World's Oldest Fire Has Been Burning for 5,500 Years

Nobody is sure how the coal seam beneath the exterior of Australia’s Burning Mountain, also known as Mount Wingen (“fire” in an aboriginal language), originally ignited. But a coal seam 90 feet below the surface been burning for an estimated 5,500 years, making it the longest continuous fire on the planet.

Ancient people actually used heat from rocky vents in the mountain to cook food and make tools. When an Australian settler found the mountain in 1828, he assumed that he’d discovered a volcano.

Today, the smoking mountain and its weird landscape have become a tourist attraction. Australian Traveler describes it: “Smell the acrid sulfur. Feel the heat from the roasting 350-degree surface. Watch the pale grey smoke waft into the air. Look for wedge-tailed eagles soaring on the thermal currents above. Imagine you’re at the beginning of time. Or perhaps the end.”

But as Atlas Obscura notes, there’s a downside: “It has also caused massive ecological damage to the area’s vegetation. The path of the fire has left a barren and rocky trail, with no traces of life.”

There actually are many of these underground fires across the planet, They’re a type of low-temperature, flameless combustion called a smoldering fire. They can be ignited by natural events such as lightning, though humans can set them accidentally or intentionally, by burning down forests. Multiple fires, for example, recently have occurred at a coal mine about 700 miles from Burning Mountain, including on in early 2014 that burned for 45 days.

The fires also are a source of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, according to this 2012 blog post by New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin.

From Discovery News