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This Mysterious Fire in Australia Has Been Burning For at Least 6,000 Years
[Science Alert.com] In a national park a four-hour drive north of Sydney in Australia, a fire is smoldering out of control — and it's been doing so for at least 6,000 years.Known as 'Burning Mountain', the mysterious underground blaze is the oldest known fire on the planet. And some scientists estimate it may be far more ancient than we currently think. Located under Mount Wingen in the state of New South Wales (Wingen means 'fire' in the language of the local Wanaruah people, the traditional custodians of the land), this underground smolder is a coal seam fire — one of thousands burning at any one time around the globe. Once ignited, these subterranean fires are almost impossible to put out. Slowly but intensely, they travel through the coal seam, a layer of coal that naturally occurs beneath Earth's surface. "No one knows the size of the fire under Burning Mountain, you can only infer it," Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science at Imperial College London in the UK, tells ScienceAlert. "It's likely a ball of around 5 to 10 meters in diameter, reaching temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius [1,832 Fahrenheit]," he explains. Rein visited Burning Mountain in 2014 — which was on his field trip bucket list. Posted by: Besoeker 2022-01-04 |
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