April 28, 2022 • 46 mins
It might surprise you to learn that the oldest raging fires on Earth are actually underground. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the world of eternal flames and coal seam fires.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert 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 you
(00:24):
opened with a question that we never fully got to
the to the bottom of the question was what is
the oldest continuously burning fire on Earth? And uh, or
you may have phrased it a little bit differently. That
was one question. I guess another one would be like,
what's the longest a single fire with the with the
single common origin has ever burned? Right? Yeah, but essentially
(00:46):
getting down to the same question. Yeah, yeah, I guess
the last one is really unknowable. The first 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 by
(01:08):
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 looked
(01:29):
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 burned
by themselves as a result of an exothermic chemical reaction
that happens when pyrite rich mudstone is exposed to the air,
(01:51):
so erosion happens, part of the cliff comes away, and
some of this mudstone that has you know, fine grain
pyrite in it, oxidizes it he eats 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
(02:12):
long time. All 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 than you're
not usually seeing like big sort of dancing flames coming
(02:32):
off of it. But it's smoking and burning four hundreds
or thousands of years. It certainly is a very long burn.
But is it the longest? Well, I think the answer
is probably not. Again this 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
(02:52):
on Earth is a place in Australia known as the
Burning Mountain. The Burning Mountain is technically known as Mount
Wingin spelled like winging like w i n g, and
it's Windin, which is a name allegedly derived from a
word used by the native Wannerooa people meaning fire. The
(03:13):
Burning Mountain is located in the Upper Hunter Valley of
New South Wales what's today about three kilometers north of Sydney,
and the earliest written records of the mountain trace back
to stories published in the Sydney newspapers in eighty eight,
though the site had been used and known by the
Wannerooa going back much longer. To get a feel for
(03:36):
the extent of this site, I was looking around for
photos and videos and I found a really cool video
somebody uploaded to YouTube of aerial drone footage, so you
can look that up if you want. But if you
are peering down at the 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
(03:57):
me to be about I'm not so good at estimating
area by by sight, but it looks like maybe half
the size of a soccer field something like that. Uh,
it's been scorched clean, so all of the ground around it.
This is not a bare rock mountaintop. This is a
fully forested uh and and grass covered mountains So all
of the ground around this burned area is populated with
(04:21):
with trees and grasses, But within the burned zone there
is only bare earth, soil and gravel, either bleached white
like ash or burned red like brick. And near the
edges of the burned field there are these pale skeletons
of dead trees, some laying flat. I guess maybe those
(04:41):
are the older ones that have fallen down and some
still standing. The ones that are still upright seem to
be the ones that 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. Uh,
there are no usable cracks and fissures in the earth
(05:03):
like you might see opening up during an earthquake scene
in a disaster movie. 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 more door esque, very you know,
volcanic vision of what we're talking about here, and and
(05:23):
the reality is in many ways more subtle than that
extreme vision, but but also inherently, uh, you know, weird
when compared to most other environments you're gonna encounter. Yeah, totally.
And I think there are indications there may have been times,
even in fairly recent history, where it it looked scarier
than it does now, though it certainly does look very strange.
(05:46):
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 Charles Wilton UH, published
in eight 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
(06:08):
waiting into a kind of ongoing controversy and would have
to contradict previous reports, including the earlier reports that Mount
win Gin was a volcano with a crater or called
ea uh. 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
(06:31):
of the mountain wingin where the fire is now burning,
and which is a compact sandstone rock, comprehends parts 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
(06:53):
the fire having been in a hollow between two ridges
of the same mountain. Mr Mackie, referring to somebody 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
(07:17):
particularly examined the widest of these. The rock, a solid
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, thus forming the convex surface
(07:38):
of the heated rock. I looked down this chasm to
the depth of about fifteen feet. The sides of the
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
(08:01):
down into the chasm. The noise they made in their
falls seemed to die away in a vast abyss beneath
my feet. 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
there is no crater, no caldera. Instead, there is a
burned area on the surface of the mountain, producing sulfurous fumes.
(08:26):
And then there are these cracks or chasms in the earth,
and the fire seems to be burning down in the
deep of these cracks 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 but in many cases too
but to compare them to human fire technology on one
(08:47):
level or another. Yeah, especially industry, right, like both of
the earliest written accounts of the smoking Hills in the
Northwest Territories compared them to h compared them to human industry,
one to a chemical fact to read, the other to
a brick manufacturing location. And that many of the oral
traditions of the New Valuate people said that these were
(09:09):
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've been driven away from human companionship. So coming
back to Reverend Wilton's account, he he goes on to
write that there are a bunch of these chasms there,
of varying width, and they're constantly belching out smoke and
(09:32):
sulfurous vapor, and the chasms are also quote beautified with
efflorescent crystal of sulfur, varying in color from the deepest
red orange occasioned by Ferruginists mixture. I think that means
containing iron or iron oxide to the palest straw color
where alum predominated. And he said he could not spend
(09:54):
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. Yeah, and he 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
(10:16):
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 the Burning Mountain,
though he notes that he found coal in many places nearby.
So this, this region of the country seems to be
coal rich, which is important. We'll come back to it.
(10:38):
And as one weird acide, 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 the fumes from
the chasms. You go and get yourself some of the
water from the spring. It will quench the folks. It
is not a good idea to drink untested or untreated
(10:59):
spring water. I can can have stuff and 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 from a mountain that's on fire. Yeah,
because I can imagine the water potentially tasting strongly of
sulfur or something. But I don't know. Maybe it's just
(11:20):
a wonderful spring that was quite refreshing. 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, but can discover no exact similarity between them.
The burning Mountain of Australia may, I think be pronounced
(11:42):
as unique one other example of nature sports of her
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.
But but he is correct, you know, it depends on
(12:03):
what he's looking to, I guess in in history books
and other accounts, because uh there can be obviously large,
big differences between what one could roughly classify as a
as fire erupting from the ground or burning earth in
one part of the world and m in something that
fits the same description elsewhere in the world. And we'll
(12:24):
we'll get to some examples of that in a bit, right.
Uh So, in the years 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
(12:45):
point in history that coal must have been exposed to
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 that
(13:07):
sets it ablaze and it just continues throughout the years
after that. 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
(13:27):
the sun, it can start burning on its own. Or
there could be some kind of chemical reaction, maybe involving
you know, sulfur like we like we observed in the
Smoking Hills the oxidation that kicks off that burning process
in Canada. And then of course, obviously there's there's the
other possibility which I think Smoky Bear would definitely point
(13:48):
out to us, that there's always the chance that that
human beings have a hand in setting such things ablaze. Possible, yes,
either by accident or intentionally. 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 and uh
(14:12):
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 on the on the
surface and in these chasms leading down below. So something's
happening deep down in their fires in the deep, but
you're not seeing tongues of flame or up from the earth.
I think some early reports did say that that they
(14:33):
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 or something like that coming out of the mountain,
which could have been caused by if there was a
section of the coal seam that 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
(14:56):
these flames and there within you know, a distance from
the surface that can be seen the naked eye. Yeah,
because we are dealing with the situation where you know,
geologic processes are need to be considered, and 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 you read here,
(15:17):
like he talks about the great fury. Uh, that is
observable here and perhaps this is just you know, his
his description being you know, colorful and enthusiastic. But uh,
you know that that doesn't necessarily match up with say,
you know, these modern drone images in the modern drone
footage that we were talking about earlier, Right, So, the
(15:39):
surface appearance of a coal seam fire like this could
could vary a lot over the ages as it continues
to burn. I think one of 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
(16:00):
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 um, I'm pretty sure that the main reason for
this is that it's so deep that it has very
(16:21):
little access to oxygen. So for a mundane analogy, if
you ever have experience working a grill, think about getting
a fire going. Uh, and maybe you want this fire
in the grill to burn low and slow instead of
hot and fast. What would you do there, Well, you
manipulate the vents, right. You squeeze them down to only
the barest crack of an opening, so that the fire
(16:43):
has very little access 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 few aal source. So I
think that's probably what's going on in this case as well.
(17:05):
There's you know, a bunch of coal 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 the average
rate at which the fire spreads within the burning mountain,
and a common estimate I've seen is that it appears
(17:27):
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 mentioned in a in a
paper called Thermal Infrared Imagery of the Burning Mountain coal
Fire published in Remote Sensing Equipment Buy C. D. Elliott
(17:51):
and Adrian W. Fleming in nineteen seventy four. And so
the authors of this paper right quote, baked sediments and
slag produced by the urning 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
(18:12):
is burnt continuously and migrated steadily south at the present
main 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 acknowledged the fire
may in fact have been burning for a much longer period.
(18:33):
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
(18:54):
than a 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. Yeah, I
mean that that dwarfs anything we've discussed thus far or
will discuss. After this, I was reading about the site
(19:16):
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, so
I guess he was killed in battle. And when when
(19:38):
he didn't come back, she was so distraught that she
cried out to the sky god beyalm Me to 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. Now,
(19:59):
this is this is a site that that that the
people can go and see. Uh. You can be looking
it up on the website here. Uh, you can go
to Burning Mountain Nature Reserve and there's a one a
one to two hour hike you can take and you
can go to this observation platform that's also visible in
the drone footage that we were looking at. So I
(20:20):
know we have a number of listeners out there in Australia.
So if anyone out there has has been to this
site and has some firsthand experience they would like to share,
we'd love to hear about it. Yeah, totally. If you've
been there right in, let us know what it's like. Yeah.
The website also points out please note remember to take
your binoculars if you want to bird watch, because serious
bird watchers are like Burning Mountain. No, no, those birds Okay.
(20:51):
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 were
some famous ones in uh in the coal mining regions
the United States, like the famous Centralia fire in Pennsylvania.
(21:14):
There also I know a lot of coal seam fires
throughout China where places that have where coal has been
mined have accidentally been set a light. How long has
the Springfield tire uh fire supposed to have been going
on on the SIMP cells, we wouldn't have our tire fire,
and um, I don't know how long is how many
(21:35):
years has Simpson's been on? Seventy four years at this point. Now.
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 the you know,
(21:57):
this carbon into the atmosphere and polluting the air, but
at least you're getting power out of it. This is
just doing that 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 and
some of these have just proven pretty much impossible for
people to extinguish. Yeah, though it is interesting how it
(22:20):
is kind of the naturally occurring equivalent of of human
coal industry, you know, like it because of uh, because
it's it's coal, it's burning, it's just not doing anything
for humans. Uh So, coal, of course, is is a
fossil fuel formed from ancient organic matter converted through heat
and pressure. And like we've been saying, coal seams are
(22:42):
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. Yeah, if oxygen can
get to the coal, that's 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
assistant ongoing fire that that stretches beyond human control. That's right.
(23:04):
One of the big ones here is um is a
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.
(23:26):
Deposits of natural gas occurrent smaller amounts at 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 UM and I'm not going to
go into detail on on these, but there's conventional gas,
there's biogas, deep natural gas, shale tight gas, coal bed methane,
(23:47):
submarine methane, hydrate gas, and geo pressurized zone gas. UM.
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 that natural leakage of gas
(24:10):
should encounter a spark a flame, well then you have
yourself potentially a jet of fire uh emerging from the earth.
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 supplies as
(24:30):
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
burns as long as the as long as the gas
is continually escaping. Yeah, and uh, and very very shortly
here we'll have a I think a great example of this.
(24:50):
But another possibility worth mentionment mentioning here is that of
pete 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 number of different
uses for in human technology, including gardening, filtration, chemical absorption techniques.
(25:12):
But it's high in carbon, so if it drives out enough,
it can catch fire. And I've read stories about the these. Uh.
Pete fires that get out of hand can also be
incredibly difficult to deal with. But it is interesting because
you don't necessarily think of something in the bog being
flammable like this. You don't. I don't know why don't you.
(25:33):
I mean, you do think of things like swamp gas
and um and you know we've talked in the past
the whisp will of the whisp. Yeah, but you can
also imagine yourself in this environment, being like it is
so damp here it is, 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 uh, naturally fueled flames, I
(25:57):
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
Agebajan on the the Absorm Peninsula. This was a region
that was under the domain of Schirvan in ancient times,
but came under the domain of Imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Iran,
(26:21):
and Soviet Russia during the twentieth century. UM. And this
is an area where there is a lot of a
lot of petroleum and also various examples of natural gas
emerging from the ground that that I thought we might
discuss here, Okay, alright, So it takes us to what
is now the capital city of Azerba jean Baku. Uh.
(26:44):
It's a hosted numerous sites of interest, including the Maiden Tower,
a twelfth century construction with a very intriguing design. Its
origins are often explained in a tale concerning fire Um.
In particular, there are a few different Zoroastrian legends about
this structure, and I included a picture here for you, Joe,
(27:05):
and I encourage listeners to look up images of this, uh,
this this structure because it's it's it's quite picturesque. I
don't think I've seen anything quite like it. It's it's
rather different from from from other twelfth century constructions and
certainly from other archaeological traditions in other parts of the world. Yeah. Yeah,
And this is also interesting because, of course fire has
(27:29):
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 zoro Asternism, like
the the god of Zoroastrianism is the is Hura Mazda,
you know that, the god of good and light um.
(27:51):
But but fire is an important religious symbol within You
do see these ancient accounts by foreigners generally who come
into this region and they're like, oh, yeah, they worshiped
fire here. But 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 worshiped demons, here,
they worship devils. They're not Christian at all. So, uh,
(28:13):
you know, it's it's ultimately, I think more complicated than that.
But there is this element of fire that does pop
up in some of the religious traditions in this area.
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, right, Yeah, yeah,
I think I think that that that gets at it. Yeah. Oh,
(28:35):
but but so I want to know this legend. You
mentioned a Zoroastrian legend concerning the Maiden Tower, this intriguing
and beautiful building, uh, and its origins concerning fire. Yes,
and I was I was reading. Center was essentially a
post that was put together by Professor Mahir Khalifa Zade
(28:56):
and Laila Khalifa Zade, and uh. They point out that
there there are several different legends tie that concerned fire
and concern this to this tower, the maid In Tower. Um.
But the 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
(29:18):
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 gonna quote this, uh,
this bit, uh, just a bit from the paper here
or the post by Khalifa Zade here. Quote. Finally he
(29:39):
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 knees and started to pray to her.
And so from here basically what happens. The fire maiden says, hey,
(30:00):
I am sent here to protect you, but I'm gonna
need a sword and I'm gonna need a helmet to
hide my long, beautiful hair from the enemy. The enemy
cannot see my hair. Um, so they outfit her with
these items. She orders the gates thrown open, and then
a great battle ensues and she engages. He winds up
engaging in single combat with the enemy commander, who just
(30:23):
assumes she's just another one of the male soldiers of
the city, you know, dressed in the helmet, wielding a sword. Uh.
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 has bested him, so she shows him. She takes
the helm off, and he's shocked to see the face
of a girl in the long, beautiful, flame colored hair
(30:46):
of a girl. And first he realizes, Okay, first of all,
if this is what the girls of Baku are capable of,
you know, if they're this tough, then we don't have
a chance against the rest of the army. But then
he also falls in love with her instantly, and then
she falls in love with him, and then peace is declared.
Oh didn't see that coming. Yeah, yeah, it kind of
(31:07):
has goes in a direction I didn't. I didn't expect there. Um,
and uh, you know, I mean, who knows you with
stories like this, you can't have multiple stories, I guess,
kind of merging together and twisting over time. And at
some point someone decides, what if it had a what
if it had a romantic ending? Um and ultimately um
Khalifa Zade shares a few other versions where you know,
(31:29):
various other things occur, and also mentions that the tower
might just be called the maid In Tower because it
was never conquered by the enemy. It's the ideas like this,
this tower is it's it's a virgin tower. The enemy
has never defiled it. I see. So you have this
(31:50):
history in Baku, you know, concerning fire and uh and
and you know, it's it's the character 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're they're they're very beautiful. In the pictures I
looked at, they have this kind of curling flame shape
(32:12):
to them, and so you know, during the day they're
reflective glass and steel, very much like like any other
modern skyscrapers. But I've also seen images where they lighted
a light, the light these towers up at night with
you know, swirling orange and yellow and red and and
also some blue thrown in there as well. That really
make them look like strong depictions of flames curling up
(32:36):
from the earth. 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 uh Jan a Dog also known
as the Burning Mountain uh and this is where natural
gas constantly seeps up through the ground and has been
(32:58):
a flame since at least the nineteen fifties, when um
it may have been ignited by shepherds. So this is
an example where uh you know, ultimately who knows, but
at least one of the other stories out there is that, okay,
there's gas leaking up and then some shepherds set it
on fire in the fifties, um, and by some accounts
it has been burning ever since. Flames reportedly jet about
(33:21):
three meters or nine point eight feet into the air
from 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 mortor you're probably
gonna be disappointed. It's basically this this hillside, and there's
a there's an area where there's not any vegetation, and
there's an area that's really dark, and then here are
(33:43):
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. Uh uh.
And I have to throw in this wonderful description that
I found for mud volcanoes in general from Brewster at
All in article in geo Echo Marina. They say that
(34:05):
these are geo exuded slurries including usually including water and gases.
So they look like a like a bit like um
like bubbling mud like gas rising up through the mud. Uh,
you know, forming these big bub bubbles. It has kind
of a bog of eternal stinch kind of a look
to it. And you know, some of these also looks
(34:27):
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, I think I flagged mud
volcanoes as a is a potential episode topic for us.
Oh yeah, we could easily come back to it. Yeah,
weird sort of gray clay puke coming up from these
these cracked blisters in the earth. It's it's pretty cool. Yeah. Now,
(34:49):
this this region of of of of Sasani 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
(35:10):
Ingelbert Comfort, who visited here in sixteen eighty three and
just and and uh and has some wonderful descriptions of
what he saw. Inglebert Comfort, of course, popped up in
our Vegetable Lamb episode, 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 what these stories are
(35:31):
talking about. I do not think there is a there
is a plant that makes lambs. Yes. So the book
in question is Exotic Attractions in Persia eighty four through
six eight, And I was looking at a translation of
this by Villiam Floor, which you can find on the
(35:53):
book or physical book out there. So I'm just gonna
read just a brief bit from it here where he's
talking about these fires. 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.
(36:14):
Some fissures made a lot of noise, and with their
fires and their violence, aroused a holy fear among some
rare spectators. 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 Nafta.
(36:36):
These phenomena appeared in the area of eighty eight paces
in length wide. The fissures were amazingly narrow, not wider
than one foot or one palm, some shorter and drawn
into a semicircle, and others crooked with a long and
sinuous bend, which I have shown accurately and conform to
reality in the appended illustration to complete this description. The
(37:00):
edges of these cracks and the soil itself, when you
remove the dust, showed a pox marked light stone, almost
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,
(37:21):
having placed copper or earthenware pots on a not too
blazing crack, prepared the meals for the inhabitants of the
neighboring village of Sorgani at Swaga, thus named because of
the fire. Others, having brought stones from all around, and
having heaped them together, were burning lime, and once, when ready,
they made a pile to transport it in small vessels.
(37:44):
Two foreigners, Indian fire worshippers descended from the ancient Persians,
were quietly seated around an enclosure they had constructed. 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,
(38:06):
he placed small cotton balls that he tore from his
dress on a fire shovel and set fire to them.
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.
(38:28):
Such is the first appearance of the wonders of nature,
well known in this part of the peninsula, but not
in the same place, and eternally remain in people's memory. Wow. Yeah,
so yeah, I love everything about that account. That's oh yeah, yeah,
it's wonderful. Though. I have to notice Camphor mentions cotton,
thinking back to the vegetable lamb thing, So he knew
(38:50):
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. That's a
good point. That's a good point. So again, that is
from Exotic Attractions in Persia by by Ingolbert Comfort And
you can pick up a copy of that that comes
(39:10):
out from this out from major publishers. Uh. And there
is a kindle addition. But there's another side of interest
related to all of this, and that is the Atashka
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
(39:33):
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 there are four small almost
like little towers, one at each corner of the of
the roof, and those are flaming as well. Oh wow,
So this is a temple, a religious building built around
(39:54):
a natural gas leak. Yeah. So I love this because
in that comfort account we had an example of people
cooking over one of these naturally occurring bouts of gas
and spouts of flame. Uh and uh. And now we
have an actual structure that is not not only like
built around this, but but seems to be manipulating the
(40:17):
flow of gas so that you can have additional fires
control fires burning at the top of the temple. Yeah. Yeah.
And you know there's some old woodcuts of this and
uh and and also you know you can find modern
photos of it as well. Um. It's been a place
for Hindu seek and Zoroastrian worship, um and uh. It
(40:39):
seems to be some debate on who originally worshiped here,
and part of this may be due to what Mary
Boyce described in the 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 sent Tree ce. But Boys points
(41:02):
out a few different ideas about the history of these
fire temples again in the in the particularly mainly and
we were talking about in the Baku region. First of all,
okay I was like, surely we know it's older than that.
Okay I see in this region. So, first of all,
the history is complex due to the existence of both
(41:22):
Zoroastrian image cults and fire cults, and uh and there
seemed to be an offer a lot of overlap between
the two. So she says that the image cults seems
seemed to have lasted from the fourth century b c e.
Until they were suppressed by an iconoclastic movement under the
Sasanians or the Neo Persian Empire. And so in this
(41:45):
we're getting back into this idea that we have explored
in a previous episode about the role of images in worship.
So basically, uh and so the cult of the fire
temples may have been instituted in oppose adition to quote
this alien form of worship, and so I believe what
she's saying here is that as the use of images
(42:08):
were suppressed in their worship UH, they turned to the
flame itself as a focal point of worship. And we
can we can we see that reflected in that story
we were discussing earlier, praying to a hura mazda, but
using the flame is like the focal point of the worship.
And Boys also points out that this would you could
(42:28):
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 h
easily linked to natural flames, et cetera. So there's a
there's a there's a local aspect of this going on.
But then in general we also have these traditions of
keeping the fire and UH, into a certain extent, venerating
(42:50):
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 A four the
Parthian period. That's from b C. E C. Now, this
is another bit that I found quite interesting. Um So
(43:12):
this is a still I believe a candidate to become
a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Temple 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 gas line U
(43:33):
instead of natural gas emerging from the earth. So it's
interesting to think of this, this site and this date
in eight three is kind of a key boundary point
between the oil age and the age of fossil fuel
and the period preceding it, a time during which the
divine fire is extinguished and then is replaced by technological
(43:55):
mastery over fossil fuels and fire. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So
I found all the just just richly um interesting. I
have I have to admit I had not read much
about age Bajan. I've never been to a Bajan. But this,
this is, 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 a Bajan or
(44:17):
as of of are Bajan the heritage that or is
just traveled there and seeing these sites right in let
us know. I'd love to have some you know, some
more insight on all of this. Alright, we're gonna go
and close it out here, but we're gonna be back
and and hey, we might keep talking on this this
topic that the train is in motion and there's there's
(44:37):
certainly more we could discuss here. The burning continues, the
fuel has not been extinguished yet so so so this
may go on next week, all right, in the 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, um, you know, and h and also
anything about the previous episode or there are other episodes
(44:59):
that have come before, or potential episodes we could record
in the future. Um. As a reminder, Core episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind air on Tuesdays and Thursdays
and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed and
can get that wherever you get your podcasts these days.
On Monday's we do listener Mail. On Wednesday's we do
a short form artifact were Monster Fact. On Fridays we
(45:19):
do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.
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 for the future,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
(45:40):
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
Heart Radio with the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. The Bigger than
(46:02):
the four four
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert 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 you
(00:24):
opened with a question that we never fully got to
the to the bottom of the question was what is
the oldest continuously burning fire on Earth? And uh, or
you may have phrased it a little bit differently. That
was one question. I guess another one would be like,
what's the longest a single fire with the with the
single common origin has ever burned? Right? Yeah, but essentially
(00:46):
getting down to the same question. Yeah, yeah, I guess
the last one is really unknowable. The first 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 by
(01:08):
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 looked
(01:29):
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 burned
by themselves as a result of an exothermic chemical reaction
that happens when pyrite rich mudstone is exposed to the air,
(01:51):
so erosion happens, part of the cliff comes away, and
some of this mudstone that has you know, fine grain
pyrite in it, oxidizes it he eats 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
(02:12):
long time. All 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 than you're
not usually seeing like big sort of dancing flames coming
(02:32):
off of it. But it's smoking and burning four hundreds
or thousands of years. It certainly is a very long burn.
But is it the longest? Well, I think the answer
is probably not. Again this 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
(02:52):
on Earth is a place in Australia known as the
Burning Mountain. The Burning Mountain is technically known as Mount
Wingin spelled like winging like w i n g, and
it's Windin, which is a name allegedly derived from a
word used by the native Wannerooa people meaning fire. The
(03:13):
Burning Mountain is located in the Upper Hunter Valley of
New South Wales what's today about three kilometers north of Sydney,
and the earliest written records of the mountain trace back
to stories published in the Sydney newspapers in eighty eight,
though the site had been used and known by the
Wannerooa going back much longer. To get a feel for
(03:36):
the extent of this site, I was looking around for
photos and videos and I found a really cool video
somebody uploaded to YouTube of aerial drone footage, so you
can look that up if you want. But if you
are peering down at the 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
(03:57):
me to be about I'm not so good at estimating
area by by sight, but it looks like maybe half
the size of a soccer field something like that. Uh,
it's been scorched clean, so all of the ground around it.
This is not a bare rock mountaintop. This is a
fully forested uh and and grass covered mountains So all
of the ground around this burned area is populated with
(04:21):
with trees and grasses, But within the burned zone there
is only bare earth, soil and gravel, either bleached white
like ash or burned red like brick. And near the
edges of the burned field there are these pale skeletons
of dead trees, some laying flat. I guess maybe those
(04:41):
are the older ones that have fallen down and some
still standing. The ones that are still upright seem to
be the ones that 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. Uh,
there are no usable cracks and fissures in the earth
(05:03):
like you might see opening up during an earthquake scene
in a disaster movie. 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 more door esque, very you know,
volcanic vision of what we're talking about here, and and
(05:23):
the reality is in many ways more subtle than that
extreme vision, but but also inherently, uh, you know, weird
when compared to most other environments you're gonna encounter. Yeah, totally.
And I think there are indications there may have been times,
even in fairly recent history, where it it looked scarier
than it does now, though it certainly does look very strange.
(05:46):
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 Charles Wilton UH, published
in eight 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
(06:08):
waiting into a kind of ongoing controversy and would have
to contradict previous reports, including the earlier reports that Mount
win Gin was a volcano with a crater or called
ea uh. 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
(06:31):
of the mountain wingin where the fire is now burning,
and which is a compact sandstone rock, comprehends parts 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
(06:53):
the fire having been in a hollow between two ridges
of the same mountain. Mr Mackie, referring to somebody 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
(07:17):
particularly examined the widest of these. The rock, a solid
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, thus forming the convex surface
(07:38):
of the heated rock. I looked down this chasm to
the depth of about fifteen feet. The sides of the
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
(08:01):
down into the chasm. The noise they made in their
falls seemed to die away in a vast abyss beneath
my feet. 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
there is no crater, no caldera. Instead, there is a
burned area on the surface of the mountain, producing sulfurous fumes.
(08:26):
And then there are these cracks or chasms in the earth,
and the fire seems to be burning down in the
deep of these cracks 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 but in many cases too
but to compare them to human fire technology on one
(08:47):
level or another. Yeah, especially industry, right, like both of
the earliest written accounts of the smoking Hills in the
Northwest Territories compared them to h compared them to human industry,
one to a chemical fact to read, the other to
a brick manufacturing location. And that many of the oral
traditions of the New Valuate people said that these were
(09:09):
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've been driven away from human companionship. So coming
back to Reverend Wilton's account, he he goes on to
write that there are a bunch of these chasms there,
of varying width, and they're constantly belching out smoke and
(09:32):
sulfurous vapor, and the chasms are also quote beautified with
efflorescent crystal of sulfur, varying in color from the deepest
red orange occasioned by Ferruginists mixture. I think that means
containing iron or iron oxide to the palest straw color
where alum predominated. And he said he could not spend
(09:54):
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. Yeah, and he 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
(10:16):
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 the Burning Mountain,
though he notes that he found coal in many places nearby.
So this, this region of the country seems to be
coal rich, which is important. We'll come back to it.
(10:38):
And as one weird acide, 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 the fumes from
the chasms. You go and get yourself some of the
water from the spring. It will quench the folks. It
is not a good idea to drink untested or untreated
(10:59):
spring water. I can can have stuff and 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 from a mountain that's on fire. Yeah,
because I can imagine the water potentially tasting strongly of
sulfur or something. But I don't know. Maybe it's just
(11:20):
a wonderful spring that was quite refreshing. 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, but can discover no exact similarity between them.
The burning Mountain of Australia may, I think be pronounced
(11:42):
as unique one other example of nature sports of her
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.
But but he is correct, you know, it depends on
(12:03):
what he's looking to, I guess in in history books
and other accounts, because uh there can be obviously large,
big differences between what one could roughly classify as a
as fire erupting from the ground or burning earth in
one part of the world and m in something that
fits the same description elsewhere in the world. And we'll
(12:24):
we'll get to some examples of that in a bit, right.
Uh So, in the years 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
(12:45):
point in history that coal must have been exposed to
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 that
(13:07):
sets it ablaze and it just continues throughout the years
after that. 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
(13:27):
the sun, it can start burning on its own. Or
there could be some kind of chemical reaction, maybe involving
you know, sulfur like we like we observed in the
Smoking Hills the oxidation that kicks off that burning process
in Canada. And then of course, obviously there's there's the
other possibility which I think Smoky Bear would definitely point
(13:48):
out to us, that there's always the chance that that
human beings have a hand in setting such things ablaze. Possible, yes,
either by accident or intentionally. 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 and uh
(14:12):
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 on the on the
surface and in these chasms leading down below. So something's
happening deep down in their fires in the deep, but
you're not seeing tongues of flame or up from the earth.
I think some early reports did say that that they
(14:33):
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 or something like that coming out of the mountain,
which could have been caused by if there was a
section of the coal seam that 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
(14:56):
these flames and there within you know, a distance from
the surface that can be seen the naked eye. Yeah,
because we are dealing with the situation where you know,
geologic processes are need to be considered, and 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 you read here,
(15:17):
like he talks about the great fury. Uh, that is
observable here and perhaps this is just you know, his
his description being you know, colorful and enthusiastic. But uh,
you know that that doesn't necessarily match up with say,
you know, these modern drone images in the modern drone
footage that we were talking about earlier, Right, So, the
(15:39):
surface appearance of a coal seam fire like this could
could vary a lot over the ages as it continues
to burn. I think one of 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
(16:00):
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 um, I'm pretty sure that the main reason for
this is that it's so deep that it has very
(16:21):
little access to oxygen. So for a mundane analogy, if
you ever have experience working a grill, think about getting
a fire going. Uh, and maybe you want this fire
in the grill to burn low and slow instead of
hot and fast. What would you do there, Well, you
manipulate the vents, right. You squeeze them down to only
the barest crack of an opening, so that the fire
(16:43):
has very little access 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 few aal source. So I
think that's probably what's going on in this case as well.
(17:05):
There's you know, a bunch of coal 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 the average
rate at which the fire spreads within the burning mountain,
and a common estimate I've seen is that it appears
(17:27):
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 mentioned in a in a
paper called Thermal Infrared Imagery of the Burning Mountain coal
Fire published in Remote Sensing Equipment Buy C. D. Elliott
(17:51):
and Adrian W. Fleming in nineteen seventy four. And so
the authors of this paper right quote, baked sediments and
slag produced by the urning 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
(18:12):
is burnt continuously and migrated steadily south at the present
main 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 acknowledged the fire
may in fact have been burning for a much longer period.
(18:33):
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
(18:54):
than a 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. Yeah, I
mean that that dwarfs anything we've discussed thus far or
will discuss. After this, I was reading about the site
(19:16):
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, so
I guess he was killed in battle. And when when
(19:38):
he didn't come back, she was so distraught that she
cried out to the sky god beyalm Me to 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. Now,
(19:59):
this is this is a site that that that the
people can go and see. Uh. You can be looking
it up on the website here. Uh, you can go
to Burning Mountain Nature Reserve and there's a one a
one to two hour hike you can take and you
can go to this observation platform that's also visible in
the drone footage that we were looking at. So I
(20:20):
know we have a number of listeners out there in Australia.
So if anyone out there has has been to this
site and has some firsthand experience they would like to share,
we'd love to hear about it. Yeah, totally. If you've
been there right in, let us know what it's like. Yeah.
The website also points out please note remember to take
your binoculars if you want to bird watch, because serious
bird watchers are like Burning Mountain. No, no, those birds Okay.
(20:51):
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 were
some famous ones in uh in the coal mining regions
the United States, like the famous Centralia fire in Pennsylvania.
(21:14):
There also I know a lot of coal seam fires
throughout China where places that have where coal has been
mined have accidentally been set a light. How long has
the Springfield tire uh fire supposed to have been going
on on the SIMP cells, we wouldn't have our tire fire,
and um, I don't know how long is how many
(21:35):
years has Simpson's been on? Seventy four years at this point. Now.
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 the you know,
(21:57):
this carbon into the atmosphere and polluting the air, but
at least you're getting power out of it. This is
just doing that 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 and
some of these have just proven pretty much impossible for
people to extinguish. Yeah, though it is interesting how it
(22:20):
is kind of the naturally occurring equivalent of of human
coal industry, you know, like it because of uh, because
it's it's coal, it's burning, it's just not doing anything
for humans. Uh So, coal, of course, is is a
fossil fuel formed from ancient organic matter converted through heat
and pressure. And like we've been saying, coal seams are
(22:42):
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. Yeah, if oxygen can
get to the coal, that's 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
assistant ongoing fire that that stretches beyond human control. That's right.
(23:04):
One of the big ones here is um is a
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.
(23:26):
Deposits of natural gas occurrent smaller amounts at 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 UM and I'm not going to
go into detail on on these, but there's conventional gas,
there's biogas, deep natural gas, shale tight gas, coal bed methane,
(23:47):
submarine methane, hydrate gas, and geo pressurized zone gas. UM.
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 that natural leakage of gas
(24:10):
should encounter a spark a flame, well then you have
yourself potentially a jet of fire uh emerging from the earth.
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 supplies as
(24:30):
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
burns as long as the as long as the gas
is continually escaping. Yeah, and uh, and very very shortly
here we'll have a I think a great example of this.
(24:50):
But another possibility worth mentionment mentioning here is that of
pete 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 number of different
uses for in human technology, including gardening, filtration, chemical absorption techniques.
(25:12):
But it's high in carbon, so if it drives out enough,
it can catch fire. And I've read stories about the these. Uh.
Pete fires that get out of hand can also be
incredibly difficult to deal with. But it is interesting because
you don't necessarily think of something in the bog being
flammable like this. You don't. I don't know why don't you.
(25:33):
I mean, you do think of things like swamp gas
and um and you know we've talked in the past
the whisp will of the whisp. Yeah, but you can
also imagine yourself in this environment, being like it is
so damp here it is, 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 uh, naturally fueled flames, I
(25:57):
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
Agebajan on the the Absorm Peninsula. This was a region
that was under the domain of Schirvan in ancient times,
but came under the domain of Imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Iran,
(26:21):
and Soviet Russia during the twentieth century. UM. And this
is an area where there is a lot of a
lot of petroleum and also various examples of natural gas
emerging from the ground that that I thought we might
discuss here, Okay, alright, So it takes us to what
is now the capital city of Azerba jean Baku. Uh.
(26:44):
It's a hosted numerous sites of interest, including the Maiden Tower,
a twelfth century construction with a very intriguing design. Its
origins are often explained in a tale concerning fire Um.
In particular, there are a few different Zoroastrian legends about
this structure, and I included a picture here for you, Joe,
(27:05):
and I encourage listeners to look up images of this, uh,
this this structure because it's it's it's quite picturesque. I
don't think I've seen anything quite like it. It's it's
rather different from from from other twelfth century constructions and
certainly from other archaeological traditions in other parts of the world. Yeah. Yeah,
And this is also interesting because, of course fire has
(27:29):
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 zoro Asternism, like
the the god of Zoroastrianism is the is Hura Mazda,
you know that, the god of good and light um.
(27:51):
But but fire is an important religious symbol within You
do see these ancient accounts by foreigners generally who come
into this region and they're like, oh, yeah, they worshiped
fire here. But 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 worshiped demons, here,
they worship devils. They're not Christian at all. So, uh,
(28:13):
you know, it's it's ultimately, I think more complicated than that.
But there is this element of fire that does pop
up in some of the religious traditions in this area.
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, right, Yeah, yeah,
I think I think that that that gets at it. Yeah. Oh,
(28:35):
but but so I want to know this legend. You
mentioned a Zoroastrian legend concerning the Maiden Tower, this intriguing
and beautiful building, uh, and its origins concerning fire. Yes,
and I was I was reading. Center was essentially a
post that was put together by Professor Mahir Khalifa Zade
(28:56):
and Laila Khalifa Zade, and uh. They point out that
there there are several different legends tie that concerned fire
and concern this to this tower, the maid In Tower. Um.
But the 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
(29:18):
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 gonna quote this, uh,
this bit, uh, just a bit from the paper here
or the post by Khalifa Zade here. Quote. Finally he
(29:39):
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 knees and started to pray to her.
And so from here basically what happens. The fire maiden says, hey,
(30:00):
I am sent here to protect you, but I'm gonna
need a sword and I'm gonna need a helmet to
hide my long, beautiful hair from the enemy. The enemy
cannot see my hair. Um, so they outfit her with
these items. She orders the gates thrown open, and then
a great battle ensues and she engages. He winds up
engaging in single combat with the enemy commander, who just
(30:23):
assumes she's just another one of the male soldiers of
the city, you know, dressed in the helmet, wielding a sword. Uh.
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 has bested him, so she shows him. She takes
the helm off, and he's shocked to see the face
of a girl in the long, beautiful, flame colored hair
(30:46):
of a girl. And first he realizes, Okay, first of all,
if this is what the girls of Baku are capable of,
you know, if they're this tough, then we don't have
a chance against the rest of the army. But then
he also falls in love with her instantly, and then
she falls in love with him, and then peace is declared.
Oh didn't see that coming. Yeah, yeah, it kind of
(31:07):
has goes in a direction I didn't. I didn't expect there. Um,
and uh, you know, I mean, who knows you with
stories like this, you can't have multiple stories, I guess,
kind of merging together and twisting over time. And at
some point someone decides, what if it had a what
if it had a romantic ending? Um and ultimately um
Khalifa Zade shares a few other versions where you know,
(31:29):
various other things occur, and also mentions that the tower
might just be called the maid In Tower because it
was never conquered by the enemy. It's the ideas like this,
this tower is it's it's a virgin tower. The enemy
has never defiled it. I see. So you have this
(31:50):
history in Baku, you know, concerning fire and uh and
and you know, it's it's the character 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're they're they're very beautiful. In the pictures I
looked at, they have this kind of curling flame shape
(32:12):
to them, and so you know, during the day they're
reflective glass and steel, very much like like any other
modern skyscrapers. But I've also seen images where they lighted
a light, the light these towers up at night with
you know, swirling orange and yellow and red and and
also some blue thrown in there as well. That really
make them look like strong depictions of flames curling up
(32:36):
from the earth. 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 uh Jan a Dog also known
as the Burning Mountain uh and this is where natural
gas constantly seeps up through the ground and has been
(32:58):
a flame since at least the nineteen fifties, when um
it may have been ignited by shepherds. So this is
an example where uh you know, ultimately who knows, but
at least one of the other stories out there is that, okay,
there's gas leaking up and then some shepherds set it
on fire in the fifties, um, and by some accounts
it has been burning ever since. Flames reportedly jet about
(33:21):
three meters or nine point eight feet into the air
from 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 mortor you're probably
gonna be disappointed. It's basically this this hillside, and there's
a there's an area where there's not any vegetation, and
there's an area that's really dark, and then here are
(33:43):
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. Uh uh.
And I have to throw in this wonderful description that
I found for mud volcanoes in general from Brewster at
All in article in geo Echo Marina. They say that
(34:05):
these are geo exuded slurries including usually including water and gases.
So they look like a like a bit like um
like bubbling mud like gas rising up through the mud. Uh,
you know, forming these big bub bubbles. It has kind
of a bog of eternal stinch kind of a look
to it. And you know, some of these also looks
(34:27):
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, I think I flagged mud
volcanoes as a is a potential episode topic for us.
Oh yeah, we could easily come back to it. Yeah,
weird sort of gray clay puke coming up from these
these cracked blisters in the earth. It's it's pretty cool. Yeah. Now,
(34:49):
this this region of of of of Sasani 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
(35:10):
Ingelbert Comfort, who visited here in sixteen eighty three and
just and and uh and has some wonderful descriptions of
what he saw. Inglebert Comfort, of course, popped up in
our Vegetable Lamb episode, 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 what these stories are
(35:31):
talking about. I do not think there is a there
is a plant that makes lambs. Yes. So the book
in question is Exotic Attractions in Persia eighty four through
six eight, And I was looking at a translation of
this by Villiam Floor, which you can find on the
(35:53):
book or physical book out there. So I'm just gonna
read just a brief bit from it here where he's
talking about these fires. 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.
(36:14):
Some fissures made a lot of noise, and with their
fires and their violence, aroused a holy fear among some
rare spectators. 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 Nafta.
(36:36):
These phenomena appeared in the area of eighty eight paces
in length wide. The fissures were amazingly narrow, not wider
than one foot or one palm, some shorter and drawn
into a semicircle, and others crooked with a long and
sinuous bend, which I have shown accurately and conform to
reality in the appended illustration to complete this description. The
(37:00):
edges of these cracks and the soil itself, when you
remove the dust, showed a pox marked light stone, almost
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,
(37:21):
having placed copper or earthenware pots on a not too
blazing crack, prepared the meals for the inhabitants of the
neighboring village of Sorgani at Swaga, thus named because of
the fire. Others, having brought stones from all around, and
having heaped them together, were burning lime, and once, when ready,
they made a pile to transport it in small vessels.
(37:44):
Two foreigners, Indian fire worshippers descended from the ancient Persians,
were quietly seated around an enclosure they had constructed. 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,
(38:06):
he placed small cotton balls that he tore from his
dress on a fire shovel and set fire to them.
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.
(38:28):
Such is the first appearance of the wonders of nature,
well known in this part of the peninsula, but not
in the same place, and eternally remain in people's memory. Wow. Yeah,
so yeah, I love everything about that account. That's oh yeah, yeah,
it's wonderful. Though. I have to notice Camphor mentions cotton,
thinking back to the vegetable lamb thing, So he knew
(38:50):
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. That's a
good point. That's a good point. So again, that is
from Exotic Attractions in Persia by by Ingolbert Comfort And
you can pick up a copy of that that comes
(39:10):
out from this out from major publishers. Uh. And there
is a kindle addition. But there's another side of interest
related to all of this, and that is the Atashka
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
(39:33):
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 there are four small almost
like little towers, one at each corner of the of
the roof, and those are flaming as well. Oh wow,
So this is a temple, a religious building built around
(39:54):
a natural gas leak. Yeah. So I love this because
in that comfort account we had an example of people
cooking over one of these naturally occurring bouts of gas
and spouts of flame. Uh and uh. And now we
have an actual structure that is not not only like
built around this, but but seems to be manipulating the
(40:17):
flow of gas so that you can have additional fires
control fires burning at the top of the temple. Yeah. Yeah.
And you know there's some old woodcuts of this and
uh and and also you know you can find modern
photos of it as well. Um. It's been a place
for Hindu seek and Zoroastrian worship, um and uh. It
(40:39):
seems to be some debate on who originally worshiped here,
and part of this may be due to what Mary
Boyce described in the 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 sent Tree ce. But Boys points
(41:02):
out a few different ideas about the history of these
fire temples again in the in the particularly mainly and
we were talking about in the Baku region. First of all,
okay I was like, surely we know it's older than that.
Okay I see in this region. So, first of all,
the history is complex due to the existence of both
(41:22):
Zoroastrian image cults and fire cults, and uh and there
seemed to be an offer a lot of overlap between
the two. So she says that the image cults seems
seemed to have lasted from the fourth century b c e.
Until they were suppressed by an iconoclastic movement under the
Sasanians or the Neo Persian Empire. And so in this
(41:45):
we're getting back into this idea that we have explored
in a previous episode about the role of images in worship.
So basically, uh and so the cult of the fire
temples may have been instituted in oppose adition to quote
this alien form of worship, and so I believe what
she's saying here is that as the use of images
(42:08):
were suppressed in their worship UH, they turned to the
flame itself as a focal point of worship. And we
can we can we see that reflected in that story
we were discussing earlier, praying to a hura mazda, but
using the flame is like the focal point of the worship.
And Boys also points out that this would you could
(42:28):
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 h
easily linked to natural flames, et cetera. So there's a
there's a there's a local aspect of this going on.
But then in general we also have these traditions of
keeping the fire and UH, into a certain extent, venerating
(42:50):
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 A four the
Parthian period. That's from b C. E C. Now, this
is another bit that I found quite interesting. Um So
(43:12):
this is a still I believe a candidate to become
a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Temple 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 gas line U
(43:33):
instead of natural gas emerging from the earth. So it's
interesting to think of this, this site and this date
in eight three is kind of a key boundary point
between the oil age and the age of fossil fuel
and the period preceding it, a time during which the
divine fire is extinguished and then is replaced by technological
(43:55):
mastery over fossil fuels and fire. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So
I found all the just just richly um interesting. I
have I have to admit I had not read much
about age Bajan. I've never been to a Bajan. But this,
this is, 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 a Bajan or
(44:17):
as of of are Bajan the heritage that or is
just traveled there and seeing these sites right in let
us know. I'd love to have some you know, some
more insight on all of this. Alright, we're gonna go
and close it out here, but we're gonna be back
and and hey, we might keep talking on this this
topic that the train is in motion and there's there's
(44:37):
certainly more we could discuss here. The burning continues, the
fuel has not been extinguished yet so so so this
may go on next week, all right, in the 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, um, you know, and h and also
anything about the previous episode or there are other episodes
(44:59):
that have come before, or potential episodes we could record
in the future. Um. As a reminder, Core episodes of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind air on Tuesdays and Thursdays
and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed and
can get that wherever you get your podcasts these days.
On Monday's we do listener Mail. On Wednesday's we do
a short form artifact were Monster Fact. On Fridays we
(45:19):
do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.
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 for the future,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
(45:40):
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
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