In 1983, two things happened that are barely relevant to this story but one day you’ll get to pwn someone at skeptic trivia. Annette Zilinskas, vocalist and bass player, left a trail-blazing all-girl rock band. Also, I was born.
She’s one of my roommates now. And she’s playing bass in that band again. You’ve maybe heard of them- it’s a little group called The Bangles.
Anyway, today’s Moment of Science… eternal flames.
There’s no set time frame to be declared eternal, but consensus is generally “we don’t know when it started and/or we don’t know when it’s ending.” There are far more man-made everlasting blazes, ‘obelisks of glory’ and other vaguely phallic memorials of flame (my new band name). Fuck those, today we’re talking about some of the planet’s all natural fiery sharts.
Long burning fires like this tend to fall into one of two categories: coal or gas. Beyond the obvious requirement of an assload of fuel, a variety of mechanisms can grant these fires their longevity. Ancient stories of mysterious burning pillars, with legends chronicling them as demons or deities, have often pointed back to the locations of these fires.
Even as we’ve learned their evidence-based causes, we’re still giving a hat tip to old timey myths with names like ‘the Gates of Hell.’ Next time we find one of these, I propose a slight modernization, like Tony Stark’s Cocaine Fueled Orgy Inferno.
Some of the better known eternal fires are ones that, sorry to say, we fucking started (I hear you groaning, I accept it). Centralia, Pennsylvania’s coal mine was set aflame in the 1960s in what was suspected to be a landfill fire. Multiple attempts to control it failed before the government kinda shrugged and said “idk, pay people to leave?” The smouldering fire devastated the once thriving community, rendering it a ghost town, releasing toxic fumes into the air indefinitely.
In Darvaza, Turkmenistan, drilling for oil in 1971 caused the land to give way to an underground cavern full of natural gas. So they lit it on fucking fire. Obviously. It was apparently the safest thing to do to prevent the gas from causing an uncontrolled fire beyond the cavern, which would have been fine if there was an end in sight. Ever.
There was not.
The Darvaza Gas Crater was born. Turkmenistan is ranked 52nd in size and fourth in natural gas reserves. This sonofabitch is gonna burn until the heat death of the universe.
Then there are places that seem to have been burning for as long as time itself in oddly calm little blazes.
Eternal Flame Falls in New York has been flowing with a steady supply of fuels for, likely, thousands of years. A macroseep, not to be confused with a phenomenon that occurs in one’s pants due to proximity to a Hemsworth brother, releases gas in a mechanism that’s kinda like natural fracking. Evidence suggests that an enormous pool of natural gas is held beneath tectonically fractured shales, steadily spewing about a kilogram of gas per day, enough to keep a brilliant flame lit under a delightful fucking waterfall.
Look, if nature didn’t also give us a goddamn plague this year, I’d be giving her more credit right now. This is flatulence set to Mozart.
One eternal flame does not resemble the next. Yanar Dağ in Azerbaijan, meaning ‘burning mountain,’ was first lit in the 1950s. An abundance of natural gas readily seeps up through the porous sandstone. You can even light the surface of streams in the area on fire. This is not to be confused with Yanartaş in Turkey, meaning ‘flaming stone.’ A breathtaking five square kilometer hellscape that’s been burning for 2,500 years, it’s thought by many to be the inspiration for the fire-breathing Chimera in Homer’s Iliad. Today the flames are often used to brew tea.
The title of the longest burning of the eternal flames goes to, fucking of course, the country where everything that walks, crawls, flies, whatever the fuck the platypus does to get around, and even very ground you walk on is out to kill you: Australia’s Mount Wingen, also just called Burning Mountain. It’s been burning for about 6,000 years.
I’m sure some of y’all have some burning curiosity about Annette.
She’s fucking great. I didn’t realize I was living with a Bangle for two goddamn months. All I knew was that my dog would leave me for this woman with hair befitting a rockstar. When we were all talking about music one day, I asked if she played anything and she told me “I play a little bass.” Legend.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that if the burn is accompanied by odor or discharge, please contact your doctor.
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Image source: wikimedia commons
Very cool! The original Bangles yes to that!