Fire From the Rocks, Part 3

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In.
Today we're back with part three of our series on
naturally fueled flames and smolderings and burnings that come from

(00:26):
the earth itself or from the rocks. So in the
last episode of this series, we talked about the Burning
Mountain or Mount Wingin in Australia down in New South Wales,
which is an example of a naturally fueled type of
fire called a coal seam fire, a place where coal

(00:46):
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 Windin has been proposed as
as potentially the longest burning fire on Earth. Though. It's
interesting because today, as we discussed last time, there's no

(01:08):
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 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

(01:29):
you'll see, like you know, grass is trying to survive,
and then these bleached tree trunks that are long dead
but still standing. And then also around this area you
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

(01:53):
from the surface. And nobody knows how the fire inside
mountain engine got started, but it's presumed to be a
result of some form of natural ignition. Maybe the coal
at the surface underwent a chemical reaction leading to spontaneous
combustion or or auto ignition as it's called, or maybe

(02:13):
it was struck by lightning or by a brush fire,
but we don't really know. However, there are many other
coal seam fires that have mostly in one way or another,
been created by human behavior, and a big example here
is coal mine fires. Fires the fires in a coal

(02:34):
seam that gets started one way or another because of
mining there, and they're actually a number of these that
are that are still burning throughout the world today. 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, that I can't remember any
offhand that mentioned fires. The real good coal mining folk songs.

(02:57):
I know, we're like union songs. Yeah, same yeah, high
Sheriff of hazard and so forth. Which side are you on? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that sort of thing. Well, yeah, those are great songs,
but I don't know if any of them that mentioned
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

(03:17):
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 decades and it is situated
underneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The poem I found
was won by a poet named Leonard Cress, called the
Centralia mind Fire, and I thought it was really pretty great.

(03:40):
It uh. It talks about the town being the shrine
of the Holy Order of Anthracite, and the last four
lines of the poem read, the odors of bottom damp
and methane no longer reek into the streets and ignite.
The underground tunnels burn, and each vein of coal potential
use leads to another domain. Oh nice, this is a

(04:03):
contemporary poet. By the way, Um, yeah, they have a
website Leonard craft dot com. 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

(04:26):
West Virginia, places in the U s where there there's
a lot of coal and settlements 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

(04:47):
sixty two when part of the coal seam that formed
the town's industrial base caught fire. Now there's still apparently
disagreement about exactly how it caught fire. One idea UH
I read is that it happened to because of a
pre existing coal seam fire from a neighboring region that

(05:07):
spread slowly over several decades until it made contact with
the Centralia seam and then just burned on from there.
But I think that's a minority position. The more commonly
cited explanations involve a garbage dump, and so the idea
is that the coal caught fire either when a scheduled
trash burn at a local landfill penetrated the mine tunnels

(05:31):
and managed to ignite the coal, or possibly when some
kind of hot ash or coal was dumped 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 that are exposed to
the atmosphere, you really don't want to be burning stuff
near that. Yeah, Yeah, trying to imagine this sort of yeah,

(05:53):
the apocalyptic scenario where the your your garbage fires meet
your your your coal mine tunnels. 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 are a few touch
points here. One story from nineteen seventy nine that I've

(06:16):
seen in multiple sources is that there was a local
gas station owner named John Coddington, who was also the
mayor of the town, who one day went out to
check the levels in his underground storage tanks. So when
you go to a gas station, you know, you get
out the pump. The gas is being pumped up from
these big tanks under the ground that's where the gas lives.

(06:37):
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 and found that the
gasoline was a hundred and seventy two degrees fahrenheit. Yeah,
yikes uh, And this did make me wonder. I was like, wait,
what is the auto ignition temperature of gasoline? Because I
might have guessed that if you heat gasolene up to

(06:59):
one seventy two degree fahrenheit in the presence of oxygen,
that would be close to it automatically igniting on its own.
But I checked and no, 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 auto ignition temperature of gasoline is more
like four seventy five to five thirty six degrees fahrenheit

(07:21):
or to forty six to eighties celsius. So so it
wasn't gonna catch fire on its own, but that's still freaky. Yeah,
And quick disclaimer out there, please do not try and
heat up gasoline. 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.

(07:43):
But so that was seventy nine. But then a real
turning point seemed to come in ninet one when a
local boy who was twelve years old was nearly swallowed
up and killed. He managed to survive, but he was
nearly swallowed by the sudden collapse of a sinkhole created
by the coal seam fire. And so for a contemporary

(08:04):
report on this, I found an AP article published on
February nineteen one called Pennsylvania Fearful fire Rages for nineteen years.
This is a This is a I mean, it's a
serious story, don't get me wrong. But also the writing
in this little news pieces, uh really drives home the dread.
Oh yeah, uh yeah. So its It starts off talking

(08:27):
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 Saturday is heightened
their fears, leading to a new flurry of government interest.
Todd Domboski, twelve, was playing in his grandmother's backyard a

(08:51):
few houses from his home when he went to investigate
a tiny whiff of smoke. The ground beneath him collapsed instantly,
The youth engulfed in a hot, stinking tangle of dirt
and tree roots. Escaping when his older cousin pulled him out,
Todd fell about six feet before grabbing the roots. Florence Dumbosky,

(09:12):
Todd's mother praised her fourteen year old nephew, Eric Wolfgang,
who was swift and strong enough to reach into the hole,
grabbed Todd's arm and pull him to safety. A temperature
of three hundred and fifty degrees was recorded in the hole.
Its depth was not known, and I did look it up.
More recent articles mentioned that the sinkhole was later measured

(09:33):
and it was a hundred and fifty feet deep for
about forty fives 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 uh and
and you're you're grabbing at tree roots that are protruding
from the dirt, and uh, you managed to get ahold

(09:54):
of it, but down below you is just a pit
into nothingness with with fumes of he l coughing out.
Absolutely biblical. Um. There's another great paragraph in this, uh,
this ap story that reads, quote feeding on timbers, coal
and gas in a maze of abandoned anthracize tunnels that

(10:14):
date back to the eighteen eighties. The creeping inferno is
believed to have spread beneath forty acres despite repeated attempts
to curb it. 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,

(10:36):
and to no avail. It just didn't work, and so
Another thing this article cites is quotes from local towns
people talking about their fears 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 Goodinski who says, we feel like rats in

(10:58):
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 effect on them. All of this,
I mean all all this sounds like something you'd encounter
in a in a horror movie, except it is. It
is real life. It's a real life, horrible situation. Concerned
for the children, the creeping darkness beneath the uh, the earth,

(11:20):
eruptions preying on the innocent. Yeah. Another quote it gives
is from a resident named Sally Sulik, who says, my
nose burns my eyes here, I'm like a zombie. I
just 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

(11:41):
been steeply declining. It basically I think between nineteen eight
and two thousand and declined to almost nothing as the
residents moved away. The local homeowners were offered buyouts from
the government to to relocate, and then at some point
the government essentially condemned the all of the property in
town on by way of imminent domain. There were a

(12:01):
few residents left who didn't want to leave, but most
of the recent articles I read mentioned only like a
handful of people still living in the area, fewer than
ten and uh and apparently nobody is going to be
allowed to move to the area, So it's just it's
just those people there as long as they stay or
until their deaths. Another thing that struck me about the

(12:23):
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 of the Centralia
fire but also had been there and taking 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 are the remains of Route sixty one,

(12:46):
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, like
again like bad earthquake movie, uh and the so the
road is just sort of split down the middle. And

(13:07):
it actually reminded me a bit of the cracks and
crevices that have been forming in Mount Wingin 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 by the burning
out that's going on underneath the surface, just like we

(13:28):
saw in these other cases, or like would have caused
the sinkhole. Now. Of course, sometimes um real life tragedy
does inspire great art. It's worth noting that the town
of Centralia inspired the fictional town of vulcan Vania UH
in the film Nothing But trouble Really, Dan dan Ackroid's

(13:51):
uh uh weird um horror comedy about a bunch of
sort of sort of. I guess you would say Texas
Chainsaw massacre esque family residing above a big coal mine fire. Um.
Quite a film. Quite a film. Trystar Pictures or whoever

(14:11):
it is should have a standing cash prize for anybody
who can manage to watch that whole movie. It has
a lot of fun things in it. You've got a
wonderful digital underground performance. I think you've got to make
it through a lot of stuff before you get to
that is clearly having the time of his life in
this film. Yeah. So if it's if it's, if you

(14:32):
considered a film for an audience of one an absolute success,
I think you know. There's another interesting tidbit I came
across that's related to the Centralia coal mine uh and
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 news

(14:54):
station called w n E P sixteen. I guess that's
an ABC affiliate, and this was out 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. I'm
looking at the footage here though it it looks guysory,

(15:14):
but 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

(15:34):
been heavy rain or when the snow melts in the spring. Uh,
you you get suddenly a geyser gushing up out of
this ventilation hole, and it looks like a real geyser.
It's just spraying up into the air and then running
off into a nearby creek. And they say that the
guys are has a distinct smell. It smells like like eggs,
which I guess is an indication of sulfurous compounds. And

(15:57):
that would again make sense since you know you've got
the coal down there and it's on fire. And I
was unable to tell if if this guy's are is
actually related to the fire or if it's just an
unrelated weird feature of the same mind. You see, Like
there's a quote in the tweet that's attached where the
reporters saying that that it's been there as long as

(16:18):
quote anyone can remember. Uh, 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 you're changing the earth. Uh, you know,
at least on a local level, and of course you
can get into larger issues of of of actual climate
change as well, but even just on a local level,

(16:40):
like you're just you're you're vastly altering how the uh
the ground beneath your feet is functioning. Yeah, all right,
let's move on to another fire in the earth. This
is a fun one. I'm excited to talk about it

(17:02):
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, uh and
the chimere. Of course, I think most folks out there
will have some image of this in their mind. There's
some wonderful depictions of it. There's the Chimera of of

(17:24):
of Arezzo. It's an Etruscan bronze statue of four b
C E H. That's absolutely gorgeous. If anyone has seen
this or seen a reproduction of this, I've been to
a retzo, but I don't think I've seen this 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 I've seen plenty of images

(17:45):
of it. You know, it's this wonderful uh, you know,
dark bronze finish and uh. 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 uh, it is this uh,
this hybrid form that some have criticized for not completely

(18:07):
making all that much sense and maybe being too counterintuitive.
So at the heart of things, the chimera is, of
course a goat monster. Um. Most of its recognizable body
is usually that of a goat. I guess one of
the interesting things about the Chimera of Arezzo is that
less of it is a goat and maybe that's why

(18:27):
it's more impressive, Like it looks like the artists decided
to lean more into the into the lion aspects of
its body. But but generally, when you here here talk
of it, you were talking about something that is uh
in a large part, a monstrous she goat. Uh. It
roams the myths of ancient Greece and Rome UH. And
the name itself means she goat, and in all depictions

(18:51):
it has at least some goat properties to its hybrid form.
That's funny. I certainly believe you that that's true, But
I do not really associate the Amira with a goat
at all. I think, like, yeah, like lions, snake, eagle
or something. Yes, some depictions it has wings. I want
to stand that. In the Dungeon Dragons Monster Manual they
give it wings um specifically. Now, the oldest records of

(19:15):
the monster can be found in the sixth book of
Homer's Iliad Uh. And this is you know, written down
at some point in the eighth century BC, and the
beast here is described as a great fire breathing she
goat with a lion's head and the tail of a serpent,
and then slightly More recently, hess the Odd wrote of
the Chimera in his book The Ageny, composed between seven

(19:38):
thirty and seven d c h. So, So in uh Theogny,
hes Odd is discussing the monstrous at Kidna quote divine,
stubborn hearted at Kidna, half nymph with dark eyes and
fair cheeks, and half on the other hand, a serpent,
huge and terrible and vast, speckled and fled, devouring beneath

(20:01):
caves of sacred earth. And there in the depths of
Kidna mates with the deadly giant uh Typhon, and they
produce quote fierce hearted children uh monsters, all including the
two headed dog Orthos, the three headed dog Cerebus, and
even then the even more headed uh larnaean Hydra, as

(20:24):
well as the Sphinx, the Nemian lion, and of course
the Chimera Uh. And here's what Hesiot had to say
about the Chimera. And these are these are all translations
from the Reverend J. Banks translation. Quote. But she Kidna
bore Chimera, breathing, restless, fire, fierce and huge, fleet footed

(20:45):
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
of lion, a dragon behind, and in the midst a
goat breathing forth the dread strength of burning fire, and
in the midst a goat. So like, mostly a goat.

(21:09):
That's what you're saying, mostly mostly, that's what That's what
I take it 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 and I think this is This is why you
have a lot of variation and how it's depicted, like
that the Etruscan statue, for instance, and other depictions will

(21:31):
have the goat head just straight up growing out of
the back of the creature your head, but it's a
good head. And the goat always looks a little awkward there, like,
what what do you even doing there, buddy? Like you
can imagine the creatures moving around the gast just sort
of awkwardly making a play for vegetation and stuff to
nibble on. You see a ripple in the water. The

(21:51):
Jaws theme plays, but it's a goat's head poking out
over the Yeah wait the goats bare, They don't really,
they bleat, Yeah, the bleating. So yeah, you say. Then
you see it depicted other ways where the all the
heads are sort of arranged up front and so forth. Um,
but yeah, you can. I imagine a lot of this
is coming from different interpretations of of like this passage. Now,

(22:15):
every monster must have its slayer, of course, and in
this case it is mighty Bellerophon, 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
ma where what happens? The metal instantly melts. Oh no,

(22:37):
he's defeated. Oh no he's not, because then the liquid
metal chokes the deadly monster to death. So I always
found that to be kind of a nice twist. Oh yeah, Now,
surely the hero didn't intend for the metal to melt
and choke the monster. I don't know. Never doubt these
these heroes, these uh, these Greek heroes are are are
wicked smart. That strikes me as more like a like

(22:58):
a war of the world's type in ng where yeah,
something you didn't even expect kills the monster. Now you're
probably asking, okay, well, how does this tie into places
and fire? Well, this, 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

(23:19):
Karia before it escaped and rampaged. This was a region
of western Anatolia from the eleventh through sixth centuries b c.
This region is now part of Turkey. But then the
chimeras said to descend upon an area to the southeast
of Karia in Alicia, where it generally devours every mortal
in sight and just sets everything on fire. So this

(23:41):
is the realm of Mount Chimera. In the Book of
Imaginary Beings, jore Louis Boges rights that Virgil describes the
Chimera in the Aeid, and that the fourth and fifth
century commentator Servius ties the monster uh to Lycia and
went so far as to say that the monster was

(24:01):
a metaphor for a volcano there, and this was apparently
echoed by plenty of the elder as well. Okay, interesting,
this is how Bores 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

(24:22):
forth and lions have their dens. 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 uh, and then you have, of course the
flames coming out. I guess that's the dragon aspect, right, Yeah,

(24:44):
so yeah, I have to say, like when I when
I was reading this, it sended a little far afetched
to me because we talked about geomethology 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 or into a into a hybrid
monster and uh. And as it turns out, Borges also

(25:06):
finds this ridiculous and mentions that he thinks it's absurd
as well as uh an idea that I think was
put forth by Plutarch that uh 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. It was a pirate. Now. One of
the advancements in the sort of figuring out this myth

(25:27):
and tying the myth into actual geology. Uh, this occurred
during the early nineteenth century. In eighteen eleven, hydrographer and
Irish rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort linked Mount Chimera to
the geographical features in the region known as Jana or

(25:49):
yann Artis. And he explored this region, I believe, in
eighteen eleven through eighteen twelve, basically going around looking at
various ruins, citing various winds, and he's he's noted during
this time for rediscovering Hadrian's Gate built for built there
for Roman Emperor Hadrian in the year one thirty. So

(26:09):
you know our n artists. What does it look like? Well,
it's 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 perhaps years so some still

(26:31):
kind of interpreted and say, well, this site could have
been the inspiration for the monster itself. UM, And I
guess you can kind of open that up and you
can look at ideas of the monster being a metaphor
for them, for for this mountain, or just kind of
like the who, here's this weird landscape with fire, and
you end up with this idea of will a monster
lives here? Surely this is the habitat for some sort

(26:54):
of monstrous fire breathing creature. So the seeps in question
here are largely um on barren ground, and they follow
various fissures and perhaps faults. According to a two thousand
fifteen paper UM I was looking at from Meyer Dombard
at All, published in Frontiers and Microbiology. Uh. These researchers

(27:16):
also reported a fluid seat that they discovered um 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, hikers
visit the flames and they do things apparently like brew
ti uh, cook marshmallows over them, or do you know,

(27:38):
just just look at them as well. Because this is
all part of the Olympus National Park. So if you know,
if if you 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 linked to changes in atmospheric pressure and
groundwater recharge. Um and uh. And this kind of takes

(28:02):
us back to where we're just talking about. You know,
when you disrupt the underground environment through extensive coal mining. UM.
You know, these are the sort of things like groundwater
recharge or there are are the situations you're potentially interfering in. UM,
the vent gases that come up. I was looking at
a profile of these and it is mostly methane and

(28:22):
there's some other ingredients in there as well. Now as
to whether there are actual snakes there, UM, I mean
one presumes I know there there there are snakes in Turkey. UM,
I guess it's 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 munch on. Um.

(28:42):
And 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 um, I mean, I guess
all of that is plausible as well to at least
a certain extent. Oh yeah. If you compare maps of
the historic distribution of lions to the present distribution throughout
Africa and Eurasia, it's well. On on one hand, it's

(29:05):
it's kind of sad to see how much their range
has been constricted, but it's also eye opening too, Like
it's eye opening about how so many ancient myths and
stories all throughout the Middle East and the Greek myths
and stuff, it seems that they're lions everywhere, And you're like,
what because they're you don't really think that there are

(29:25):
lions wandering around and say Greece or Turkey today, but
you know, thousands of years ago there absolutely were. It
brings us back to the topic we discussed in the
past about the first known human animal hybrid represented an
art that of the lion man. Yeah. Yeah. Now this
side of this a side is also interesting because there

(29:46):
is a link to the Greek forge god Hephestus here
as well. Hephestus, of course, was the blacksmith's god, who
was also deformed after his father Zeus cast him 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 he Festus, Yeah, I can
be found at this site just below the fires, which

(30:07):
again makes sense, given that the you know, sites of
natural flames like this seemed to be inevitably tied to
human industry. Like we've discussed in these various other examples,
people see them and they think of of like cook
fires and the depths maintained by the little people, or uh,
you know, we think of of of industrial processes, uh,

(30:28):
chemical fires and so forth. But then sometimes we also
tie them to fire breathing monsters. And I wanted to
mention one more thing that that Boees brings up about
the chimera. He discusses how he thinks that the chimera
was ultimately quote two heterogeneous. In other words, these parts

(30:52):
were all too dissimilar, and it all resists quote merging
into a into a single animal. So I guess in
that you could say that these sort of saying that
it's too counterintuitive. To a certain extent, he contends that
people got a bit tired of the idea of the chimera,
and you we see that reflected in the the use
of chimeracle and the use of chimera as referring to

(31:14):
something that is just too outrageous to be true, too
outrageous to actually exist in the real world. Uh, something
that just doesn't jell together in a form that you
can believe in. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm always curious about
why our intuitions about imaginary beings work the way they do.
And I'm sure I've asked questions like this on the
show a bunch of times, but like, why does one

(31:36):
unreal monster seem plausible in quotes and another one doesn't?
Like the chimera is, yeah, it's got a goat head
in the middle of its back, or at least in
some depictions, and people are just like, no, no, that
doesn't work. The hydra, which has many heads coming out
of the Yeah, that that works. Yeah, I mean even

(31:56):
the vegetable lamb of tartary, as fantastic as that is,
and as you know, with that, the gulf existing between plant,
plant and mammal like that feels more believable, and I
think clearly was more believable for a very long period
of time, uh, compared to the chimera. Yeah, so what
are the underlying psychological factors? Like what subconscious criteria do

(32:19):
we use to judge an unreal being that makes sense
to us versus an unreal being that doesn't. The camera goathhead, Yeah,
that's just that doesn't make sense. Yeah, maybe part of
it comes down to like a basic uh, you know,
primal estimation of another animal, like what is the head
on this thing going to bite me? What is the

(32:39):
head on this animal seem to want to do? And uh,
if you look at that goat head sticking out of
the middle of the chimera is back, Like what am
I supposed to make of that? What's it even doing? Now? Cyclops,
on the other hand, one big guy in the forehead.
I picture that all day long. That works. Yeah. One
of the interesting things about these uh, I guess you

(33:00):
could call them, you could think of them as minimally
counterintuitive monsters and um and hybrids, is that the best
of them we continue to to look at and and
and reconsider and also apply like theoretical biological models like
I've read. I know, I read a wonderful paper once

(33:22):
on the biology of the centaur where the author was
discussing how the centaur's body would work, and uh, you know,
really focusing on on the the circulatory 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 but it's
an example of how the centaur, as fantastic as it is,

(33:45):
is not so far removed from reality that we can't apply, uh,
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 uh, you know, a paper like this
is how the biology of the chimera would work. This
is how would breathe fire. This is the function of
the the live goat head growing from its back, and
this is why its tail is a live snake. This

(34:07):
is the diet it consumes. Yeah, this, it's just it's
just ridiculous. Now, coming back just a little bit to 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,

(34:27):
where eternal flames have evoked mythic ideas, religious devotion and
so forth. Um I was reading Seeps in the Ancient World, Myths,
Religions and Social Development by Causseppe Etope of the National
Institute of Geophysics and Volcanogiology in Italy. Uh and he

(34:48):
has a book titled Natural Gas Seepage. But one of
the chapters is devoted to just looking at some of
these examples. M so. He mentions the camera in there
that he mentions the fires of back we previously discussed,
as well as a couple of other examples. There's the
Baba Gurger seep in Iraq, he writes, was probably the

(35:08):
burning fiery furnace into which King Nebuchadneezer cast of the Jews.
I've seen this claim before, I say, so Boba Gurger is. Uh,
it's like an oil field near kier Cook, I believe,
And uh, there there is at least one place there
where Yeah, there's a there is a natural gas seep

(35:29):
where the the volatiles that are coming out of it
have been set aflame and they're burning. And yeah, I've said,
I don't know what the actual 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 a an observable feature today.

(35:50):
And and in some cases you can do that like
there's a pretty clear link, and in other cases I'm
not quite sure what how how strong the evidence for
that direct connection is. But so yeah, there is the
story of King Nebuchadnezzar throwing uh what is it shad
rack mishek in a bed nego into a burning furnace. Uh.
And and I have read some modern authors saying, ah,

(36:13):
maybe the furnace was this geological feature we see today.
Boba gurger, by the way, I think, means something like
like father flame or daddy flame. Another example that he
brings up is the sacred um Mangarmas flame in Indonesia,
which has been active at least since the fifteenth century,
he writes, and is still used in annual Buddhist ceremonies.

(36:35):
And then there's the Oracle of Delphi in Greece, which
we we've discussed at least a little bit on the show.
In the past. Um, there's there's talk of their having
been an eternal flame at the at the Temple of
Apollo there at least at one point uh. And then
there was there's this idea that I believe researchers have
kind of gone back and forth on this idea that

(36:57):
vapors from the earth contributed to the vision is granted
to the priestess of the sacred site, the um. The
the idea I think kind of fell out of favor
for a while, but more recent geological research I was
looking at it from two thousand four, two thousand five,
they argue that Okay, the side here lies over a
fault where gas leaks could theoretically cause oxygen reduction uh

(37:21):
in an in an individual that would then result in
a mild hypnotic state complete with hallucinations. I mean, even
coming back to this um 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

(37:43):
that it's not the divine trying to speak through her, etcetera.
But you can you can well imagine a situation where
if you're combining holy expectations religious expectations and and ritual.
With this sort of environment, you could easily get to
this point. If only we could get a medical readoubt
on the the oracles of Delphi that uh, that might

(38:05):
be really illuminating. Yeah, information exists. I wouldn't mind going
back and looking at the oracle again in the future. Um,
it's there's a there's a lot of interesting writing about it.
It as a as a wonderful history. All right, we're
gonna go and close it out there. Um, this this
was a fun journey. We got to talk about a

(38:25):
number of fascinating locations around the earth, some wonderful history, mythology,
and religion. Um, if there's a particular site we didn't
discuss that you would like to bring to our attention,
certainly right in and let us know. And especially if
you have visited any of these locations and you have
direct firsthand experience, perhaps you've actually glimpsed the flames emerging

(38:48):
from the earth. Uh, definitely, right in and tell us
about to share your photos, etcetera. We would love to
hear from you. In the meantime, core episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind published every Tuesday, and there's Day
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

(39:10):
just discuss a weird film with Weird House Cinema. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
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(39:36):
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