now ascending with
great fury the opposite and southern imminence from the situation
of the fire having been in a hollow between two
ridges of the same mountain. Mister Mackie, referring to somebody
(07:24):
who gave an earlier report, was probably induced to give
to the clefts in the mountain the appellation of a crater.
The fact is, the rock, as the subterraneous fire increases,
is rent into several concave chasms of various widths. I
particularly examined the widest of these. The rock, a solid
(07:46):
mass of sandstone, was torn asunder about two feet in width,
leaving its upper and southerly side exposed to view the
parts so torn asunder, having slipped as it were, down
and sunk into a hollow, the forming the convex surface
of the heated rock. I looked down this chasm to
the depth of about fifteen feet. The sides of the
(08:08):
rock were of a white heat, like that of a
lime kiln, while sulfurous and steamy vapors arose from a
depth below, like blasts from the forge of Vulcan himself.
I stood on that portion of the rock which had
been cleft from the part above, and on hurling stones
down into the chasm. The noise they made in their
fall seemed to die away in a vast abyss beneath
(08:31):
my feet. Oh wow, so I love the part where
he starts chucking rocks into the chasms in the earth. So, okay,
he has established this is probably not a volcano. There
is no crater, no caldera. Instead, there is a burned
area on the surface of the mountain producing sulfurous fumes.
And then there are these cracks or chasms in the earth,
(08:52):
and the fire seems to be burning down in the
deep of these cracks.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Now in comparing it to the Forge of Vulcan though,
this comes back to something we touched on in the
last episode that when people encounter these they have no
choice in many cases but to compare them to human
fire technology on one level or another.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, especially industry, right, Like both of the earliest written
accounts of the smoking hills in the Northwest Territories compared
them to compared them to human industry, one to a
chemical factory, the other to a brick manufacturing location. And
that many of the oral traditions of the inuvialuate people
(09:32):
who said that these were the fires coming off of
the hills were the cooking fires or smoke from the
fires of the little people or the invisible people who
lived inside the mountains. There after they'd been driven away
from human companionship. So coming back to Reverend Wilton's account,
he goes on to write that there are a bunch
of these chasms. They're of varying width, and they're constantly
(09:54):
belching out smoke and sulfurous vapor. And the chasms are
also quote beautified with efflorescent crystal of sulfur, varying in
color from the deepest red orange occasioned by a ferruginous mixture.
I think that means containing iron or iron oxide to
the palest straw color where alum predominated. And he said
(10:17):
he could not spend much time near these clefts because
the ground was too hot to stand on, and the
vapors were not quote most grateful to the lungs.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Very polite.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, And he makes a bunch more descriptive observations. He
says that he did not observe any lava or trachite there,
and these would be rocks that would be signs of
volcanic activity, so he seems to be accumulating evidence against
the interpretation of this mountain as any kind of volcano.
He also says that he didn't see any coal at
(10:50):
the Burning Mountain, though he notes that he found coal
in many places nearby, So this region of the country
seems to be coal rich, which is important. We'll come
back to it. And as one weird aside, he's like, Oh,
by the way, right on the other side of the
burning mountain, there's a spring that's great to drink from,
nice cool water, especially after you've been breathing smoke from
(11:12):
the fumes from the chasms. You go and get yourself
some of the water from the spring. It will quinch
thee folks. It is not a good idea to drink
untested or untreated spring water. I can have stuff in it.
It's not good for you, though. I honestly, I don't
know if that's more or less likely if you're getting
your spring water from a mountain that's on fire.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, because I can imagine the water potentially tasting strongly
of sulfur or something. But I don't know. Maybe it's
just a wonderful spring that was quite refreshing.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Now. As a general comment on his observations, Wilton writes, quote,
I have compared the phenomenon presented by this mountain with
written descriptions of volcanic action and subterraneous fire in other
portions of the globe and discover no exact similarity between them.
The Burning Mountain of Australia may I think be pronounced
as unique one other example of nature sports of her
(12:10):
total disregard in this country of those laws which the
philosophers of the old world have since assigned her. I
don't know about that, Wilton. This is certainly not a
unique phenomenon. We can come back to that in a minute.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
But Betty is correct, you know, it depends on what
he's looking to, I guess in history books and other accounts,
because there can be, you know, obviously big differences between
what one could roughly classify as fire erupting from the
ground or burning earth in one part of the world
and something that fits the same description elsewhere in the world.
(12:47):
And we'll get to some examples of that in a bit, right.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
So, in the year since, study on the Burning Mountain
is continued, and it is clear that it is in
fact a coal seam fire. So you can imagine there
are masses of coal inside the mountains, sometimes you know,
ribbons of coal running through the rocks, and at some
point in history that coal must have been exposed to
(13:13):
the air to some extent and set on fire and
it has been slowly burning or smoldering ever since. Now,
how is it first ignited? Ultimately, we have no way
of knowing that, but hypotheses include lightning strikes that would
make sense. So lightning strikes exposed coal seam that sets
it ablaze and it just continues throughout the years after that.
(13:34):
It could have been a natural brush fire. Brush fire
gets close and does the same thing. There are some
theories that it could be a kind of spontaneous spontaneous
ignition of exposed coal, because when coal is exposed to
air and gets really hot, maybe baking under the sun,
it can start burning on its own. Or there could
(13:55):
be some kind of chemical reaction, maybe involving sulfur like
we like we observed in the Smoking Hills the oxidation
that kicks off that burning process in Canada.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And then, of course, obviously there's the other possibility, which
I think Smoky Bear would definitely point out to us,
that there's always the chance that human beings have a
hand in setting such things ablaze. Possible, yes, either by
accident or intentionally.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, And so one of the articles I was reading
mentioned the possibility because I think there are some early
reports that make it, that make the burning Mountain sound
more hellish and stupendous than it is even today. I
mean today, you don't see flames anywhere. You just see
and smell the smoke, and you see the scorched earth
(14:44):
on the surface and these chasms leading down below. So
something's happening deep down in there, fires in the deep,
but you're not seeing tongues of flame erupt from the earth.
I think some early reports did say that they observed
like lights and stuff like that, which may have led
to the initial reports that this was some kind of
volcano if they were seeing actual like glowing flames or
(15:07):
something like that coming out of the mountain, which could
have been caused by if there was a section of
the coal seam, it was just closer to the surface, right,
It's closer to the surface, so more oxygen's getting to it.
It's getting really hot, it's producing these flames, and they're
within you know, a distance from the surface that can
be seen with the naked eye.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, because we are dealing with the situation where you know,
geologic processes need to be considered, and also where a
situation where fuel is being consumed and so a certain
amount of change is going to take place there. Like
even in the Wilton quote that you read here, like
he talks about the great fury that is observable here,
(15:46):
and perhaps this is just you know, his his description
being you know, colorful and enthusiastic. But you know that
doesn't necessarily match up with say, you know, these modern
drone images in the modern Tren footage that we were
talking about earlier.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Right, So the surface appearance of a coal seam fire
like this could vary a lot over the ages as
it continues to burn. I think one of the biggest
variables just being like how close is the coal to
the surface. Now, coming back to the question of how
long the fire has been burning and how we could
estimate this as the oldest continuous fire on Earth. It
(16:24):
appears to be burning underground at a depth of roughly
thirty meters below the surface. So while it has an
enormous quantity of fuel that it can access in the
coal seam that feeds it, it's actually burning incredibly slowly.
And I'm pretty sure that the main reason for this
is that it's so deep that it has very little
(16:45):
access to oxygen. So, for a mundane analogy, if you
ever have experience working a grill, Think about getting a
fire going, and maybe you want this fire and the
grill to burn low and slow instead of hot and fast.
What would you do there? You manipulate the vents, right.
You squeeze them down to only the barest crack of
an opening, so that the fire has very little access
(17:08):
to oxygen. You can't close the vents completely, of course,
because then the fire will just go out there's no oxygen.
But if you keep just a little trickle of oxygen
going in, the fire will burn slowly at a lower
temperature and last for a longer time without extinguishing its
fuel source. So I think that's probably what's going on
in this case as well. There's a bunch of coal
(17:30):
down there, but it's burning through the coal very slowly.
It's smoldering over the years because it's deep and the
oxygen not a whole lot of oxygen gets to it
at once. So scientists have actually been able to estimate
the average rate at which the fire spreads within the
burning mountain, and a common estimate I've seen is that
(17:50):
it appears to be going roughly one meter per year.
And because we can track the historical movement of the
burned area through geological markers, we can actually estimate the
age of the fire, as the authors mention in a
paper called Thermal Infrared Imagery of the Burning Mountain coal
Fire published in Remote Sensing Equipment by CD Elliott and
(18:15):
Adrian W. Fleming in nineteen seventy four. And so the
authors of this paper right quote, baked sediments and slag
produced by the burning mountain coal fire have been traced
over a distance of six kilometers to the northeast of
the present chimney. The burning mountain coal fire itself is
of considerable antiquity. If it's assumed that the fire is
(18:36):
burnt continuously and migrated steadily south at the present mean
rate of movement, and again this is estimated to be
roughly one meter per year, it would have taken approximately
six thousand years to cover the distance indicated at the
surface by its effects, though they acknowledge the fire may
in fact have been burning for a much longer period.
(18:57):
But it's kind of nice that that's some nice even
math to round it out, right. So if it's gone
about six kilometers and it's going about one meter per year,
it seems to have been traveling for at least around
six thousand years. And I don't know how credible these
next claims are because I don't know the methodology behind them,
but I've at least seen it stated in some other
articles that the fire could be much older, maybe more
(19:18):
than one hundred thousand years old, but I don't know
why anybody would say that. So, as far as I
can tell, even if only the low end estimate of
six thousand years is true, that would make the Burning
Mountain the longest burning fire on planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah. I mean that dwarfs anything we've discussed thus far,
or we'll discuss after this.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
I was reading about the site on the National Parks
Australia page and they actually summarized a Wannaroua story about
the origin of the mountain, which was that there was
a woman who was waiting for her husband to return
from battle, and she was sitting upon the mountain and
her husband did not return. I guess he was killed
(20:01):
in battle, and when he didn't come back, she was
so distraught that she cried out to the sky god
beyond me, to kill her. And the god did not
kill her. Instead, he turned her into stone, and so
the tears she wept, became fire and set the mountain
itself on fire.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Oh wow. Now this is a site that the people
can go and see. You can be looking it up
on the website here, but you can go to Burning
Mountain Nature Reserve and there's a what a one to
two hour hike you can take and you can go
to this observation platform that's also visible in the drone
(20:41):
footage that we were looking at. So I know we
have a number of listeners out there in Australia. So
if anyone out there has been to this site and
has some first hand experience they would like to share,
we'd love to hear about it.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, totally. If you've been there right in, let us
know what it's like.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah. The website also points out please note remember to
take her by no if you want to birdwatch, because
serious bird watchers are like spurning mountain. No no, no,
are those birds?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Okay? But so this is one type of naturally fueled fire, right.
This is a coal seam fire, and there are other
fires like it, though none that we know of that
are as old as this one. Some of the other
major ones actually have clear human origins, like there are
some famous ones in the coal mining regions of the
United States, like the famous Centralia fire in Pennsylvania. There
(21:38):
are also, I know, a lot of coal seam fires
throughout China where places that have where coal has been mined,
have accidentally been set alight.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
How long has the Springfield tire fire supposed to have
been going on?
Speaker 3 (21:51):
On?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
The simp sells, we wouldn't have our tire fire, hm,
I don't know how long is How many years is
the sim since been on? Oh wow, seventy four years
at this point.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Now.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Coal seam fires have all kinds of interesting characteristics and
also that they can be incredibly troublesome because of course
they're just sitting there belching smoke into the atmosphere without
even being of use. I mean, it's not even like
a coal power plant that is belching this carbon into
the atmosphere and polluting the air, but at least you're
getting power out of it. This is just doing that
(22:26):
and nothing's coming from it. It's just burning, and it's
in many cases hard or even impossible to put these out.
I know there have been various schemes involving dumping like
liquid nitrogen and stuff in and some of these have
just proven pretty much impossible for people to extinguish.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, though it is interesting how it is kind of
the naturally occurring equivalent of human coal industry. You know,
I like it because of it's coal. It's burning. It's
just not doing anything for humans. So a coal, of course,
is a fossil fuel formed from ancient organic matter converted
(23:02):
through heat and pressure. And like we've been saying, coal
seams are just blanket like coal deposits in the rock,
and when exposed in an outcrop or even in an
underground environment, these seams can and will burn.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah, if oxygen can get to the coal, that's dangerous, right,
But of course this is not the only natural fossil
fuel that can be set alight and lead to a
sort of persistent, ongoing fire that stretches beyond human control.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
That's right. One of the big ones here is a
natural gas fueled fire, and this is exactly what it
sounds like. Natural gas is, of course, also a fossil
fuel formed underground due to high temperatures and high compression
of ancient organic matter into flammable thermogenic methane as opposed
to biogenic methane, which is produced by organisms, deposits of
(23:50):
natural gas occurrent smaller amounts at shallower depths near oil deposits,
and in deeper deposits of mostly just natural gas. There
are several different classifications that we can work with here,
and I'm not going to go into detail on these,
but there's conventional gas, there's biogas, deep natural gas, shale
tight gas, coalbad methane, submarine methane, hydrate gas, and geopressurized
(24:15):
zone gas. So the basics though, are that if conditions
are right, natural gas forms within the Earth over geologic time,
and if conditions are also right, that gas can leak
to the surface without human industry playing a hand in
any of it. And if that natural leakage of gas
should encounter a spark a flame, well then you have
(24:38):
yourself potentially a jet of fire emerging from the earth.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Right the earth itself can sort of have a pilot
light going. It's just there is a continuous release of
natural gas, which is flammable, and if the flame gets going,
the heat is there, the fuel is continuously supplied as
it leaks out of the ground, and the oxygen is
there in the atmosphere because it's meeting the surface so
you can just have a flame that comes out of
the ground and just burns and burns and burns and
(25:04):
burns as long as the as long as the gas
is continually escaping.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah, and very shortly here we'll have I think a
great example of this. But another possibility worth mentioning here
is that of peat fires. So PETE is found in
shallow wetlands such as swamps and bogs, large deposits of
plant matter have decomposed under anaerobic conditions. PETE has a
(25:29):
number of different uses for in human technology, including gardening, filtration,
chemical absorption techniques. But it's high in carbon, so if
it drives out enough, it can catch fire.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
And I've read stories about these peat fires that get
out of hand can also be incredibly difficult to deal with.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
But it is interesting because you don't necessarily think of
something in the bog being flammable like this.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
You don't. I don't know why don't you.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
I mean you do think of things like swamp gas.
And you know, we've talked in the past till the wisp,
will of the wisp. Yeah, but you can also imagine
yourself in this environment being like it is so damp here,
it is so wet. How could anything possibly burn on
its own without humans playing a direct hand in it? Right?
All right? So coming back to natural gas powered naturally
(26:19):
fueled flames, I want to come to some what I
thought were just fascinating examples that I don't think I
was really familiar with any of these, because they concern
what is now Azerbaijan on the Abseron Peninsula. This was
a region that was under the domain of Shivan in
(26:39):
ancient times, but came under the domain of Imperial Russia,
the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Soviet Russia during the twentieth century.
And this is an area where there is a lot
of petroleum and also various examples of natural gas emerging
from the ground that I thought we might discuss here, Okay,
(27:02):
all right, So it takes us to what is now
the capital city of Azerbaijan, Baku. It's a host to
numerous sites of interest, including the Maiden Tower, a twelfth
century construction with a very intriguing design. Its origins are
often explained in a tail concerning fire. In particular, there
(27:23):
are a few different Zoroastrian legends about this structure, and
I included a picture here for you, Joe, and I
encourage listeners to look up images of this structure because
it's it's quite picturesque. I don't think I've seen anything
quite like it's it's rather different from other twelfth century
constructions and certainly from other archaeological traditions in other parts
(27:46):
of the world.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And this is also interesting because, of course
fire has very important religious significance within Zoroastrianism. I've sometimes
heard Zoroastrianism, I think incorrectly described as a fire worshiping religion,
and I don't think that's quite right, because fire is
not like a god or the god of Zoroastrianism, like
(28:08):
the god of Zoroastrianism is the Ahura Mazda, you know,
the god of good and light. But fire is an
important religious symbol within their rightship.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
You do see these ancient accounts by foreigners, generally who
come into this region and they're like, oh, yeah, they
worship fire here. But yeah, I think you could very
easily compare that to accounts of say Europeans going into
many other parts of the world and saying, hey, they
worship demons here, they worship devils, they're not Christian at all.
So you know, it's it's ultimately I think more complicated
than that, But there is this element of fire that
(28:43):
does pop up in some of the religious traditions in
this area.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I think maybe this might be a very rough analogy,
but it would be kind of like mistakenly saying that
Christians worship a cross made of wood.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I think I think that that gets
at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Oh, but but I I'm I want to know this legend.
You mentioned a Zoroastrian legend concerning the Maiden Tower, this
intriguing and beautiful building and its origins concerning fire.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Yes, and I was I was reading. Central was essentially
a post that was put together by Professor Mahir Khalifa
Zade and Layla Khalifa Zade, and they point out that
there are several different legends tie that concern fire and
concern this to this tower, the Maiden Tower. But the
(29:33):
basic story that really captivated my attention was this idea that, Okay,
you have this very brutal siege that's taking place at
the city of Baku, and the people there they pray
before the holy fires of the Fire Temple to Ahura
Mazda to save them. Again. This is the creator deity
of Zoroastrianism. And I'm going to quote this this bit,
(29:56):
just a bit from the paper here or the post
by Khalifa Zade here. Quote Finally he heard their prayers.
On the next day, the people saw that a large
piece of the Holy Fire was fell down to the
earth from the top of the fire temple tower. A
beautiful girl came up from the fire. She had long
and fire colored hairs. The crowd went down on their
(30:18):
knees and started to pray to her. And so from
here basically what happens. The fire maiden says, Hey, i
am sent here to protect you, but I'm going to
need a sword, and I'm going to need a helmet
to hide my long, beautiful hair from the enemy. The
enemy cannot see my hair, so they outfit her with
these items. She orders the gates thrown open, and then
(30:40):
a great battle ensues and she engages. She winds up
engaging in single combat with the enemy commander, who just
assumes she's just another one of the male soldiers of
the city, dressed in the helmet wielding a sword. So
she ends up knocking the commander down, and then she
pulls a knife and holds it to his throat, and
he asked to see the face of the warrior who
(31:01):
has bested him, so she shows him. She takes the
helm off, and he's shocked to see the face of
a girl and the long, beautiful, flame colored hair of
a girl. And first he realizes, okay, first of all,
if this is what the girls of Baku are capable of,
are you know, if they're this tough, then we don't
have a chance against the rest of the army. But
(31:22):
then he also falls in love with her instantly, and
then she falls in love with him, and then peace
is declared.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Oh didn't see that coming.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Yeah, yeah, it kind of has goes in a direction
I didn't. I didn't expect there, and uh, you know,
I mean, who knows stories like this? You can have
multiple stories, I guess, kind of merging together, and it
twisting over time, and at some point someone decides what
if it had a what if it had a romantic ending?
And ultimately Khalifazade shares a few other versions where you know,
(31:52):
various other things occur, and also mentions the tower might
just be called the Maiden Tower because it was never
conquered by the enemy. It's the ideas like this, this
tower is it's a virgin tower. The enemy has never
defiled it.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
I see.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
So you have this history in Baku, you know, concerning
fire and uh and and you know, it's it's the
character of the city seems very much associated with it.
And you see that even in the city's modern wonders.
There's a there there's a trio of skyscrapers. They are
known as the Flame Towers, and they they're they're very
beautiful in the pictures I looked at. They have this
(32:34):
kind of curling flame shape to them, and so you know,
during the day they're you know, reflective glass and steel,
very much like like any other modern skyscrapers. But I've
also seen images where they lighted it like the light
these towers up at night with you know, swirling orange
and yellow and red and and also some blue thrown
(32:54):
in there as well that really make them look like,
you know, strong depictions of flames curling up from the air.
And this comes back to the idea that this is
a region rich in petroleum and natural gas, and you
have various sites of interest here that are associated with that,
including jan Ardagh also known as the Burning Mountain, and
(33:16):
this is where natural gas constantly seeps up through the
ground and has been a flame since at least the
nineteen fifties, when it may have been ignited by shepherds.
So this is an example where ultimately who knows, but
at least one of the stories out there is that, okay,
there's gas leaking up and then some shepherds set it
(33:37):
on fire in the fifties, and by some accounts it
has been burning ever since. Flames reportedly jet about three
meters or nine point eight feet into the air from
this site. And I looked up images of this site,
and this is another one where if you're going into
this expecting something out of Mordor, you're probably going to
(33:58):
be disappointed. It's basically this hillside and there's a there's
an area where there's not any vegetation, and then there's
an area that's really dark, and then here are the
fires springing out of the earth. Now, this area is
also known for its mud volcanoes, which are not true
volcanoes as they don't produce lava instead, And I have
(34:18):
to throw in this wonderful description that I found for
mud volcanoes in general from Brewster at All in a
twenty fifteen article in Geo Echo Marina. They say that
these are geo exuded slurries, usually including water and gases.
So they look like a like a bit like bubbling mud,
(34:40):
like gas rising up through the mud, you know, forming
these big bump bubbles. It has kind of a bog
of eternal stench kind of a look to it. And
you know, some of these also looks very much like
an alien world, like you have this this kind of
barren landscape and here's like the bubbling pool of mud
years ago.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
I think I flagged mud volcanoes as a is a
potential episode topic for us.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Oh yeah, we could easily come back to it.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
But yeah, weird sort of gray clay puke coming up
from these cracked blisters in the earth. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah. Now, this region of Surakzani has long been associated
again often with fire worship or religious practices that concern fire,
and their accounts going back apparently to the tenth century
at least, But as luck would have it, we also
have accounts of this region from German traveler Ingolbert Khompher,
(35:35):
who visited here in sixteen eighty three and has some
wonderful descriptions of what he saw Ingolbert Komper, of course,
popped up in our Vegetable Lamb episode.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Oh yeah, that's right, as one of the early voices
of skepticism about this story, saying that I don't know.
I traveled all over and people don't really seem to
know what these stories are talking about. I do not
think there is a plant that makes lamb.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yes. So the book in question is Exotic Attractions in
Persia sixteen eighty four through sixteen eighty eight, and I
was looking at a translation of this by Villain Floor,
which you can find on an ebook or physical book
out there. So I'm just going to read just a
brief bit from it here where he's talking about these fires.
(36:23):
From there, we continued our march, and after midday we
came to the burning field, covered with white sand and
sprinkled with ashy dust. From numerous fissures, sulfurous spouts burst
from the soil, a varied and pleasant spectacle. Some fissures
made a lot of noise, and with their fires and
their violence, aroused a holy fear among some rare spectators.
(36:46):
Others again emitted less strong flames, allowing everybody to come
quite close. Others exhaled fumes or rather hardly visible vapors,
but which reeked strongly of the spirit of naphtha. This
phenomena appeared in the area of eighty eight paces in
length twenty six wide. The fissures were amazingly narrow, not
(37:07):
wider than one foot or one palm, some shorter and
drawn into a semicircle, and others crooked with a long,
insinuous bend, which I have shown accurately and conform to
reality in the appended illustration to complete this description. The
edges of these cracks and the soil itself, when you
remove the dust, showed a pox marked light stone, almost
(37:30):
like pumice stone. The matter seemed to be a conglomerate
of seashells and minuscule snail shells. We came upon about
a dozen people who stayed there, who, around a fire,
were engaged in all kinds of activities. In fact, some
having placed copper or earthenware pots on a not too
blazing crack, prepared the meals for the inhabitants of the
(37:51):
neighboring village of Sorgani at Swaga, thus named because of
the fire. Others having brought stones from all aroun, and
having heaped them together, were burning a lime and once,
when ready, they made a pile to transport it in
small vessels. Two foreigners, Indian fire worshippers descended from the
ancient Persians, were quietly seated around it enclosure they had constructed.
(38:15):
They watched and venerated the spouting flame, offering prayers to
the eternal God. One of the lime burners had approached us,
proposing to show us something particularly extraordinary. If for this surface,
we offered him some money. When we had counted it,
he placed small cotton balls that he tore from his
dress on a fire shovel and set fire to them.
(38:36):
Then he very quickly took the flame obtained in that
fashion above a fissure at some distance which had neither
fire nor flame. Its vapor was everywhere invisible until it
produced a very high flame. This was a beautiful and
unexpected moment. But the flame disappeared again after a while.
Such is the first appearance of the wonders of nature,
well known in this part of the peninsula, but not
(38:57):
in the same place, and eternally remained in people memory. Wow, yeah,
so yeah, I love everything about that. Account.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
That's oh yeah, yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Though.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
I have to notice Camphor mentions cotton, thinking back to
the vegetable lamb thing, So he knew about he knew
about cotton at least I'm assuming this translation is accurate
and that is what he meant instead of using the
word for wool or something.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
That's a good point. That's a good point. So again,
that is from Exotic Attractions in Persia by Engelbert Komf
and you can pick up a copy of that that
comes out from that's out from Mage Publishers, and there
is a kindle edition. But there's another side of interest
related to all of this, and that is the Atashka
(39:45):
Fire Temple or the Fire Temple of Baku. This is
a square building with pentagonal walls and a domed roof
constructed atop a natural gas leak that provides fuel for
a large flame in the center of the temple, as
well as for four smaller flames on each of the
buildings on the roof. Basically, they're four small, almost like
(40:07):
little towers, one at each corner of the of the roof,
and those are flaming as well.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Oh wow, So this is a temple a religious building
built around a natural gas leak.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah. So I love this because in that comfort account
we had an example of people cooking over one of
these naturally occurring spouts of gas and spouts of flame.
And now we have an actual structure that is not
only like built around this, but seems to be manipulating
the flow of gas so that you can have additional
(40:44):
fires control fires burning at the top of the temple.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Yeah, yeah. And you know there's some old woodcuts of this,
and also you know you can find modern photos of
it as well. It's been a place for Hindu, Sikh,
and so Astrian worship, and it seems to be some
debate on who originally worshiped here. And part of this
may be due to what Mary Boyce described in nineteen
(41:11):
seventy five's on the Zoroastrian Temple Cult of Fire, published
in the Journal of the American Oriental Society as quote
the dearth of records of Zoroastrianism at any period before
the seventeenth century Ce. But Boyce points out a few
different ideas about the history of these fire temples. Again
in the particular mainly we're talking about in the Baku region.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
First of all, I see okay. Yeah, I was like, sure,
we know it's older than that. Okay, I see in
this region.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
So, first of all, the history is complex due to
the existence of both Zoroastrian image cults and fire cults,
and there seemed to be an offer a lot of
overlap between the two. So she says that the image
cults seem to have lasted from the fourth century BC
until they were suppressed by an iconoclastic movement under the
(42:05):
Sasanians or the Neo Persian Empire. And so in this
we're getting back into this idea that we explored in
a previous episode about the role of images in worship. Yeah,
so basically, and so the cult of the fire temples
may have been instituted in opposition to quote, this alien
form of worship. And so I believe what she's saying
(42:28):
here is that as the use of images were suppressed
in their worship, they turned to the flame itself as
a focal point of worship. And we can see that
reflected in that story we were discussing earlier, praying to
Aramazda by using the flame as like the focal point
(42:48):
of the worship, right, and Boyce also points out that
this would you could also link this to older traditions
of the veneration of hearth fires, and it goes without
saying I guess as well that this is a region
with natural gas easily linked to natural flames, et cetera.
So there's a local aspect of this going on. But
then in general we also have these traditions of keeping
(43:11):
the fire and to a certain extent, venerating that fire
and protecting it and looking after it. She also points
out that quote, no actual ruins of a fire temple
have been convincingly identified from before the Parthian period, that's
from two forty seven BCE to two twenty four CE.
Now this is another bit that I found quite interesting.
(43:35):
So this is a still I believe, a candidate to
become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the temple of the
Flame temple here. But the temple flame, reportedly according to UNESCO,
went out in eighteen eighty three due to petroleum activity
in the region. So now it's lit via an artificial
(43:55):
gas line instead of natural gas emerging from the earth.
So it's in I seem to think of this, this
site and this date in eighteen eighty three is kind
of a key boundary point between the oil age, the
age of fossil fuel, and the period preceding it, a
time during which the divine fire is extinguished and that
(44:16):
is replaced by technological mastery over fossil fuels and fire.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Oh yeah, interesting.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
So I found all this just just ritually interesting. I
have to admit I had not read much about Agerbrajan.
I've never been to Arebajon, but this this is all wonderful.
I absolutely love it, and I would love to hear
from anyone out there listening to the show who is
in Agerbrajan, or as of Agrebrajan, a heritage that, or
(44:45):
is just traveled there and seeing these sits right in,
let us know. I'd love to have you know, some
more insight on all of this. All right, we're going
to go ahead and close it out here, but we're
going to be back, and hey, we might keep talking
on this topic. The is in motion, and there's there's
certainly more we could discuss here.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
The burning continues, the fuel has not been extinguished yet,
so this may go on next week.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
All right. In the meantime, again, we'd love to hear
from everyone out there has additional inside firsthand or otherwise
on the topics we've discussed here, you know, and also
anything about the previous episode or there are other episodes
that have come before, potential episodes we could record in
the future as a reminder. Core episodes of Stuff to
(45:29):
Blow Your Mind air on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the
Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed You can get
that wherever you get your podcast these days. On Mondays
we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short
form artifact or Monster Factor. On Fridays we do Weird
House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious
concerns and just talk about a strange film.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to say hello or to suggest it up for the future,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
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