Mysterious fire in Australia has been burning for 6,000 years

© Free Nature Stock/Pexels

4 hour drive north of Sydney in Australia it’s on fire and has been for a long time at least 6,000 years,

reported by ScienceAlert.

The mysterious underground fire known as “ Burning Mountain” is the oldest known fire on our planet. It is located under the Mount Wingen in the state of New South Wales and is a coal seam fire – one of thousands burning simultaneously around the globe.

Once ignited, these subterranean fires are almost impossible to extinguish. They spread slowly but intensely through the coal seam – a layer of coal that naturally occurs below the surface of the earth. “No one knows the size of the fire under the burning mountain, one can only guess,” says Guillermo Rein, Professor of Fire Science at Imperial College London in the UK, to ScienceAlert. “It is probably a ball with a diameter of 5 to 10 meters, the temperatures of 1.000 degrees Celsius”, he explains.

Fire without flame

Such a fire smolders or there is no flame and it is more like embers in a grill. At Mount Wingen it is currently 30 meters underground and moving at a speed of about 1 Meters per year to the south.

The only signs of the fire’s existence are some smoke, white ash, a warm-to-the-touch soil, rocks discolored yellow and red, and a sulphurous odor created as the fire boils the mountain’s minerals.

The recently burned areas are covered in ash and devoid of plants, which upon closer inspection reveals the path of the fire leaves. “In front of the fire, where it hasn’t arrived yet, you see this beautiful eucalyptus forest. Where the fire is now, there’s absolutely nothing alive, not even grass,” says Rein. “And where the fire was 20 to 30 years ago, the forest has come back, but it’s a different forest – the fire has shaped the landscape.”

Origin unclear

Measurements so far have shown that the path of the fire is via 6.5 kilometers , indicating a minimum age of 6,000 years. But no one is sure what started the fire.

The first documented sighting by Europeans was 1828, when a local farmhand said a volcano was discovered in the Mount Wingen region to have. Just a year later came the geologist Reverend CPN Wilton concluded that the alleged volcano was actually a coal seam fire.

Many coal seam fires, particularly in India, China and the US, are caused by human intervention caused the coal mining – just think of the infamous fire below Centralia, Pennsylvania, today abandoned town that inspired the Silent Hill video game series and has been burning for almost 60 years.

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