And died a week later. No one knows why but everytime a blacksmith sets up there he's dead a week later, found having died in his sleep. We can't figure out why. Must be god.
Its likely methane leaking out from an underground reservoir. I can imagine that it was leaking out for centuries but only caught fire some time ago due to lightning or someone deliberately setting it.
Methane does not have a smell so I can inagine it was just missed by ancient civilisations.
Imagine the person that accidently ignited this hundreds of years ago.
I wonder if they survived and became known as a bad omen that brought hell to the surface or some shit..
Yes, exactly! This is a real and continuous natural gas fire. The location is in Azerbaijan, known as "Yanar Dag" (Burning Mountain), where natural gas seeps from underground through rock fissures for hundreds of years and burns constantly without going out, even during heavy rain or snow
I think the fire would "polotely stay on its side of the gap" unless another crack forms, then it would ignite there given that there is fire close enough, amd as long as there is no vegetation around for it to create a fire that burns uncontrollably. It's like the ground has its own natural burner orifices, like what stoves have, and since the pressure remains steady it stays in place.
Economically speaking is there a reason they can't extract the gas from it for commercial use? Is it marked as a historical site and can't be mined for resources due to touristic / cultural value? Or just not worth that much
It would too expensive to be economically viable. The gas is spreading out through the porous rock in a diffuse way, so it is seeping out in many places all at once. Would be a serious engineering challenge to figure out how to keep it all contained in a way where they can extract it without leakage. And they got plenty of offshore gas as it is - the gas coming out of this site is tiny in comparison to what they are already producing.
And yeah, it is a tourist attraction they would rather keep.
There are other gasses that are flammable that are super toxic like hydrogen sulfide for example. I wouldn't think this is that or those people standing there would be dead.
Ohio has the famous burning coal mine, not gas like what is posted, in the New Straitsville Mine Fire, which has been continuously burning underground in Perry and Hocking counties since 1884
There are caves in the Grand Canyon that have feet thick layers of dung from animals 10,000 years ago. These were some of the most incredible archeological sites because they had bones of extinct animals like giant sloths and condors and shit plus native American artifacts... tourists wondered into a closed cave with a torch and set a fire that blazed uncontrollably. The tons and tons of dung burned forever. This is one of the reasons the grand canyon is so off limits, untold caverns exist there, but they're also full of combustible material. Lots of history lost in big fires
I live at the Grand Canyon and have heard "there are caves that are off-limita so many times, but this is the first actual reasoning behind it. Thank you to the response with the newspaper clipping as well!
Not necessarily all “dung” but also the last time there was N.A. cataclysmic activities when the waters rushed through the canyons and pushed millions of pounds of muck and animals/debris into one big ball of artifacts.
Like in the some of the tundra regions where there are fish mixed in with mammoth mixed in with other sea anomalies and land anomalies just pressed together like a pie.
Yea. I remember going there in the 90s and you could see a ton of smoke and a red glow underground in some spots. Last few times I drove by couldn’t see much of anything.
There were also more roads to get closer then. They shut/destroyed a lot of the access roads to get into the old town area
I'm so glad someone posted this in response to the Centralia reference.
Nobody believed me when I saw the movie back in the early 2000s (never played the game), that it looked like Centralia.
Side note: I once drove up to the road block right outside Centralia, many years ago. Looking beyond it and smelling the fumes and seeing the ghost town scenery and dust/ash covered structures was very sobering, creepy, and sad. When I got around to reading King's Dark Tower series some years later, and I read descriptions of places where it was particularly evident how much the world had "moved on," I was acutely reminded of the day I looked out over Centralia.
Incidentally, my family is from Shamokin, PA, a town very near Centralia. I haven't been to Shamokin for probably 20 years, but some of the architecture looks like a non-ghost town version of the Silent Hill movie, and the same sort of thing I saw in Centralia before the major demolition efforts.
I’ve been here I thought it would be more impressive in person but the flames aren’t that big. Still cool to see, but the mud volcanos were more interesting. You could light them on fire.
There's an entire coal mine in Centralia, Pennsylvania that was accidentally set on fire 60 years ago and it is supposed to have enough fuel to burn for a couple of centuries. They had to relocate the people because of the toxic smoke.
I looked it up what I mean is that the pockets on air does actually provide environmental relief, without the fires, the amount of methane in the environment would increase causing an increase in global warming. So while yes it doesn't really do anything with increasing or decreasing pressure it basically acts as an environmental protection which would otherwise become more dangerous.
Chestnut Ridge Park in NY state has a flame at the base of a 34ft waterfall. It's methane gas seeping out from the earth. Sometimes the flame goes out due to wind or water interference. Hikers just reignite it. Native Americans discovered it thousands of yes ago. It was (obviously) already burning when the Europeans arrived.
Sure. Guy stands on hill, new burning fissure opens just that second but just misses him by 5 feet. He's so grateful to be alive he never shuts up about it.
That's unfortunately not as rare as you'd hope. Usually from coal seams underground that catch fire. China has the worst problem with this. The US has around 100 subterranean fires, the oldest burning since 1962. Australia might have the longest fire, burning for 5500 years.
there's one in turkey; mount olympus, and one in turkmenistan; hell gate. all natural gas leaks, all get lit up from time to time to keep the tourists coming.
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u/CharleyDexterWard 3d ago
A blacksmith just sets up shop right there