Fire From the Rocks, Part 1

an important aspect of Earth. You know, as we discussed on past episodes. You know, Earth is the only planet known to have fire, and there was a time when there was no fire on Earth because it wasn't possible yet. Um. You know fire. When we think about fire, we think about its fleeting nature, but also it's potential, it's tremendous

power provided conditions are just right. Um. It's uh. It's always interesting to think about how fire is in many ways more un event than a thing, and for it to happen you need heat, fuel and oxygen, and the fuel and the oxygen we're not always present on our planet. Fire is more or less an aspect of the New Earth and The earliest evidence of charred vegetation dates back a mere four hundred and forty million years. Right, So today natural forest fires are just part of the cycle

of life on the surface of Earth. But there was a time when Earth had its first forest fire. Can you imagine that, like the first time that ever happened. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy to imagine. And so this is this has been an aspect of life under their earth ever since. Um. And yeah, with with fire, it's it's interesting too because there's this trifecta. Obviously this necessary for it to exist. Um, but it is a delicate tripod. Remove one of the legs of the fire tripod and the fire will perish.

Uh So. Yeah, our relationship with fire is sometimes like whoe is out of control? And other times it is you know, I can't get this thing to light at all? Um. You know. So I think we're all familiar with that, with the dual nature of fire. Uh So. For today's episode, and this will spill it into the next episode as well, I thought we might start with just what I thought was just really tantalizing question because I'd never really thought about it before, not not until you brought up this topic.

And that is what is the longest that a single fire has raged? Uh? And I guess they're all sorts of sort of artificial parameters we might throw in. You know, what constitutes a single fire versus multiple fire spread out over time? Uh? I guess we kind of have to take the human scenario of like a hearth or a camp fire and imagine that is sort of our basic principle, like a single a single flame that keeps eating things,

keeps consuming, maybe it moves. But what is the longest that such a fire has raged without snuffing out completely and having to be reset one way or another? Great question? Yeah, so of course you know the answer, and I that I know the answer to now. But but putting ourselves in the mindset of someone who doesn't know the answer, you might likely turn to a few different categories to start off. And the first would be what we just

talked about, forest fires. Um. So you know, as long as we've had forests and fire, uh, this has been a possibility here on earth. Uh. Many of the worst forest fires in history, though, are measured in terms of acres, destruction, and fatality rather than in time. But if you dig, dig down, you you can start seeing some some time stamps on things. Many of the worst are dated to

just a single day in human history um. Others last longer though some of the consist of multiple blazes, So it becomes perhaps a little more of a challenge to think of a continuous fire in these cases. Uh, though in many of the cases I think it does fit. Some wildfire seasons, of course, span many months, and then you have you have particular fires that have raged for a period of time. There's the Coyote Fire of nineteen siour in Santa Barbara, California, which lasted from September one

to October one. So it seems we might if we're thinking about about modern forest fires, we're gonna probably look at something lasting days months, um uh, somewhere in that range. Now, as for wildfires of yesteryear, as well as blazes caused by prehistoric extinction events, I I couldn't find any stats on this, but I suppose it's worth thinking about. But it's also worth thinking about the fact that when you have a particularly large energetic fire, it can ultimately become

something entirely different. You've become this this fire storm which creates and sustains its own wind system. So I mean, I guess that's one of the reasons when we start looking at some of these big blazes, they do tremendous damage, they can cover a pretty large area, but they're still not lasting long and time because they're just eating through all of that fuel in a relatively short period of time.

And of course, with when we're talking about wildfires, we also have to think about the fact that, uh, you know, the human civilization has a has an impact as well on just how wildfires will play out through a given forest scenario. Uh, you know, and to a certain extent, you know, we've we've been able to to jump in with um with orchestrated burns, control burns to try and uh simulate sort of the natural cycle of fires that

would normally occur um. But another area where you have to factor in human civilization is of course when you're dealing with urban fires, where the trees and various other aspects of the natural world have been remade into an artificial environment a city, and then what happens when that catches fire. Well, I think a lot of the same practicalities are involved here as well. Some of the great fires to ravage cities are often measured to a single

date in time UM, though there are some exceptions. There's the uh There's the one b C burning of Carthage, which reportedly took seventeen days. But this was also said to be a systematic burning of the city by the Romans, So I'm not sure if that would count UH so much because it was it was one of these situations obviously, where the Romans are like, let's burn the city down, let's make sure everything burns through. There are some other

fires that are that are worth mentioning. There's the Great Fire of Utricht in the Netherlands that lasted nine days reportedly in twelve fifty three. There's the eighty nine first Great Fire of Lynn, Massachusetts, reportedly last two weeks, destroying

roughly a hundred buildings. So it looks like, if we were going to say it looked to the world of like urban fires, for some sort of a candidate for longest fire, you're gonna be looking at something in the realm of days two weeks, But figures beyond that seemed kind of doubtful. All right. The next area to think about, though,

would be, of course, human sustained fires. What about situations in which a human cultivated flame, a flame that's kept and fed more or less like a pet either for technological purposes, say like a forge or a pilot light, or something that's more religious or secular, or a secular symbol in nature, you know, something like a holy fire that's kept going, or some sort of a monument that

has an eternal flame hooked up to it. I was shocked to discover how many monuments there are that have so called eternal flames on them because I don't know, maybe it's just uh, my morbid brain, but it seems like calling a flame eternal is just tempting the faces. Like you you know, this is not this flame will not burn forever. It's like settled down. You can't call it eternal. I was trying to think what you should

call it instead. I can't come up with anything. I don't know, maybe the long burning flame or something, or the attempted eternal flame. It's just eternal is not gonna happen, right, Yeah, I mean I guess, and to a certain extent, I guess this is obvious. Like they're getting into the idea of like the fire is something that is that it

can go out and it has to be cultivated. And you know, a lot of these are tied to two causes and memories with the with the idea of saying like, hey, let's let's let's make a point of remembering this individual or remembering this cause. Um, and and we'll use the fire as a symbol. Uh. But that that yeah, And there have been a number of these that that have sprung up just at the end of the twentieth century and and even you know, in the twenty one century.

And uh and and it's also and it's certainly with the older ones that it gets more difficult to really figure out. Okay, has this been truly a perpetual eternal fire or has it gone out at least once, if not multiple times over the span of time that is attributed to it. I'm sorry that Roger Corman is invading my brain right now, but I'm thinking of a line and attack at the Crab Monsters where the giant psychic crab they're assaulting it with with different types of weapons.

The humans are trying to defeat it, and at some point they use a fire based weapon and the crab counters by telling them he says something like that was quick thinking Dale, but the pity is that all fires must one day burn out. True, it's true. Um. But by the way, more fairly recently, someone was asking, I think in the discord for Stuff to blow your mind, what are all the episodes in which Joe has mentioned

attack of the crab monsters. No one had a clear answer, but a few a few episodes were brought up in which people remembered you you mentioning it. We'll add this to the list. Okay. Uh So, out of the various examples that come up, but one that I thought was pretty interesting is that of the the dast show in Temple Complex in Japan that has a flame that is said to have been burning for about twelve hundred years. Obviously,

it's impossible to say with something like this, uh. And ultimately I guess the it's the idea of the continuous flame that is most portant here. Uh. But but still this is an example of one that has supposedly been burning for over a thousand years. Now. This is not quite a flame. But I ran across this as well, and I thought I mentioned just because it's amusing and and maybe we have some listeners who can who can

report on this firsthand. But there is something known as the Centennial light bulb in Livermore, California, specifically in the firehouse there. It's been burning there, uh, the bulb since nine one, though this has not been continuous. There have been power outages and electrical issues, etcetera. So I'm not sure exactly like what the ratio is between the time during that century plus that the light has been out versus on. But it's certainly a very old light bulb

that still lights up. And there is a webcam you can like check in on its status at centennial bulb dot org. So this is same filament, no, no replaced parts, it's the same bulb old and it still works, still works, yeah uh, And and you can go visit it like on the website. It has information about how you can see this bulb for yourself. That is very impressive because

obviously this is not an LED bulb or something. This is Lord knows how they're making light bulbs in nineteen o one, but this was in some form an incandescent filament based light bulb. Yes. Now, now getting back to the idea of fire and technology, I will say that I don't have an answer regarding things like pilot lights

or you know, forge fires, industrial flames. Um, So there might be a really good example out there that I just couldn't find of a of a verified long burning pilot light or long burning forge fire, that sort of thing. But if listeners out there have have have something to submit on that count, let us have it. So, based on everything I've mentioned here and then, this very much

reflects my mindset going into this. I was thinking, Uh, you know, before we did any research, before we brought up the idea of the episode, I would have guessed, well, the longest raging fire, you know, maybe maybe it's it's gone, you know, a few weeks, a few months, uh, and you know the conditions are just right. But beyond that, I mean, how how long can a fire rage? Uh? Joe, would you like to get into uh one of the

answers that that we're going to discuss in these episodes. Well, for the rest of the series, we wanted to talk about naturally fueled flames. Flames that can burn for a long long time because humans weren't even necessary to create them, uh, that they're in they can arise in various ways. We're going to talk about some major categories I think more

in the next part of this series. But there are various kinds of of of burning and ignition processes that it turns out have been going on on the surface of the Earth for hundreds or even thousands of years, which of course absolutely just dwarfs everything that that I

that I've mentioned so far. It really puts things on an entirely different time scale, right, So I wanted to talk in uh in this episode about one example that really struck me when I was reading up for this that's sort of an odd man out, it's not exactly fitting into the other categories that we're gonna be talking about in part two, so I figured to be good

to start with this one. So in the Northwest Territories of Canada, there is a stretch of seaside cliff faces and hills along the eastern coast of a place called Cape Bathurst where the earth and the rocks themselves seem to be perpetually burning, and they have been that way probably for thousands of years. In English, this place is known as the Smoking Hills or sometimes the Smoky Mountains, not to be confused with the ones in along the

Tennessee North Carolina border. Different and smoky mountains literally smoking in this case, but in the language of the anuvialu It, and these are the people native to the western Canadian Arctic region. It is known as nar you At, which means big fire. And I was poking around for good historical resources on this place. A lot of the articles I dug up actually seemed rather confused, offering contradictory details

about early observation. So the best thing I found was a piece in a magazine called Twosaiosat, which is a publication devoted to the language, culture and history of the Innuvvaluate. This article is by Charles Arnold and it's called ing

Near you at the Smoking Hills of Franklin Bay. So Arnold identifies the earliest written account of the Smoking Hills as one tracing back to a Scottish naturalist, explorer and naval surgeon named Sir John Richardson, who wrote about the hills in the eighteen twenties while documenting an expedition that

he made to chart the coastlines of northern Canada. And as a side note, this mission was actually organized in cooperation with another Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin, who many years later in eighteen forty five, would head up the infamous Lost Franklin Expedition, the goal of which was to fully chart a northwest sea passage through Canada. They were hoping to find a way to get around the northern

part of the continent by water. Obviously, this is even though you know, if you look at a map you'll see a lot of gaps between the islands of northern Canada. This is more difficult than it might sound because often these waterways are are choked with ice. So when Franklin got lost in the eighteen forties, he was trying to find this northwest passage. And if you want to know more, you can look up what's known and unknown about the voyage of the HMS Terror and the HMS arab Us.

If you want some good hair raising mystery with hints of cannibalism. Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a faculous score. Um. You know what we've been able to piece together over the years through you know, the original history and then the finding of the wreckage and so forth. Um. Dan Simons wrote a fictional take on the Terror and the Arabis titled The Terror, which was a brick of a book that was then made in to an excellent AMC mini series a few years back. Uh. In this Franklin

is played by the actor Kieren Hines. But I highly recommend this series. It's a wonderful mix of detailed historic depiction as well as fantasy and horror. Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies also star in that. It's really good. Rob can you do a short version of what we actually do know about the Lost Franklin expedition? Well, uh, there's a killer monster that shows up. No, No, that's the that's the that's the mini series I'm thinking of. Um,

I mean, it's really really story. We could get into the full episodes really, but but basically, you have these two vessels that were that we're seeking the North Passage and they went missing, and and you get into like what happened to the crew, Like how long were they marooned out there in the ice and their ships locked in frozen in Where did where did they get to? Did anybody actually, you know, make it out. It's presumed,

I think still that they all died. But you know, there's a lot of there's been a lot of analysis over the years about uh, you know what happened to them, and then and then later on we we actually found the wreckages. There's a famous painting I think that has to do with this, uh, with this lost voyage called It's got a really metal album name. It's called something like Man Proposes, God disposes or something um and it's the painting is just a polar bearers fighting over scraps

of the wreckage. Yeah, for the for the longest the wreckage was was just lost entirely, but it was in September and expedition by Parks Canada discovered first the Arabis and then two years later they found a terror as well well. Anyway, coming back to the story, Sorry, so Dr John Richardson, the author of the account I'm about to site, was not involved in the lost expedition. He

just was an early collaborator with Franklin. So turning back to his survey several decades earlier, in traveling along the shore of the place that would come to be known as Franklin Bay, Richardson made some observations of something marvelous cliffs that themselves appeared to be quote on fire giving out smoke, and where the ground appeared to consist of quote burnt clay's variously colored yellow, white, and deep red.

I found another source quoting one of Richardson's accounts, where he says, quote at Cape Bathurst, the northern end of Franklin Bay, bituminous shale is exposed in many places, and in my visit there in eighteen six was in a state of ignition, and the clays which had been thus at supposed to the heat were baked and vitrified, so that the spot resembled an old brick field. And I will say I understand what Richard is is getting at here.

Of course, brick fields are places where bricks are manufactured. You can look these up on the Internet and you can see the resemblance with the unnatural look of the baked earth. But when I look at pictures of the smoking hills, my computer ruined brain sees these landscapes, and unfortunately the first place it goes is that it looks like a level in doom. Yeah, it does. Um it. Also, I have to say it looks kind of delicious, like I'm also reminded of I don't like red velvet cake.

It's like red velvet cake emerging from the earth. Yeah, yeah, And it's very interesting the way they produce these protruding rock formations. They're very jagged, uh, and they seem to be rather resistant to weathering compared to the unbaked rock all around them, which is more smoothed over. Yeah, very jagged, dairy, and very bloody looking in some cases. Say it looks like some sort of rock formation that is just gouged into the flash of a titan. Totally. So that's what

Richardson saw in the eighteen twenties. He says, Hey, you know, we went past these cliffs. They appeared to be on fire. They're giving off smoke. We see a lot of burnt clay. It's yellow white and deep red. Very weird. Looks like an old brick field. But then the written history of the Smoking Hills continues after the disappearance of the Franklin

expedition in the eighteen forties. So Franklin, the two ships Franklin, and the crews go missing, and in the year eighteen fifty, a ship called the HMS Investigator, under the command of Captain Robert McClure was searching for survivors of the Franklin party in the area around Franklin Bay. Once again, when the crew of this ship came across the same weird site cliffs by the sea that were strangely covered, and

we're giving off plumes of smoke. And at first they thought that these might be campfires or signals from the Franklin survivors, so they sent out a small boat to check it out, see what's going on. But no, it was not survivors of the Franklin mission. Arnold in his article identify as testimony left by a Moravian missionary named Johann mr Sing who was a member of the shore party. And this is one where I really wanted to find the original text, but I don't. I can't if this

has been digitized anywhere, I could not find it. It appears to be from what's called the Arctic Diary of Johann mr Ching eighteen fifty eighteen fifty four. That was that was published in print form in Toronto in nineteen sixty seven. But but I couldn't find the digital version. So I'm relying on arnold summaries of of what mr Ching says. But he says that when they got to the source of the smoke, they found no human life

alive or dead. Only quote a thick smoke emerging from various events in the ground, and a smell of sulfur so strong that we could not approach the smoke pillar year than ten or fifteen feet flame there was none, but the ground was so hot that it scorched the soles of our feet. Arnold says that Mr. Ching compared

the landscape to a huge chemical factory. He says that water from nearby ponds had been fouled by something from the earth, and that it that the water tasted sour, and they brought back samples of rocks from the smoking hills, brought him back to the ship where he Merching apparently claims that they ended up burning a hole in the mahogany table where Captain McClure kept them. So they took some rocks back to the captain and they're burning up

his furniture. You know this This reminds me again of the mini series of The Terror because one of the things that they stressed in that show and Uh, and they have some of the people involved in the production that didn't mention this as well. They mentioned that when then they were researching the ships to portray them on

the show. Uh, there was this this realization that you know, these were some of them most advanced vessels of any kind of that time period, and if we were to compare them to to our modern world, we might well compare them to spaceships. We might well think of them in terms of of of something that is meant to venture beyond our atmosphere. Um. And and here we have one of the and and Uh. Specifically, this was referring

to the Terror and the Arabis. I'm not quite sure about the investigator, but I'm assuming that it may have been a similar in a similar fashion, may have been a very advanced ship. Um. But but here they are with the ship essentially arriving at an alien landscape. You know, it must have just been such a strange sight to behold. Here you are, um this, you know, this far flung

and ultimately very very hostile, very dangerous environment. And here here are shores where things are are bloody and burning and it's like a chemical that, uh, you bring a piece of it inside the ship and it begins to burn a hole through the table in front of you. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, So here I guess we come to the question of what is actually causing these hills

to smoke. You might assume, based on background knowledge that, okay, if there's heat and sulfurous gas coming out of the ground the sources volcanic, right, that that would be the obvious assumption. Yeah, that's that's where your mind instantly goes. But in this case, no, I found one source on this that that was pretty helpful. It was a paper called why do the Smoking Hills smoke? Why? Um? It was published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences in

four by W. H. Matthews and R. M. Bustin. And this paper invokes a term that I've never heard before. It refers to areas of fire baked rock as um. I think this word is French, so I think it would be pronounced bocan, but it's bo c A N N E s. And the author is right that you find these these fire baked rocks in quote cretaceous mudstones

along sea cliffs and in areas of recent slumping. So the fire baking of the rocks and the earth lead to these weird patterns of coloration that can easily be seen with the naked eye, and that we heard described in the literary sources we just mentioned. So these color changes include bleaching and reddening of the mud stone, which is otherwise dark in color, and these colors can remain

even after one of the bocans has stopped burning. And in places where these rocks are still burning and baking, you get smoke pouring out, you get sulfurous fumes as well as high ground temperatures. So the the earth you walk on gets hot. So what's the cause. Well, the authors of this paper, they performed a number of different analyzes, including petrographic, mineralogical, chemical, and calorific analyzes, and they determined that quote, the boca on are fumed by oxidation of

pyrite and or organic matter. With heating of the strata by oxidation, combustible gases are driven off that may burn in restricted areas, resulting in localized melting of the strata. So, in reading this and a few other sources and putting things together, I think I understand this now and trying to put my understanding into other words, A lot of the rock in this area is mudstone or or type

of shale rock. Mudstone is a sedimentary rock that can contain hydrocarbon or organic contents, So some amount of fossil fuel is naturally present in this rock, even if in low concentrations, and in this case, one of the main carbon constituents seems to be a form of lignite, which is a soft brown type of cold that is generally formed by the underground compression of pete. But this rock also contains a significant amount of iron pyrite, a mineral form of of iron sulfide which UM is also known

as fool's gold. Yeah, and you know it's I think it's always a shame we call fool's golded because it implies it. It's into a certain extent, it's ugly and it's without value. But UH, pyrite can can look quite impressive, you know, if I've seen examples of it in UM, UH, in mineral museums before UH and UH. And of course in the fact that it can be used to ignite something. I believe it was used in UH in firearms in

the past. UM. I did not know that, but that would make sense now reading about this, because so so what's going on here is that UM. When the cliff faces erode here at the smoking Hills and new faces of the mudstone strata are exposed to oxygen in the atmosphere, the carbon based fuel and the natural iron pyrite together undergo oxidation, a chemical reaction which leads to heating. The oxidation of the iron pye rite here is an exothermic reaction.

It heats up the surrounding rock and this oxidation based heating leads to the release of flammable gases that are embedded in the rock. And so the authors think when these gases are released, they become a form of fuel evaporating in an environment of extreme heat with exposured oxygen. So here you have the three magic ingredients, right, you have fuel escaping, you have it's very hot, and you have oxygen nearby. So they burn, and these fires further

heat and melt the strata of the rock. And I believe the implication is that this melting, uh this melting and baking helps continue to reveal new faces of strata to the atmosphere so that more oxidation can happen in the process can just continue it's auto ignition. It ignites automatically by being exposed to the oxygen, and the process

is self sustaining. The author's right that you tend to find these bocan only in places where the strata of sedimentary rock has been suddenly exposed to the atmosphere, maybe by a landslide or some of the form of erosion

or erosion UH that's left behind after the retreat of glaciers. Now, coming back to these historical counts, while the stories from Richardson and the McClure expedition are the earliest written accounts of the Smoking Hills, UH a new value at oral traditions about the mountains have been in circulation for much longer. As I mentioned the the traditional name for this place

is in near you Wat, which means big fire. And this article by Charles Arnold, then after it recounts the literary section, it goes into a section on the oral tradition, including one excellent story that was told to the Danish anthropologist Canude Rasmussen in nineteen twenty four by a person living in the Cape Bathurst area named Alan all right Sake. So this is the story told by on our rightside,

recounted to Rasmussen and and quoted in Arnold here. In the early infancy of man, people were never alone, whether they lived in a settlement or were traveling on long journeys, they were surrounded by a spirit people who lived as human beings, and were in fact human beings, except that they were invisible. Their bodies were not for our eyes

or their voices for our ears. And when people traveled and pitched camp and began to build their snow huts, one might see round about the snow drifts that the snow blocks began to move, being lifted out of the drifts and piled together into a snow house, which seemed to grow of itself. Occasionally one might see the glitter of a copper knife, and that was all. They did not mind people coming into their houses, which were arranged

just like those of human beings. All their belongings were visible, and people could trade with them very profitably. If one wished to buy something, all that was necessary was to point to it and at the same time show what one was prepared to give for it. If the spirit people agreed, the object required lifted itself up and moved towards the man who wanted it. But if they declined the bargain, the object remained where it was. So people

were never alone. They always had small, silent and invisible spirits around them. But one day it happened that during a halt, A man seized his knife and cried, what do we want with these people who were always right on our heels. Saying this, he flourished his knife in the air and thrust it in the direction of the snow huts that had made themselves. Not a sound was heard, but the knife was covered in blood. From that moment,

the spirits went away. Never again did anyone see the wondrous sight of snow drifts forming themselves into snow huts when one made camp, And forever the people lost their silent, invisible guardian spirits. It was said that they had gone to live inside the mouths in order to hide from man who had mocked and wounded their feelings. That is why to this day one can see the mountains smoking from the enormous cooking fires flaming inside them. Oh wow,

that's wonderful. Yeah, I thought this was beautiful, and it also made me so sad that like the humans betrayed

their their invisible companions. Yeah yeah, and that it also of course reminds me of of various other accounts that you see, particularly like Irish traditions, where you have these traditions of the former people or other other intelligent beings, be they some sort of spirit fulk or or or what have you, or something very humanoid in form, and they've been driven into the earth by the newer people.

And we see a similar trend here. Yeah. Yeah. Arnold's site stories remembered by other inuvaluate people of the present describing their their memories of the stories about these people, describing the smoke from the hills as the cooking fires of the little people bowl who live inside the mountains. And there was one story he recorded that really struck me. This was wonderful. This was quoting a source named Fred Wolki who said, quote, they're as big as a fork

that you eat with. They use a caribous ear for a parka. They turn it inside out and they just have to put it on, just take the inside off skin it already made park a. One thing that strikes me as interesting is how there's a convergence on everyone identifying in some way the smoking hills or in near

you at as as artificial in nature. So in in these oral traditions, the smoke coming off of the hills or the cooking fires of the little people or the invisible people living inside the mountain, but also some of the earliest written records like uhr Ching's compared the area to a huge chemical factory. Richard compared it to a brick field. Both of these are products of human into story. It's interesting that that everybody seems to look at these

things and think artificial made by people. Yeah, I mean we just as as Earth is the fire planet, like we are the people of fire, we are the only organism that that has come to master it and and created works with it. So yeah, it makes sense that that the various cultures would look to this and their mind would at least temporarily go in the same direction.

In any case, coming back to the question about some of the longest burning fires, um, I guess part of this would be dependent on what you're what you're counting as a fire. When you look at something so like I think the smoking hills, you will often not some maybe sometimes you will, but you will often not be seeing big gouts of flames like you would see at

a camp fire. You'll just see this continuous smoking and baking of the rock, and so the burning there I think would be more akin to what you'd see probably with like a burning coal. You know a piece of coal that has been ignited. But considering that, we we can know for pretty sure that the Smoking Hills have probably been burning for hundreds or thousands of years. And

there are multiple ways you can know this. I think there's some geological methods, but actually came across one study offering one interesting piece of evidence for how long these hills have been burning that I wouldn't have thought of,

which is archaeology. So there was a paper by Raymond J. LeBlanc in American Antiquity in nineteen ninety one called Prehistoric Clinker Use on the Cape Bathurst Peninsula, Northwest Territories, Canada, the Dynamics of formation and procurement and talking about the background going into this study, LeBlanc says, quote field work conducted on the Cape Bathurst Peninsula and that's where the Smoking Hills are um has resulted in the discovery of

seventy five sites representing occupation spanning more than three thousand years. Nearly all of these sites are characterized by the predominant use of a distinctive rock called a clinker, resembling a basalt to obsidian like material. It is formed by the spontaneous combustion of local organic rich shales. So some of the weird baked rocks left over at these auto ignition sites liking near you at uh these rocks have been used to make tools by the people living in the area,

spanning back thousands of years. And I found that so interesting too, that you would take these these strange clinker rocks and turn them into technology. Yeah, yeah, from this from from this site that we interpret through the lens of biotechnology. Interesting. Now, one more paper I wanted to mention before I'm done with the Smoking Hills is by Magna Havas and Thomas C. Hutchinson, published in Nature in nine three called the Smoking Hills Naturaliscidification of an Aquatic Ecosystem.

So you remember how those early reports of of the area report they said that the water of nearby ponds was foul and sour. Well, we know why that happens. Now. This is due to the acidification of the water by the sulfur dioxide produced by these mineral burning sites. So the water is very acidic, and this has actually changed the composition of the local microbial life and and insect life and stuff that the life that inhabits the area.

So the authors here right quote. In an area of typically alkaline ponds with pH above eight point oh, ponds within the fumigation zone have been acidified below a pH of two point oh. Elevated concentrations of metals including aluminum, iron, zinc, nickel, manganese, and cadmium occur in these acidic ponds. Soils and sediments have also been chemically altered. The biota and these acidic ponds are characteristic of acidic environments worldwide in contrast to

the typically arctic biota in adjacent alkali ponds. So the burning of the earth alters the chemical characteristics of the landscape, which in turn changed the bioecology. The chain reaction started thousands of years ago when these cliff faces and rocks were eroded and exposed the minerals to oxygen. The oxidation of the pyrite and the organic contents of the mudstone and the burning began. And this led to, over the thousands of years, a complete transformation of the surrounding ecosystem

into one of these strange extremophile, acid rich biosystems. Wow, that's impressive, um, you know, and and thinking about this and thinking about extreme environments and uh and uh and so forth, and and also kind of going back to the idea of these uh, these these these ships being sort of like spaceships, uh, sailing upon these uh the strange,

alien seeming environment. I I ran across a two paper in Chemical Geology the Journal Chemical Geology by Graspy at All that looked at the Smoking Hills as a possible analog for some geological conditions that have been observed on Mars. Um. Just to read a quick quote, um oxidative weathering of this unit creates extensive gerocide rich deposits and bandage gerocide and philo silicate rich mudstones similar to those observed on Mars. So I read through this paper here and it's it's

it's pretty pretty deeply. It's the Chemical Geology general, so it's it's a bit dense of for my taste anyway. But the author is, if I'm understanding that correctly, they're suggesting that such signs on Mars some some similar looking details that we've observed on Mars via the probes we've sent there, if we interpret them through the lens of the Smoking Hills, it could possibly suggest a more habitable period Mars ancient past so that's fascinated to think about

that as well. Absolutely so. I think maybe this is where we need to cap it for part one here, but there's so much more to talk about because the world is full of surprising and fascinating naturally fueled flames, and I think it will make for a carnival of geological wonders to to explore in the next part of this series. That's right, so tune in on Thursday as

we continue with more fire from the Rocks. In the meantime, if you like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find them on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. UM. I think most of the invention episodes that we recorded, several of which are dealt with fire technology and fire

related technology. I think most of those have been republished, if not all of them have been republished in this feed, but if not, you can also find the the podcast feed for Invention out there. UM. That was a fun though short lived show that we did on the side dealing with inventions UM in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Though we also do listener mail on Monday's, we do in a short form artifact or monster fact. On Wednesdays and on Friday we do something called Weird

House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production

of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. B twenty fo pographic posts Far Back bo