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It is the oldest known fire on earth and its origin is still unclear
reported by ScienceAlert.
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 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.
One more long burn
It is unclear how far the coal seam will extend and where it will go next. At the moment it has no lack of oxygen supply. “It could burn for thousands of years without human intervention,” says Rein. “As the fire progresses, it heats the mountain so that it expands and cracks, allowing oxygen to enter, allowing the fire to spread further. The fire produces its own chimney and supply of oxygen”.
Photo taken from the observation deck at the top of Burning Mountain
© Beruthiel/Wikimedia Commons
“Or when If the coal seam goes very deep, it will self-extinguish and smolder – which would be very dramatic if that happened in our lifetime, after possibly hundreds of thousands of years of burning,” Rein adds. Impact on human life
He also sees a seemingly unrealized benefit: “What frustrates me the most as an engineer is that nobody benefits from these fires – it’s a huge potential source of heat and energy , which remains unused.”
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