June 3, 2023 • 40 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 05/05/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go
into the vault for an older episode of the show.
We are continuing the re air of our series Fire
from the Rocks, originally published in April and May of
twenty twenty two. This is part three and this episode
came out on May fifth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're back with part three of our series on
naturally fueled flames and the smolderings and burnings that come
from the earth itself or from the rocks. So in
the last episode of the series, we talked talked about
the Burning Mountain or Mount WinGen in Australia done in
(01:05):
New South Wales, which is an example of a naturally
fueled type of fire called a coal seam fire, a
place where coal formations underground are set on fire and
then continue to burn as long as they can, as
long as they have access to oxygen, probably and while
there's no way to know for sure, Mount WinGen has
(01:26):
been proposed as potentially the longest burning fire on earth. Though.
It's interesting because today, as we discussed last time, there's
no fire that you can see at the surface. There's
only this large patch of bleached and baked soil which
can be hot to the touch, and or at least
(01:46):
parts of it can, and it's a devoid of plant
life within this patch. And then of course all around
it there are these interesting sort of there's like a
war for survival at the border of this burned region,
so you'll see, like you know, grasses trying to survive,
and then these bleach tree trunks that are long dead
but still standing. And then also around this area you
(02:07):
find these deep cracks or crevices in the earth, out
of which poor smoke and sulfurous fumes. So the fire
is burning, but it's burning in the deep. It's burning
out of sight down inside the mountain, fed by oxygen
from the surface. And nobody knows how the fire inside
Mount Engine got started, but it's presumed to be a
(02:29):
result of some form of natural ignition. Maybe the coal
at the surface underwent a chemical reaction leading to spontaneous
combustion or autoignition as it's called, or maybe it was
struck by lightning or by brush fire, but we don't
really know. However, there are many other coal seam fires
(02:50):
that have mostly in one way or another, been created
by human behavior, and a big example here is coal
mine fires, my fires that fires in a coal seam
that get started one way or another because of mining there,
and they are actually a number of these that are
that are still burning throughout the world today.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I'm trying to remember if I know any coal mining
songs about coal mine fires. There's some really good, like
mining town folk songs and whatnot, but I can't remember
any offhand that mentioned fires.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
The real good coal mining folk songs I know were
like union songs.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, same yeah, high Sheriff of hazard and so forth.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Which side are you on?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, yeah, those are great songs, but I don't know
of any of them that mention a coal seam fire. However,
I did actually find a poem that mentions a coal
seam fire, and not just any coal seam fire, but
the one that I was specifically about to talk about.
Because so there's a very famous example in the United
States of a coal seam fire that's been burning for
(03:54):
decades and it is situated underneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.
The poem I found was one by a poet named
Leonard Cress called the Centralia Mine Fire, and I thought
it was really pretty great. It talks about the town
being the shrine of the Holy Order of Anthracite, and
(04:15):
the last four lines of the poem read, though odors
of bottom damp and methane no longer reek into the
streets and ignite, the underground tunnels burn, and each vein
of coal potential fuse leads to another domain.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Oh nice. This is a contemporary poet by the way. Yeah,
they have a website Leonardcress dot com.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
So the town of Centralia is in eastern Pennsylvania. It
was settled in the mid eighteen hundreds and being situated
over a large coal formation, I think for most of
its history it was a town where the local economy
was based around a coal mine, which would not be
uncommon in places like Pennsylvania or West Virginia, places in
the US where there's a lot of coal and settlements
(04:59):
can grow up around the extraction industry based on that coal.
It was never a huge city. I think in the
early nineteen sixties the town had some a little over
two thousand residents, I believe, But things started changing in
the year nineteen sixty two when part of the coal
seam that formed the town's industrial base caught fire. Now
(05:22):
there's still apparently disagreement about exactly how it caught fire.
One idea I read is that it happened to because
of a pre existing coal seam fire from a neighboring
region that spread slowly over several decades until it made
contact with the Centralia sem and then just burned on
from there. But I think that's a minority position. The
(05:45):
more commonly cited explanations involve a garbage stump, and so
the idea is that the coal caught fire either when
a scheduled trash burn at a local landfill penetrated the
mine tunnels and managed to ignite the coal, or possibly
when some kind of hot ash or coal was dumped
(06:06):
directly into the pit and set the coal burning. Either way,
it's a good example to think about how if you've
got open deposits of coal that are exposed to the atmosphere,
you really don't want to be burning stuff near that.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah yeah, trying to imagine the sort of the apocalyptic
scenario where your garbage fires meet your coal mine tunnels.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah yeah. And so apparently the locals knew there was
a fire in the mines beginning in nineteen sixty two,
but didn't quite realize what a problem it was until
years later, around the late seventies and early eighties. And
there were a few touch points here. One story from
nineteen seventy nine that I've seen in multiple sources is
that there was a local gas station owner named John Coddington,
(06:50):
who was also the mayor of the town, who one
day went out to check the levels in his underground
storage tank. So when you go to a gas station,
you know, you get out the pump the gases being
pumped up from these big tanks under the ground that's
where the gas lives. And something seemed off, I guess
when he was checking the levels in the tanks. So
he ended up checking the temperature in the storage tanks
(07:12):
and found that the gasoline was one hundred and seventy
two degrees fahrenheit. Whoa, yeah, yikes, And this did make
me wonder I was like, wait, what is the autoignition
temperature of gasoline? Because I might have guessed that if
you heat gasoline up to one seventy two degrees fahrenheit
in the presence of oxygen, that would be close to
it automatically igniting on its own. But I checked, and no,
(07:35):
my intuition was way off. I see some pretty different numbers,
but they're all much higher than this. A website called
engineering toolbox dot com suggests that the autoignition temperature of
gasoline is more like four to seventy five to five
thirty six degrees fahrenheit or two forty six to two
eighty celsius. So it wasn't gonna catch fire on its own,
but that's still freaky.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, And quick disclaimer out there, please do not try
and eat up gasolene.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Oh no, don't test out these numbers. Yeah, this is
not an experiment to perform in your kitchen. In fact,
just don't ever take gasoline inside your house. Yeah. But
so that was seventy nine. But then a real turning
point seemed to come in nineteen eighty one, when a
local boy who was twelve years old was nearly swallowed
(08:21):
up and killed. He managed to survive, but he was
nearly swallowed by the sudden collapse of a sinkhole created
by the Coalseum fire. And so for a contemporary report
on this, I found an AP article published on February twentieth,
nineteen eighty one called Pennsylvania Fearful fire rages for nineteen years.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
This is a good This is a I mean, it's
a serious story, don't get me wrong. But also the
writing in this little news piece is it really drives
home the dread.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Oh yeah, yeah. So it starts off talking about opinions
of locals about you know, being exposed to the fumes
coming out of this mine and stuff. And maybe I
can come back to that in a minute, but first
I want to tell the story of this what happened
to this twelve year old boy. So the article reads quote,
townspeople said an accident Saturdays heightened their fears, leading to
(09:12):
a new flurry of government interest. Todd Domboski, twelve, was
playing in his grandmother's backyard a few houses from his home.
When he went to investigate a tiny whiff of smoke.
The ground beneath him collapsed instantly. The youth was engulfed
in a hot stinking tangle of dirt and tree roots escaping.
(09:33):
When his older cousin pulled him out, Todd fell about
six feet before grabbing the roots. Florence Domboski, Todd's mother,
praised her fourteen year old nephew, Eric Wolfgang, who was
swift and strong enough to reach into the hole, grab
Todd's arm and pull him to safety. A temperature of
three hundred and fifty degrees was recorded in the hole.
(09:54):
Its depth was not known, and I did look it up.
More recent articles mentioned that the same coal was later
measured and it was one hundred and fifty feet deep
or about forty five meters, and choked with carbon monoxide throughout.
So if you can imagine this, you're just standing on
what you believe to be solid ground, and the ground
beneath you just collapses, It just opens up, and you're
(10:17):
grabbing at tree roots that are protruding from the dirt,
and you managed to get a hold of it, but
down below you is just a pit into nothingness with
fumes of hell coughing out.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Absolutely biblical. There's another great paragraph in this ap story
that reads, quote feeding on timbers, coal and gas in
a maze of abandoned anthracide tunnels that date back to
the eighteen eighties. The creeping inferno is believed to have
spread beneath forty acres despite repeated attempts to curb it.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, so this article, part of what it's reporting on
is attempts to put out the mind fire that have failed.
I think at the time this was written, already more
than three and a half million dollars had been spent
on trying to fight the fire, and to no avail.
It just didn't work. And so another thing this article
cites is quotes from local townspeople talking about their fears
(11:11):
about the mind fire, Like one says that it's kind
of scary going to sleep at night and not knowing
if you'll wake up in the morning because you've been
poisoned in your sleep by fumes from the mine. And
it quotes a local teacher named Bob Goadinsky who says,
we feel like rats in a laboratory. No one knows
what the effect of the carbon monoxide is going to
be in the future, the children, what will be the
(11:33):
effect on them.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
All of this, I mean, all this sounds like something
you'd encounter in a horror movie, except it is real life.
It's a real life, horrible situation. Concern for the children,
the creeping darkness beneath the earth, eruptions preying on the innocent.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah. Another quote it gives is from a resident named
Sally Sulik, who says, my nose burns, my eyes tear,
I'm like a zombie, feel like going to sleep all
the time. If they don't soon do something for us,
they'll drive us crazy. So in the years since, the
population of Centralia has been steeply declining. It basically I
(12:12):
think between nineteen eighty and two thousand it declined to
almost nothing as the residents moved away. The local homeowners
were offered buyouts from the government to relocate, and then
at some point the government essentially condemned all of the
property in town by way of imminent domain. There were
a few residents left who didn't want to leave, but
(12:34):
most of the recent articles I read mentioned only like
a handful of people still living in the area, fewer
than ten. And apparently nobody is going to be allowed
to move to the area, So it's just those people
there as long as they stay or until their deaths.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Another thing that struck me about the story is. I
was reading an article in Atlas Obscura by a freelance
writer based out of Pennsylvania named Jim Cheney, who was
writing up the history the Centralia fire but also had
been there and taken a bunch of pictures on the scene,
and there was one that struck me as really interesting.
It was a picture of what the author says, or
(13:11):
the remains of Route sixty one, which is a section
of roadway a highway that's now abandoned since it was
re routed elsewhere. And if you look at the pictures,
you can see why. Right down the middle of the
road is a gigantic crack, again like in a bad
earthquake movie, and so the road is just sort of
(13:33):
split down the middle. And it actually reminded me a
bit of the cracks and crevices that had been forming
in Mount WinGen for the past six thousand years or
more when you look at the pictures of that. I
don't know the exact cause of every surface feature we're
looking at here, but if I had to guess, I
would say this is probably some kind of collapse caused
by the burning out that's going on underneath the surface,
(13:56):
just like we saw in these other cases or like
would have caused the sinkhole.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Of course, sometimes the real life tragedy does inspire great art.
It's worth noting that the town of Centralia inspired the
fictional town of Valkanvania in the nineteen ninety one film
Nothing but Trouble, Really, dan Ackroid's weird horror comedy about
(14:25):
a bunch of sort of sort of. I guess you
would say Texas chainsaw massacre esque family residing above a
big coal mine fire. Quite a film. Quite a film.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Tri Star Pictures or whoever it is, should have a
standing cash prize for anybody who can manage to watch
that whole movie.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
It has a lot of fun things in it. You've
got a wonderful digital underground performance.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I think you got to make it through a lot
of stuff before you get to that.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Dan Ackroyd is clearly having the time of his life
in this film.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
So if it's if it's, if you considered a film
for an audience of one an absolute success, I think
you know.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
There's another interesting tidbit I came across that's related to
the Centralia coal mine, and it seems geologically interesting, But
I couldn't tell if it was because of the fire
in particular. So there was a news report I read
on the site for a new station called WNEP sixteen.
I guess that's an ABC affiliate, and this was out
(15:27):
of Butler Township, Pennsylvania, and it's talking about a geyser
in Pennsylvania. That's not something that you would expect to
find in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
I'm looking at the footage here, though it looks geysery, but.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
This is not a natural geyser. This is a geyser
that was created when many years ago, the mining company
I guess that ran the Centralia mine drilled a hole
in the ground connecting to one of the tunnels for
ventilation of the mine shafts, and somehow now with the
tunnels partially flooded. I think it's especially when there's like
(16:02):
been heavy rain or when the snow melts in the spring,
you get suddenly a guyser gushing up out of this
ventilation hole. And it looks like a real guyser. It's
just spraying up into the air and then running off
into a nearby creek. And they say that the guyser
has a distinct smell. It smells like eggs which I
guess is an indication of sulfurous compounds, and that would
(16:26):
again make sense since you know, you got the coal
down there and it's on fire. And I was unable
to tell if this, guys, is actually related to the
fire or if it's just an unrelated, weird feature of
this same mine.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
You see, Like there's a quote in the tweet that's
attached where the reporters saying that it's been there as
long as quote anyone can remember. There's a mention of
like some people say, oh, there used to be a
second one, and it is kind of I mean, all
of this is a stark reminder of how an enterprise
like coal mining, how you're you're changing the earth, you know,
(17:01):
at least on a local level, and of course you
can get into larger issues of actual climate change as well,
but even just on a local level, like you're just
you're vastly altering how the ground beneath your feet is functioning.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Yeah, all right, let's move on to another fire in
the earth.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
This is a fun one. I'm excited to talk about
it because it concerns natural fires that may have been
burning for two and a half millennia, as well as
a mythical monster, and that monster is the Chimera. Oh
and the chimera, of course. I think most folks out
there will have some image of this in their mind.
There are some wonderful depictions of it. There's the Chimera
(17:51):
of Arezzo. It's an Etruscan bronze statue of four hundred
BCE that's absolutely gorgeous. If anyone has seen this, or
seen or reproduction of this.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I've been to a retzo, but I don't think I've
seen this.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Well, I'm not sure. I didn't put in my notes
where it is currently how so I don't know where
its current status is. But I've seen plenty of images
of it.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It's this wonderful, uh you know, dark bronze finish, and
it looks impressive for a creature that is not always
impressive in artistic renditions, because it is it is not
only a chimera. It is the chimera. It is this.
It is this, this hybrid form that some have criticized
(18:34):
for not completely making all that much sense and maybe
being too counterintuitive. So at the heart of things, the
chimera is, of course a goat monster. Most of its
recognizable body is usually that of a goat. I guess
one of the interesting things about the camera of Arezzo
is that less of it is a goat, and maybe
(18:55):
that's why it's more impressive, Like it looks like the
artists decided to lean more into the into the lion
aspects of its body. But generally when you hear talk
about yeah, we're talking about something that is in large
part a monstrous she goat. It roams the myths of
ancient Greece and Rome, and the name itself means she goat,
(19:18):
and in all depictions it has at least some goat
properties to its hybrid form.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Hm, that's funny. I certainly believe you that that's true.
But I do not really associate the camera with a
goat at all. I think, like, yeah, like lion, snake,
eagle or something.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yes, some depictions it has wings. I want to say that.
In the Dungeons and Dragon's Monster Manual they give it
wings specifically. Now, the oldest records of the monster can
be found in the sixth book of Homer's Iliad, and
this is you know, written down at some point in
the eighth century BCE, and the beast here is described
(19:55):
as a great fire breathing, she goat with a lion's
head and the tail of a serpent. And then slightly
more recently, Hesiod wrote of the chimera in his book Theogeny,
composed between seven thirty and seven hundred DCE. So in Theogeny,
Hesiod is discussing the monstrous Echidna quote divine, stubborn hearted Echidna,
(20:18):
half nymph with dark eyes and fair cheeks, and half
on the other hand, a serpent, huge and terrible and vast,
speckled and flesh devouring beneath caves of sacred earth. And
there in the depths, Echidna mates with the deadly giant Typhon,
and they produce quote, fierce hearted children monsters, all including
(20:43):
the two headed dog Orthos, the three headed dog Cerebus,
and then the even more headed lenaean Hydra, as well
as the sphinx, the Nemian lion, and of course the chimera.
And here's what Hesiod had to say about the kr
And these are these are all translations from the Reverend J.
(21:03):
Banks translation. Quote. But she Echidna bore chimera, breathing, restless fire,
fierce and huge, fleet footed, as well as strong. This
monster had three heads, one indeed of a grim visaged lion,
one of a goat, and another of a serpent, a
fierce dragon in front a lion, a dragon behind, and
(21:26):
in the midst a goat breathing forth the dread strength
of burning.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Fire, and in the midst a goat.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
So like, mostly a goat, that's what you're saying, mostly,
that's what That's what I take it.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
To me, is that he's saying the middle head is
the goat head, I think, or wait, but it's also
saying in front a lion and a dragon behind. Yeah,
So I'm trying to picture this. I'm having it, and I.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Think this is This is why you have a lot
of variation in how it's depicted, like that the the
Etruscan statue, for instance, and other depictions will have the
oa head just straight up growing out of the back
of the creature other times, but it's a good head.
And the goat always looks a little awkward there, like,
what what are you even doing there, buddy? Like you
can imagine the creatures moving around the goast just sort
(22:14):
of awkwardly making a play for vegetation and stuffed.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
In Nibylon, you see a ripple in the water. The
Jaws theme plays, but it's a goat's head poking out
over the certain bah. Yeah wait, dude, the goats baar.
They don't really they bleat.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Yeah, the bleeding. So yeah, you see. Then you see
it depicted other ways where all the heads are sort
of arranged up front and so forth. But yeah, you can.
I imagine a lot of this is coming from different
interpretations like this passage. Now, every monster must have its slayer,
of course, and in this case it is mighty Bellerophon,
(22:48):
sometimes described as a half human son of Poseidon, who
uses Athena's bridle to capture the winged Pegasus right into
battle against the Chimera, and then he thrust his spear
into the monster's flaming maw. Where what happens The metal
instantly melts. Oh no, he's defeated. Oh no, he's not,
because then the liquid metal chokes the deadly monster to death.
(23:11):
So I always found that to be kind of a
nice twist.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh yeah, Now, surely the hero didn't intend for the
metal to melt and choke the monster.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I don't know. I never doubt these heroes, These Greek
heroes are are wicked smart.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
That strikes me as more like a like a War
of the World's type ending where yeah, something you didn't
even expect kills the monster.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Now you're probably asking, okay, well, how does this tie
into places and fire? Well, this myth is certainly tied
to specific places. For starters, it is written that the
Chimera was for a time the pet of the king
of Krea before it escaped and rampaged. This was a
region of western Anatolia from the eleventh through sixth centuries BCE.
(23:56):
This region is now part of Turkey. But then the
Chimera is said to descend upon an area to the
southeast of Caria in Lysia, where it generally devours every
mortal in sight and just sets everything on fire. So
this is the realm of Mount Chimera. In the Book
of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges writes that Virgil describes
(24:17):
the Chimera and the Aeneid, and that the fourth and
fifth century commentator Servius ties the monster to Licia and
went so far as to say that the monster was
a metaphor for a volcano there, and this was apparently
echoed by plenty of the elder as well.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
This is how Borges summarizes it. Quote, the base of
the volcano is infested with serpents. On its sides, there
are meadows where goats pasture, and on top flames shoot forth,
and lions have their dens.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I see. Okay, So it's like combining the different types
of local wildlife, at least allegedly, the serpents around the base,
and then the goats grazing in the meadow and the lions
in their caves, and then you have, of course the
flames coming out. I guess that's the dragon aspect, right.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah. So I have to say, like, when I was
reading this, it sended a little far fetched to me
because we've talked about geomithology before, but I don't remember
like a version of geo mythology where like the aspects
of a given geographical feature are then just sort of
cobbled together into a into a hybrid monster. And as
(25:32):
it turns out, Borges also finds this ridiculous and mentions
that he thinks it's absurd, as well as an idea
that I think was put forth by Plutarch that Chimera
is the name of a pirate who just happened to
have these three different animals as part of his iconography
and his flag and so forth.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
It was a pirate.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Now. One of the advancements in the sort of figuring
out this myth and tying the myth into actual geology.
This occurred during the early nineteenth century. In eighteen eleven,
hydrographer and Irish rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort linked Mount
(26:12):
Chimera to the geographical features in the region known as
jan Ar or Janartis. And he explored this region, I believe,
in eighteen eleven through eighteen twelve, basically going around looking
at various ruins, citing various ruins, and he's noted during
this time for rediscovering Hadrian's Gate built there for Roman
(26:34):
Emperor Hadrian in the year one thirty. So jan Artists,
what does it look like? Well, it matches up with
some of these other descriptions we've discussed in these episodes.
You have a rocky mount here with active gas seeps
that have produced burning flames for depending on what sources
you're looking at, perhaps two and a half millennia, so
(26:55):
perhaps twenty five hundred years. So some still kind of
interpret it and say, well, this site could have been
the inspiration for the monster itself, And I guess you
can kind of open that up and you can look
at the ideas of the monster being a metaphor for them,
for this mountain, or just kind of like the oh,
here's this weird landscape with fire, and you end up
(27:17):
with this idea of, well, a monster lives here. Surely
this is the habitat for some sort of monstrous fire
breathing creature. So the seeps in question here are largely
on barren ground and they follow various fissures and perhaps faults,
according to a twenty fifteen paper I was looking at
(27:37):
from Meyer Dombard at All, published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
These researchers also reported a fluid seap that they discovered
in this area, and numerous papers mentioned as well that
sailors used the fires of the mountain as a kind
of natural landmark at night in ancient times. Today, however,
(28:00):
hikers visit the flames and they do things apparently like
brew tee, cook marshmallows over them, or you know, just
just look at them as well. Because this is all
part of the Olympus National Park. So if you know,
if you're in Turkey, this is a site you can
go and see. Now, the seeps here are reportedly stronger,
as are the flames during winter, and apparently this is
(28:23):
link to changes in atmospheric pressure and ground water recharge.
And this kind of takes us back to where we're
just talking about. You know, when you disrupt the underground
environment through extensive coal mining, you know, these are the
sort of things like groundwater recharge or the situations you're
potentially interfering in the vent gases that come up. I
(28:47):
was looking at a profile of these and it is
mostly methane and there's some other ingredients in there as well. Now,
as to whether there are actual snakes there, I mean,
one presumes, I know there are snakes in Turk. I
guess it's if we can presume that there either are
goats or could have been goats there as well, goats
like a rocky area with some vegetation to muncheon. And
(29:10):
as far as lions go, you won't find any lions
here today, but there were once lions found throughout what
is now Turkey. So I mean, I guess all of
that is plausible as well to at least a certain extent.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Oh yeah. If you compare maps of the historic distribution
of lions to the present distribution throughout Africa and Eurasia,
it's well, on one hand, it's kind of sad to
see how much their range has been constricted, but it's
also eye opening to like, it's eye opening about how
so many ancient myths and stories all throughout the Middle
(29:46):
East and the Greek myths and stuff, it seems that
there are lions everywhere. And you're like, what, because you
don't really think that there are lions wandering around and
say Greece or Turkey today, but you know, thousands of
years ago, they're absolutely.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
It brings us back to the topic we discussed in
the past about the first known human animal hybrid represented
in art, that of the lion man. Yeah. Yeah, Now
this side of this side is also interesting because there
is a link to the Greek forge god he Festus
here as well. Hepestus, of course, was the blacksmith's god
who was also deformed after his father Zeus cast him
(30:23):
off Mount Olympus for taking his mother Hera's side in
an argument, Or at least that's one version of the story.
The Remains of a temple to Hefestus I can be
found at this site just below the fires, which again
makes sense given that the sites of natural flames like
this seem to be inevitably tied to human industry. Like
we've discussed in these various other examples, people see them
(30:45):
and they think of like cook fires and the depths
maintained by the little people, or you know, we think
of industrial processes, you know, chemical fires and so forth,
But then sometimes we all tie them to fire breathing monsters.
(31:08):
And I wanted to mention one more thing that Borjes
brings up about the chimera. He discusses how he thinks
that the chimera was ultimately quote too heterogeneous. In other words,
these parts were all too dissimilar, and it all resists
quote merging into a single animal. So I guess in
that you could say that he's sort of saying that
(31:28):
it's too counterintuitive. To a certain extent, he contends that
people got a bit tired of the idea of the chimera,
and we see that reflected in the use of chimeracle
and the use of chimera as referring to something that
is just too outrageous to be true. Too outrageous to
actually exist in the real world, something that just doesn't
(31:49):
gel together in a form that you can believe in.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, that's interesting. I'm always curious about why our intuitions
about imaginary beings work the way they do. I'm sure
I've asked questions like this on the show a bunch
of times, But like, why does one unreal monster seem
plausible in quotes and another one doesn't? Like the chymerira is, Yeah,
it's got a goat head in the middle of its back,
(32:14):
or at least in some depictions, and people are just like, eh, no, no, yeah,
that doesn't work. The hydra, which has many heads coming
out of the Yeah, that that works.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Yeah. I mean even the vegetable lamb of Tartary, as
fantastic as that is and is you know, with the
gulf existing between plant and mammal like, that feels more
believable and I think clearly was more believable for a
very long period of time compared to the chimera.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, so what are the underlying psychological factors, Like what
subconscious criteria do we use to judge an unreal being
that makes sense to us versus an unreal being that
doesn't the chimera goat head. That's just that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, maybe part of it comes down into like a basic,
you know, primal estimation of another animal, like what is
the head on this thing going to bite me? What
is the head on this animal seem to want to do?
And if you look at that goat head sticking out
of the middle of the camera's back, what am I
supposed to make of that?
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:17):
What's it even doing?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Now? Cyclops, on the other hand, one big eye in
the forehead. I picture that all day long. That works.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah. One of the interesting things about these I guess
you could call them, you could think of them as
minimally counterintuitive monsters and hybrids, is that the best of
them we continue to look at and reconsider and also
apply like theoretical biological models like I've read. I know,
(33:48):
I read a wonderful paper once on the biology of
the centaur where the author was discussing how the centaur's
body would work, and you know, really focusing on onlatory
system and and the fact that it would need two hearts,
one in the human part and one in the horse part.
You know, I love I love examinations like that. So,
(34:09):
but it's an example of how the the centaur, as
fantastic as it is, is not so far removed from
reality that we can't apply this line of thinking to it. Whereas, yeah,
I don't think I've ever seen anybody go out on
a limb and write a you know, a paper like
This is how the biology of the chimera would work.
This is how it would breathe fire. This is the
function of the the live goat head growing from its back,
(34:32):
and this is why its tail is a live snake.
This is the diet it consumes. Yeah, this, it's just
it's just ridiculous. Now, coming back just a little bit too, uh,
you know to what we've been talking about here, eternal
flames and all I do want to point out that
this is the examples we've brought up are are certainly
not the only examples of natural gas seeps and so forth,
(34:55):
where eternal flames have evoked mythic ideas, religious devote and
so forth. I was reading Seeps in the Ancient World, Myths,
Religions and Social Development by Giuseppe Etope of the National
Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy, and he has
(35:16):
a book titled natural Gas Seepach, but one of the
chapters is devoted to just looking at some of these examples.
So he mentions the chimera there. He mentions the fires
of Baku that we previously discussed, as well as a
couple of other examples. There's the Baba GurGur seep in Iraq,
he writes, was probably the burning fiery furnace into which
(35:40):
King and Nebucanezer cast of the Jews.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
I've seen this claim before, So Baba gurger is it's
like an oil field near Kirkook, I believe, And there
is at least one place there where, yeah, there's a
there is a natural gas seep where the volatiles that
are out of it have been set a flame and
they're burning. And yeah, I don't know what the actual
(36:05):
evidence is that this is the basis of the Bible story.
One of these many cases where somebody like connects a
story from ancient history or mythology or legend to an
observable feature today. And in some cases you can do that,
like there's a pretty clear link, and in other cases
I'm not quite sure how strong the evidence for that
(36:27):
direct connection is. But so, yeah, there is the story
of King Nebuchadnezzar throwing what is it, Shadragnieshak and a
bed nego. Oh yeah, yeah, into a burning furnace, and
I have read some modern authors saying, ah, maybe the
furnace was this geological feature we see today. Bobby GurGur,
by the way, I think, means something like father flame
(36:50):
or Daddy flame.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Another example that he brings up is the sacred Mangarma's
flame in Indonesia, which has been active at least since
the fifteenth century, he writes, and is still used in
annual Buddhist ceremonies. And then there's the Oracle of Delphi
in Greece, which we've discussed at least a little bit
on the show. In the past, there's talk of there
(37:13):
having been an internal flame at the Temple of Apollo
there at least at one point. And then there's this
idea that I believe researchers have kind of gone back
and forth on this idea that vapors from the earth
contributed to the visions granted to the priestess of the
sacred site. The idea I think kind of fell out
(37:35):
of favor for a while, but more recent geological research
I was looking at it from two thousand and four
two thousand and five. They argue that, Okay, the site
here lies over a fault where gas leaks could theoretically
cause oxygen and reduction in an individual that would then
result in a mild hypnotic state complete with hallucinations. I mean,
(37:56):
even coming back to this ap article about Centralia, you
have this quote about the you know, the woman talking
about feeling like she's a zombie walking around due to
the fumes, which is an altered state. And in this
and in this case, I mean she she knows that
it's not the divine trying to speak through her, et cetera.
But you can you can well imagine a situation where
(38:18):
if you're combining holy expectations, religious expectations, and ritual with
this sort of environment, you could easily get to this point.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
If only we could get a medical readout on the
the oracles of Delphi, that that might be really illuminating. Yeah,
kind of information exists.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
I wouldn't mind going back and looking at the oracle
again in the future. It's there's there's a lot of
interesting writing about it. It is a has a wonderful history.
All Right, we're going to go and close it out there.
This this was a fun journey. We got to talk
about a number of fascinating locations around the Earth, some
wonderful history, mythology, and religion. If there's a particular site
(39:01):
we didn't discuss that you would like to bring to
our attention, certainly write in and let us know. And
especially if you have visited any of these locations and
you have direct first hand experience, perhaps you've actually glimpsed
the flames emerging from the earth, definitely write in and
tell us about it, share your photos, etc. We would
love to hear from you. In the meantime. Core episodes
(39:25):
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publish every Tuesday and Thursday,
and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, short form,
Monster fact or Artifact episodes on Wednesdays, listener Mail on Mondays,
and on Friday. We set aside most serious concerns and
just discuss a weird film with Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
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 suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say Hello. You can email us at contact Stuff to
Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go
into the vault for an older episode of the show.
We are continuing the re air of our series Fire
from the Rocks, originally published in April and May of
twenty twenty two. This is part three and this episode
came out on May fifth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today we're back with part three of our series on
naturally fueled flames and the smolderings and burnings that come
from the earth itself or from the rocks. So in
the last episode of the series, we talked talked about
the Burning Mountain or Mount WinGen in Australia done in
(01:05):
New South Wales, which is an example of a naturally
fueled type of fire called a coal seam fire, a
place where coal formations underground are set on fire and
then continue to burn as long as they can, as
long as they have access to oxygen, probably and while
there's no way to know for sure, Mount WinGen has
(01:26):
been proposed as potentially the longest burning fire on earth. Though.
It's interesting because today, as we discussed last time, there's
no fire that you can see at the surface. There's
only this large patch of bleached and baked soil which
can be hot to the touch, and or at least
(01:46):
parts of it can, and it's a devoid of plant
life within this patch. And then of course all around
it there are these interesting sort of there's like a
war for survival at the border of this burned region,
so you'll see, like you know, grasses trying to survive,
and then these bleach tree trunks that are long dead
but still standing. And then also around this area you
(02:07):
find these deep cracks or crevices in the earth, out
of which poor smoke and sulfurous fumes. So the fire
is burning, but it's burning in the deep. It's burning
out of sight down inside the mountain, fed by oxygen
from the surface. And nobody knows how the fire inside
Mount Engine got started, but it's presumed to be a
(02:29):
result of some form of natural ignition. Maybe the coal
at the surface underwent a chemical reaction leading to spontaneous
combustion or autoignition as it's called, or maybe it was
struck by lightning or by brush fire, but we don't
really know. However, there are many other coal seam fires
(02:50):
that have mostly in one way or another, been created
by human behavior, and a big example here is coal
mine fires, my fires that fires in a coal seam
that get started one way or another because of mining there,
and they are actually a number of these that are
that are still burning throughout the world today.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I'm trying to remember if I know any coal mining
songs about coal mine fires. There's some really good, like
mining town folk songs and whatnot, but I can't remember
any offhand that mentioned fires.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
The real good coal mining folk songs I know were
like union songs.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, same yeah, high Sheriff of hazard and so forth.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Which side are you on?
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, yeah, those are great songs, but I don't know
of any of them that mention a coal seam fire. However,
I did actually find a poem that mentions a coal
seam fire, and not just any coal seam fire, but
the one that I was specifically about to talk about.
Because so there's a very famous example in the United
States of a coal seam fire that's been burning for
(03:54):
decades and it is situated underneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.
The poem I found was one by a poet named
Leonard Cress called the Centralia Mine Fire, and I thought
it was really pretty great. It talks about the town
being the shrine of the Holy Order of Anthracite, and
(04:15):
the last four lines of the poem read, though odors
of bottom damp and methane no longer reek into the
streets and ignite, the underground tunnels burn, and each vein
of coal potential fuse leads to another domain.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Oh nice. This is a contemporary poet by the way. Yeah,
they have a website Leonardcress dot com.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
So the town of Centralia is in eastern Pennsylvania. It
was settled in the mid eighteen hundreds and being situated
over a large coal formation, I think for most of
its history it was a town where the local economy
was based around a coal mine, which would not be
uncommon in places like Pennsylvania or West Virginia, places in
the US where there's a lot of coal and settlements
(04:59):
can grow up around the extraction industry based on that coal.
It was never a huge city. I think in the
early nineteen sixties the town had some a little over
two thousand residents, I believe, But things started changing in
the year nineteen sixty two when part of the coal
seam that formed the town's industrial base caught fire. Now
(05:22):
there's still apparently disagreement about exactly how it caught fire.
One idea I read is that it happened to because
of a pre existing coal seam fire from a neighboring
region that spread slowly over several decades until it made
contact with the Centralia sem and then just burned on
from there. But I think that's a minority position. The
(05:45):
more commonly cited explanations involve a garbage stump, and so
the idea is that the coal caught fire either when
a scheduled trash burn at a local landfill penetrated the
mine tunnels and managed to ignite the coal, or possibly
when some kind of hot ash or coal was dumped
(06:06):
directly into the pit and set the coal burning. Either way,
it's a good example to think about how if you've
got open deposits of coal that are exposed to the atmosphere,
you really don't want to be burning stuff near that.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah yeah, trying to imagine the sort of the apocalyptic
scenario where your garbage fires meet your coal mine tunnels.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah yeah. And so apparently the locals knew there was
a fire in the mines beginning in nineteen sixty two,
but didn't quite realize what a problem it was until
years later, around the late seventies and early eighties. And
there were a few touch points here. One story from
nineteen seventy nine that I've seen in multiple sources is
that there was a local gas station owner named John Coddington,
(06:50):
who was also the mayor of the town, who one
day went out to check the levels in his underground
storage tank. So when you go to a gas station,
you know, you get out the pump the gases being
pumped up from these big tanks under the ground that's
where the gas lives. And something seemed off, I guess
when he was checking the levels in the tanks. So
he ended up checking the temperature in the storage tanks
(07:12):
and found that the gasoline was one hundred and seventy
two degrees fahrenheit. Whoa, yeah, yikes, And this did make
me wonder I was like, wait, what is the autoignition
temperature of gasoline? Because I might have guessed that if
you heat gasoline up to one seventy two degrees fahrenheit
in the presence of oxygen, that would be close to
it automatically igniting on its own. But I checked, and no,
(07:35):
my intuition was way off. I see some pretty different numbers,
but they're all much higher than this. A website called
engineering toolbox dot com suggests that the autoignition temperature of
gasoline is more like four to seventy five to five
thirty six degrees fahrenheit or two forty six to two
eighty celsius. So it wasn't gonna catch fire on its own,
but that's still freaky.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, And quick disclaimer out there, please do not try
and eat up gasolene.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Oh no, don't test out these numbers. Yeah, this is
not an experiment to perform in your kitchen. In fact,
just don't ever take gasoline inside your house. Yeah. But
so that was seventy nine. But then a real turning
point seemed to come in nineteen eighty one, when a
local boy who was twelve years old was nearly swallowed
(08:21):
up and killed. He managed to survive, but he was
nearly swallowed by the sudden collapse of a sinkhole created
by the Coalseum fire. And so for a contemporary report
on this, I found an AP article published on February twentieth,
nineteen eighty one called Pennsylvania Fearful fire rages for nineteen years.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
This is a good This is a I mean, it's
a serious story, don't get me wrong. But also the
writing in this little news piece is it really drives
home the dread.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Oh yeah, yeah. So it starts off talking about opinions
of locals about you know, being exposed to the fumes
coming out of this mine and stuff. And maybe I
can come back to that in a minute, but first
I want to tell the story of this what happened
to this twelve year old boy. So the article reads quote,
townspeople said an accident Saturdays heightened their fears, leading to
(09:12):
a new flurry of government interest. Todd Domboski, twelve, was
playing in his grandmother's backyard a few houses from his home.
When he went to investigate a tiny whiff of smoke.
The ground beneath him collapsed instantly. The youth was engulfed
in a hot stinking tangle of dirt and tree roots escaping.
(09:33):
When his older cousin pulled him out, Todd fell about
six feet before grabbing the roots. Florence Domboski, Todd's mother,
praised her fourteen year old nephew, Eric Wolfgang, who was
swift and strong enough to reach into the hole, grab
Todd's arm and pull him to safety. A temperature of
three hundred and fifty degrees was recorded in the hole.
(09:54):
Its depth was not known, and I did look it up.
More recent articles mentioned that the same coal was later
measured and it was one hundred and fifty feet deep
or about forty five meters, and choked with carbon monoxide throughout.
So if you can imagine this, you're just standing on
what you believe to be solid ground, and the ground
beneath you just collapses, It just opens up, and you're
(10:17):
grabbing at tree roots that are protruding from the dirt,
and you managed to get a hold of it, but
down below you is just a pit into nothingness with
fumes of hell coughing out.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Absolutely biblical. There's another great paragraph in this ap story
that reads, quote feeding on timbers, coal and gas in
a maze of abandoned anthracide tunnels that date back to
the eighteen eighties. The creeping inferno is believed to have
spread beneath forty acres despite repeated attempts to curb it.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, so this article, part of what it's reporting on
is attempts to put out the mind fire that have failed.
I think at the time this was written, already more
than three and a half million dollars had been spent
on trying to fight the fire, and to no avail.
It just didn't work. And so another thing this article
cites is quotes from local townspeople talking about their fears
(11:11):
about the mind fire, Like one says that it's kind
of scary going to sleep at night and not knowing
if you'll wake up in the morning because you've been
poisoned in your sleep by fumes from the mine. And
it quotes a local teacher named Bob Goadinsky who says,
we feel like rats in a laboratory. No one knows
what the effect of the carbon monoxide is going to
be in the future, the children, what will be the
(11:33):
effect on them.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
All of this, I mean, all this sounds like something
you'd encounter in a horror movie, except it is real life.
It's a real life, horrible situation. Concern for the children,
the creeping darkness beneath the earth, eruptions preying on the innocent.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah. Another quote it gives is from a resident named
Sally Sulik, who says, my nose burns, my eyes tear,
I'm like a zombie, feel like going to sleep all
the time. If they don't soon do something for us,
they'll drive us crazy. So in the years since, the
population of Centralia has been steeply declining. It basically I
(12:12):
think between nineteen eighty and two thousand it declined to
almost nothing as the residents moved away. The local homeowners
were offered buyouts from the government to relocate, and then
at some point the government essentially condemned all of the
property in town by way of imminent domain. There were
a few residents left who didn't want to leave, but
(12:34):
most of the recent articles I read mentioned only like
a handful of people still living in the area, fewer
than ten. And apparently nobody is going to be allowed
to move to the area, So it's just those people
there as long as they stay or until their deaths.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Another thing that struck me about the story is. I
was reading an article in Atlas Obscura by a freelance
writer based out of Pennsylvania named Jim Cheney, who was
writing up the history the Centralia fire but also had
been there and taken a bunch of pictures on the scene,
and there was one that struck me as really interesting.
It was a picture of what the author says, or
(13:11):
the remains of Route sixty one, which is a section
of roadway a highway that's now abandoned since it was
re routed elsewhere. And if you look at the pictures,
you can see why. Right down the middle of the
road is a gigantic crack, again like in a bad
earthquake movie, and so the road is just sort of
(13:33):
split down the middle. And it actually reminded me a
bit of the cracks and crevices that had been forming
in Mount WinGen for the past six thousand years or
more when you look at the pictures of that. I
don't know the exact cause of every surface feature we're
looking at here, but if I had to guess, I
would say this is probably some kind of collapse caused
by the burning out that's going on underneath the surface,
(13:56):
just like we saw in these other cases or like
would have caused the sinkhole.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Of course, sometimes the real life tragedy does inspire great art.
It's worth noting that the town of Centralia inspired the
fictional town of Valkanvania in the nineteen ninety one film
Nothing but Trouble, Really, dan Ackroid's weird horror comedy about
(14:25):
a bunch of sort of sort of. I guess you
would say Texas chainsaw massacre esque family residing above a
big coal mine fire. Quite a film. Quite a film.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Tri Star Pictures or whoever it is, should have a
standing cash prize for anybody who can manage to watch
that whole movie.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
It has a lot of fun things in it. You've
got a wonderful digital underground performance.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I think you got to make it through a lot
of stuff before you get to that.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Dan Ackroyd is clearly having the time of his life
in this film.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
So if it's if it's, if you considered a film
for an audience of one an absolute success, I think
you know.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
There's another interesting tidbit I came across that's related to
the Centralia coal mine, and it seems geologically interesting, But
I couldn't tell if it was because of the fire
in particular. So there was a news report I read
on the site for a new station called WNEP sixteen.
I guess that's an ABC affiliate, and this was out
(15:27):
of Butler Township, Pennsylvania, and it's talking about a geyser
in Pennsylvania. That's not something that you would expect to
find in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
I'm looking at the footage here, though it looks geysery, but.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
This is not a natural geyser. This is a geyser
that was created when many years ago, the mining company
I guess that ran the Centralia mine drilled a hole
in the ground connecting to one of the tunnels for
ventilation of the mine shafts, and somehow now with the
tunnels partially flooded. I think it's especially when there's like
(16:02):
been heavy rain or when the snow melts in the spring,
you get suddenly a guyser gushing up out of this
ventilation hole. And it looks like a real guyser. It's
just spraying up into the air and then running off
into a nearby creek. And they say that the guyser
has a distinct smell. It smells like eggs which I
guess is an indication of sulfurous compounds, and that would
(16:26):
again make sense since you know, you got the coal
down there and it's on fire. And I was unable
to tell if this, guys, is actually related to the
fire or if it's just an unrelated, weird feature of
this same mine.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
You see, Like there's a quote in the tweet that's
attached where the reporters saying that it's been there as
long as quote anyone can remember. There's a mention of
like some people say, oh, there used to be a
second one, and it is kind of I mean, all
of this is a stark reminder of how an enterprise
like coal mining, how you're you're changing the earth, you know,
(17:01):
at least on a local level, and of course you
can get into larger issues of actual climate change as well,
but even just on a local level, like you're just
you're vastly altering how the ground beneath your feet is functioning.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Yeah, all right, let's move on to another fire in
the earth.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
This is a fun one. I'm excited to talk about
it because it concerns natural fires that may have been
burning for two and a half millennia, as well as
a mythical monster, and that monster is the Chimera. Oh
and the chimera, of course. I think most folks out
there will have some image of this in their mind.
There are some wonderful depictions of it. There's the Chimera
(17:51):
of Arezzo. It's an Etruscan bronze statue of four hundred
BCE that's absolutely gorgeous. If anyone has seen this, or
seen or reproduction of this.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I've been to a retzo, but I don't think I've
seen this.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Well, I'm not sure. I didn't put in my notes
where it is currently how so I don't know where
its current status is. But I've seen plenty of images
of it.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It's this wonderful, uh you know, dark bronze finish, and
it looks impressive for a creature that is not always
impressive in artistic renditions, because it is it is not
only a chimera. It is the chimera. It is this.
It is this, this hybrid form that some have criticized
(18:34):
for not completely making all that much sense and maybe
being too counterintuitive. So at the heart of things, the
chimera is, of course a goat monster. Most of its
recognizable body is usually that of a goat. I guess
one of the interesting things about the camera of Arezzo
is that less of it is a goat, and maybe
(18:55):
that's why it's more impressive, Like it looks like the
artists decided to lean more into the into the lion
aspects of its body. But generally when you hear talk
about yeah, we're talking about something that is in large
part a monstrous she goat. It roams the myths of
ancient Greece and Rome, and the name itself means she goat,
(19:18):
and in all depictions it has at least some goat
properties to its hybrid form.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Hm, that's funny. I certainly believe you that that's true.
But I do not really associate the camera with a
goat at all. I think, like, yeah, like lion, snake,
eagle or something.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yes, some depictions it has wings. I want to say that.
In the Dungeons and Dragon's Monster Manual they give it
wings specifically. Now, the oldest records of the monster can
be found in the sixth book of Homer's Iliad, and
this is you know, written down at some point in
the eighth century BCE, and the beast here is described
(19:55):
as a great fire breathing, she goat with a lion's
head and the tail of a serpent. And then slightly
more recently, Hesiod wrote of the chimera in his book Theogeny,
composed between seven thirty and seven hundred DCE. So in Theogeny,
Hesiod is discussing the monstrous Echidna quote divine, stubborn hearted Echidna,
(20:18):
half nymph with dark eyes and fair cheeks, and half
on the other hand, a serpent, huge and terrible and vast,
speckled and flesh devouring beneath caves of sacred earth. And
there in the depths, Echidna mates with the deadly giant Typhon,
and they produce quote, fierce hearted children monsters, all including
(20:43):
the two headed dog Orthos, the three headed dog Cerebus,
and then the even more headed lenaean Hydra, as well
as the sphinx, the Nemian lion, and of course the chimera.
And here's what Hesiod had to say about the kr
And these are these are all translations from the Reverend J.
(21:03):
Banks translation. Quote. But she Echidna bore chimera, breathing, restless fire,
fierce and huge, fleet footed, as well as strong. This
monster had three heads, one indeed of a grim visaged lion,
one of a goat, and another of a serpent, a
fierce dragon in front a lion, a dragon behind, and
(21:26):
in the midst a goat breathing forth the dread strength
of burning.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Fire, and in the midst a goat.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
So like, mostly a goat, that's what you're saying, mostly,
that's what That's what I take it.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
To me, is that he's saying the middle head is
the goat head, I think, or wait, but it's also
saying in front a lion and a dragon behind. Yeah,
So I'm trying to picture this. I'm having it, and I.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Think this is This is why you have a lot
of variation in how it's depicted, like that the the
Etruscan statue, for instance, and other depictions will have the
oa head just straight up growing out of the back
of the creature other times, but it's a good head.
And the goat always looks a little awkward there, like,
what what are you even doing there, buddy? Like you
can imagine the creatures moving around the goast just sort
(22:14):
of awkwardly making a play for vegetation and stuffed.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
In Nibylon, you see a ripple in the water. The
Jaws theme plays, but it's a goat's head poking out
over the certain bah. Yeah wait, dude, the goats baar.
They don't really they bleat.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Yeah, the bleeding. So yeah, you see. Then you see
it depicted other ways where all the heads are sort
of arranged up front and so forth. But yeah, you can.
I imagine a lot of this is coming from different
interpretations like this passage. Now, every monster must have its slayer,
of course, and in this case it is mighty Bellerophon,
(22:48):
sometimes described as a half human son of Poseidon, who
uses Athena's bridle to capture the winged Pegasus right into
battle against the Chimera, and then he thrust his spear
into the monster's flaming maw. Where what happens The metal
instantly melts. Oh no, he's defeated. Oh no, he's not,
because then the liquid metal chokes the deadly monster to death.
(23:11):
So I always found that to be kind of a
nice twist.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh yeah, Now, surely the hero didn't intend for the
metal to melt and choke the monster.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I don't know. I never doubt these heroes, These Greek
heroes are are wicked smart.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
That strikes me as more like a like a War
of the World's type ending where yeah, something you didn't
even expect kills the monster.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Now you're probably asking, okay, well, how does this tie
into places and fire? Well, this myth is certainly tied
to specific places. For starters, it is written that the
Chimera was for a time the pet of the king
of Krea before it escaped and rampaged. This was a
region of western Anatolia from the eleventh through sixth centuries BCE.
(23:56):
This region is now part of Turkey. But then the
Chimera is said to descend upon an area to the
southeast of Caria in Lysia, where it generally devours every
mortal in sight and just sets everything on fire. So
this is the realm of Mount Chimera. In the Book
of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges writes that Virgil describes
(24:17):
the Chimera and the Aeneid, and that the fourth and
fifth century commentator Servius ties the monster to Licia and
went so far as to say that the monster was
a metaphor for a volcano there, and this was apparently
echoed by plenty of the elder as well.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
This is how Borges summarizes it. Quote, the base of
the volcano is infested with serpents. On its sides, there
are meadows where goats pasture, and on top flames shoot forth,
and lions have their dens.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I see. Okay, So it's like combining the different types
of local wildlife, at least allegedly, the serpents around the base,
and then the goats grazing in the meadow and the lions
in their caves, and then you have, of course the
flames coming out. I guess that's the dragon aspect, right.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah. So I have to say, like, when I was
reading this, it sended a little far fetched to me
because we've talked about geomithology before, but I don't remember
like a version of geo mythology where like the aspects
of a given geographical feature are then just sort of
cobbled together into a into a hybrid monster. And as
(25:32):
it turns out, Borges also finds this ridiculous and mentions
that he thinks it's absurd, as well as an idea
that I think was put forth by Plutarch that Chimera
is the name of a pirate who just happened to
have these three different animals as part of his iconography
and his flag and so forth.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
It was a pirate.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Now. One of the advancements in the sort of figuring
out this myth and tying the myth into actual geology.
This occurred during the early nineteenth century. In eighteen eleven,
hydrographer and Irish rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort linked Mount
(26:12):
Chimera to the geographical features in the region known as
jan Ar or Janartis. And he explored this region, I believe,
in eighteen eleven through eighteen twelve, basically going around looking
at various ruins, citing various ruins, and he's noted during
this time for rediscovering Hadrian's Gate built there for Roman
(26:34):
Emperor Hadrian in the year one thirty. So jan Artists,
what does it look like? Well, it matches up with
some of these other descriptions we've discussed in these episodes.
You have a rocky mount here with active gas seeps
that have produced burning flames for depending on what sources
you're looking at, perhaps two and a half millennia, so
(26:55):
perhaps twenty five hundred years. So some still kind of
interpret it and say, well, this site could have been
the inspiration for the monster itself, And I guess you
can kind of open that up and you can look
at the ideas of the monster being a metaphor for them,
for this mountain, or just kind of like the oh,
here's this weird landscape with fire, and you end up
(27:17):
with this idea of, well, a monster lives here. Surely
this is the habitat for some sort of monstrous fire
breathing creature. So the seeps in question here are largely
on barren ground and they follow various fissures and perhaps faults,
according to a twenty fifteen paper I was looking at
(27:37):
from Meyer Dombard at All, published in Frontiers in Microbiology.
These researchers also reported a fluid seap that they discovered
in this area, and numerous papers mentioned as well that
sailors used the fires of the mountain as a kind
of natural landmark at night in ancient times. Today, however,
(28:00):
hikers visit the flames and they do things apparently like
brew tee, cook marshmallows over them, or you know, just
just look at them as well. Because this is all
part of the Olympus National Park. So if you know,
if you're in Turkey, this is a site you can
go and see. Now, the seeps here are reportedly stronger,
as are the flames during winter, and apparently this is
(28:23):
link to changes in atmospheric pressure and ground water recharge.
And this kind of takes us back to where we're
just talking about. You know, when you disrupt the underground
environment through extensive coal mining, you know, these are the
sort of things like groundwater recharge or the situations you're
potentially interfering in the vent gases that come up. I
(28:47):
was looking at a profile of these and it is
mostly methane and there's some other ingredients in there as well. Now,
as to whether there are actual snakes there, I mean,
one presumes, I know there are snakes in Turk. I
guess it's if we can presume that there either are
goats or could have been goats there as well, goats
like a rocky area with some vegetation to muncheon. And
(29:10):
as far as lions go, you won't find any lions
here today, but there were once lions found throughout what
is now Turkey. So I mean, I guess all of
that is plausible as well to at least a certain extent.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Oh yeah. If you compare maps of the historic distribution
of lions to the present distribution throughout Africa and Eurasia,
it's well, on one hand, it's kind of sad to
see how much their range has been constricted, but it's
also eye opening to like, it's eye opening about how
so many ancient myths and stories all throughout the Middle
(29:46):
East and the Greek myths and stuff, it seems that
there are lions everywhere. And you're like, what, because you
don't really think that there are lions wandering around and
say Greece or Turkey today, but you know, thousands of
years ago, they're absolutely.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
It brings us back to the topic we discussed in
the past about the first known human animal hybrid represented
in art, that of the lion man. Yeah. Yeah, Now
this side of this side is also interesting because there
is a link to the Greek forge god he Festus
here as well. Hepestus, of course, was the blacksmith's god
who was also deformed after his father Zeus cast him
(30:23):
off Mount Olympus for taking his mother Hera's side in
an argument, Or at least that's one version of the story.
The Remains of a temple to Hefestus I can be
found at this site just below the fires, which again
makes sense given that the sites of natural flames like
this seem to be inevitably tied to human industry. Like
we've discussed in these various other examples, people see them
(30:45):
and they think of like cook fires and the depths
maintained by the little people, or you know, we think
of industrial processes, you know, chemical fires and so forth,
But then sometimes we all tie them to fire breathing monsters.
(31:08):
And I wanted to mention one more thing that Borjes
brings up about the chimera. He discusses how he thinks
that the chimera was ultimately quote too heterogeneous. In other words,
these parts were all too dissimilar, and it all resists
quote merging into a single animal. So I guess in
that you could say that he's sort of saying that
(31:28):
it's too counterintuitive. To a certain extent, he contends that
people got a bit tired of the idea of the chimera,
and we see that reflected in the use of chimeracle
and the use of chimera as referring to something that
is just too outrageous to be true. Too outrageous to
actually exist in the real world, something that just doesn't
(31:49):
gel together in a form that you can believe in.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, that's interesting. I'm always curious about why our intuitions
about imaginary beings work the way they do. I'm sure
I've asked questions like this on the show a bunch
of times, But like, why does one unreal monster seem
plausible in quotes and another one doesn't? Like the chymerira is, Yeah,
it's got a goat head in the middle of its back,
(32:14):
or at least in some depictions, and people are just like, eh, no, no, yeah,
that doesn't work. The hydra, which has many heads coming
out of the Yeah, that that works.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Yeah. I mean even the vegetable lamb of Tartary, as
fantastic as that is and is you know, with the
gulf existing between plant and mammal like, that feels more
believable and I think clearly was more believable for a
very long period of time compared to the chimera.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, so what are the underlying psychological factors, Like what
subconscious criteria do we use to judge an unreal being
that makes sense to us versus an unreal being that
doesn't the chimera goat head. That's just that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, maybe part of it comes down into like a basic,
you know, primal estimation of another animal, like what is
the head on this thing going to bite me? What
is the head on this animal seem to want to do?
And if you look at that goat head sticking out
of the middle of the camera's back, what am I
supposed to make of that?
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:17):
What's it even doing?
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Now? Cyclops, on the other hand, one big eye in
the forehead. I picture that all day long. That works.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah. One of the interesting things about these I guess
you could call them, you could think of them as
minimally counterintuitive monsters and hybrids, is that the best of
them we continue to look at and reconsider and also
apply like theoretical biological models like I've read. I know,
(33:48):
I read a wonderful paper once on the biology of
the centaur where the author was discussing how the centaur's
body would work, and you know, really focusing on onlatory
system and and the fact that it would need two hearts,
one in the human part and one in the horse part.
You know, I love I love examinations like that. So,
(34:09):
but it's an example of how the the centaur, as
fantastic as it is, is not so far removed from
reality that we can't apply this line of thinking to it. Whereas, yeah,
I don't think I've ever seen anybody go out on
a limb and write a you know, a paper like
This is how the biology of the chimera would work.
This is how it would breathe fire. This is the
function of the the live goat head growing from its back,
(34:32):
and this is why its tail is a live snake.
This is the diet it consumes. Yeah, this, it's just
it's just ridiculous. Now, coming back just a little bit too, uh,
you know to what we've been talking about here, eternal
flames and all I do want to point out that
this is the examples we've brought up are are certainly
not the only examples of natural gas seeps and so forth,
(34:55):
where eternal flames have evoked mythic ideas, religious devote and
so forth. I was reading Seeps in the Ancient World, Myths,
Religions and Social Development by Giuseppe Etope of the National
Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy, and he has
(35:16):
a book titled natural Gas Seepach, but one of the
chapters is devoted to just looking at some of these examples.
So he mentions the chimera there. He mentions the fires
of Baku that we previously discussed, as well as a
couple of other examples. There's the Baba GurGur seep in Iraq,
he writes, was probably the burning fiery furnace into which
(35:40):
King and Nebucanezer cast of the Jews.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
I've seen this claim before, So Baba gurger is it's
like an oil field near Kirkook, I believe, And there
is at least one place there where, yeah, there's a
there is a natural gas seep where the volatiles that
are out of it have been set a flame and
they're burning. And yeah, I don't know what the actual
(36:05):
evidence is that this is the basis of the Bible story.
One of these many cases where somebody like connects a
story from ancient history or mythology or legend to an
observable feature today. And in some cases you can do that,
like there's a pretty clear link, and in other cases
I'm not quite sure how strong the evidence for that
(36:27):
direct connection is. But so, yeah, there is the story
of King Nebuchadnezzar throwing what is it, Shadragnieshak and a
bed nego. Oh yeah, yeah, into a burning furnace, and
I have read some modern authors saying, ah, maybe the
furnace was this geological feature we see today. Bobby GurGur,
by the way, I think, means something like father flame
(36:50):
or Daddy flame.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Another example that he brings up is the sacred Mangarma's
flame in Indonesia, which has been active at least since
the fifteenth century, he writes, and is still used in
annual Buddhist ceremonies. And then there's the Oracle of Delphi
in Greece, which we've discussed at least a little bit
on the show. In the past, there's talk of there
(37:13):
having been an internal flame at the Temple of Apollo
there at least at one point. And then there's this
idea that I believe researchers have kind of gone back
and forth on this idea that vapors from the earth
contributed to the visions granted to the priestess of the
sacred site. The idea I think kind of fell out
(37:35):
of favor for a while, but more recent geological research
I was looking at it from two thousand and four
two thousand and five. They argue that, Okay, the site
here lies over a fault where gas leaks could theoretically
cause oxygen and reduction in an individual that would then
result in a mild hypnotic state complete with hallucinations. I mean,
(37:56):
even coming back to this ap article about Centralia, you
have this quote about the you know, the woman talking
about feeling like she's a zombie walking around due to
the fumes, which is an altered state. And in this
and in this case, I mean she she knows that
it's not the divine trying to speak through her, et cetera.
But you can you can well imagine a situation where
(38:18):
if you're combining holy expectations, religious expectations, and ritual with
this sort of environment, you could easily get to this point.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
If only we could get a medical readout on the
the oracles of Delphi, that that might be really illuminating. Yeah,
kind of information exists.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
I wouldn't mind going back and looking at the oracle
again in the future. It's there's there's a lot of
interesting writing about it. It is a has a wonderful history.
All Right, we're going to go and close it out there.
This this was a fun journey. We got to talk
about a number of fascinating locations around the Earth, some
wonderful history, mythology, and religion. If there's a particular site
(39:01):
we didn't discuss that you would like to bring to
our attention, certainly write in and let us know. And
especially if you have visited any of these locations and
you have direct first hand experience, perhaps you've actually glimpsed
the flames emerging from the earth, definitely write in and
tell us about it, share your photos, etc. We would
love to hear from you. In the meantime. Core episodes
(39:25):
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publish every Tuesday and Thursday,
and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, short form,
Monster fact or Artifact episodes on Wednesdays, listener Mail on Mondays,
and on Friday. We set aside most serious concerns and
just discuss a weird film with Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
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 suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say Hello. You can email us at contact Stuff to
Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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