Fire From the Rocks, Part 3

the earth itself or from the rocks. So in the last episode of this series, we talked about the Burning Mountain or Mount Wingin in Australia down in New South Wales, which is an example of a naturally fueled type of fire called a coal seam fire, a place where coal formations underground are set on fire and then continue to burn as long as they can, as long as they have access to oxygen. Probably, and while there's no way to know for sure, Mount Windin has been proposed as

as potentially the longest burning fire on Earth. Though. It's interesting because today, as we discussed last time, there's no

fire that you can see at the surface. There's only this large patch of bleached and baked soil which can be hot to the touch, and or at least parts of it can, and it's a devoid of plant life within this patch, and then of course, all around it there are these interesting sort of there's like a war for survival at the border of this burned region, so you'll see, like you know, grass is trying to survive, and then these bleached tree trunks that are long dead

but still standing. And then also around this area you find these deep cracks or crevices in the earth, out of which poor smoke and sulfurous fumes. So the fire is burning, but it's burning in the deep. It's burning out of sight down inside the mountain, fed by oxygen from the surface. And nobody knows how the fire inside mountain engine got started, but it's presumed to be a

result of some form of natural ignition. Maybe the coal at the surface underwent a chemical reaction leading to spontaneous combustion or or auto ignition as it's called, or maybe it was struck by lightning or by a brush fire, but we don't really know. However, there are many other coal seam fires that have mostly in one way or another, been created by human behavior, and a big example here

is coal mine fires. Fires the fires in a coal seam that gets started one way or another because of mining there, and they're actually a number of these that are that are still burning throughout the world today. I'm trying to remember if I know any coal mining songs about coal mine fires. There's some really good like mining town folk songs and whatnot, that I can't remember any offhand that mentioned fires. The real good coal mining folk songs.

I know, we're like union songs. Yeah, same yeah, high Sheriff of hazard and so forth. Which side are you on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that sort of thing. Well, yeah, those are great songs, but I don't know if any of them that mentioned

a coal seam fire. However, I did actually find a poem that mentions a coal seam fire, and not just any coal seam fire, but the one that I was specifically about to talk about, because so there's a very famous example in the United States of a coal seam fire that's been burning for decades and it is situated underneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The poem I found was won by a poet named Leonard Cress, called the Centralia mind Fire, and I thought it was really pretty great.

It uh. It talks about the town being the shrine of the Holy Order of Anthracite, and the last four lines of the poem read, the odors of bottom damp and methane no longer reek into the streets and ignite. The underground tunnels burn, and each vein of coal potential use leads to another domain. Oh nice, this is a contemporary poet. By the way, Um, yeah, they have a website Leonard craft dot com. So the town of Centralia

is in eastern Pennsylvania. It was settled in the mid eighteen hundreds and being situated over a large coal formation. I think for most of its history it was a town where the local economy was based around a coal mine, which would not be uncommon in places like Pennsylvania or West Virginia, places in the U s where there there's a lot of coal and settlements can grow up around the extraction industry based on that coal. It was never

a huge city. I think in the early nineteen sixties the town had some a little over two thousand residents, I believe. But things started changing in the year nineteen sixty two when part of the coal seam that formed the town's industrial base caught fire. Now there's still apparently

disagreement about exactly how it caught fire. One idea UH I read is that it happened to because of a pre existing coal seam fire from a neighboring region that spread slowly over several decades until it made contact with the Centralia seam and then just burned on from there.

But I think that's a minority position. The more commonly cited explanations involve a garbage dump, and so the idea is that the coal caught fire either when a scheduled trash burn at a local landfill penetrated the mine tunnels and managed to ignite the coal, or possibly when some kind of hot ash or coal was dumped directly into

the pit and set the coal burning. Either way, it's a good example to think about, how if you've got open deposits of coal that are that are exposed to the atmosphere, you really don't want to be burning stuff near that. Yeah, Yeah, trying to imagine this sort of yeah, the apocalyptic scenario where the your your garbage fires meet

your your your coal mine tunnels. Yeah. And so apparently the locals knew there was a fire in the mines beginning in nineteen sixty two, but didn't quite realize what a problem it was until years later, around the late seventies and early eighties, and there are a few touch points here. One story from nineteen seventy nine that I've seen in multiple sources is that there was a local gas station owner named John Coddington, who was also the mayor of the town, who one day went out to

check the levels in his underground storage tanks. So when you go to a gas station, you know, you get out the pump. The gas is being pumped up from these big tanks under the ground that's where the gas lives. And something seemed off, I guess when he was checking the levels in the tanks. So he ended up checking the temperature in the storage tanks and found that the gasoline was a hundred and seventy two degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, yikes uh, And this did make me wonder. I was like, wait,

what is the auto ignition temperature of gasoline? Because I might have guessed that if you heat gasolene up to one seventy two degree fahrenheit in the presence of oxygen, that would be close to it automatically igniting on its own. But I checked and no, my intuition was way off. I see some pretty different numbers, but they're all much

higher than this. A website called engineering toolbox dot com suggests that the auto ignition temperature of gasoline is more like four seventy five to five thirty six degrees fahrenheit or to forty six to eighties celsius. So so it wasn't gonna catch fire on its own, but that's still freaky. Yeah, And quick disclaimer out there, please do not try and heat up gasoline. Oh no, don't test out these numbers. Yeah, this is not an experiment to perform in your kitchen.

In fact, just don't ever take gasoline inside your house. But so that was seventy nine. But then a real turning point seemed to come in ninet one when a local boy who was twelve years old was nearly swallowed up and killed. He managed to survive, but he was nearly swallowed by the sudden collapse of a sinkhole created by the coal seam fire. And so for a contemporary report on this, I found an AP article published on February nineteen one called Pennsylvania Fearful fire Rages for nineteen years.

This is a This is a I mean, it's a serious story, don't get me wrong. But also the writing in this little news pieces, uh really drives home the dread. Oh yeah, uh yeah. So its It starts off talking about opinions of locals about you know, being exposed to the fumes coming out of this mine and stuff. And maybe I can come back to that in a minute, but first I want to tell the story of this

what happened to this twelve year old boy. So the article reads quote townspeople said an accident Saturday is heightened their fears, leading to a new flurry of government interest. Todd Domboski, twelve, was playing in his grandmother's backyard a few houses from his home when he went to investigate a tiny whiff of smoke. The ground beneath him collapsed instantly, The youth engulfed in a hot, stinking tangle of dirt and tree roots. Escaping when his older cousin pulled him out,

Todd fell about six feet before grabbing the roots. Florence Dumbosky, Todd's mother praised her fourteen year old nephew, Eric Wolfgang, who was swift and strong enough to reach into the hole, grabbed Todd's arm and pull him to safety. A temperature of three hundred and fifty degrees was recorded in the hole. Its depth was not known, and I did look it up. More recent articles mentioned that the sinkhole was later measured and it was a hundred and fifty feet deep for

about forty fives and choked with carbon monoxide throughout. So, if you can imagine this, You're just standing on what you believe to be solid ground, and the ground beneath you just collapses. It just opens up, and uh and and you're you're grabbing at tree roots that are protruding from the dirt, and uh, you managed to get ahold of it, but down below you is just a pit into nothingness with with fumes of he l coughing out.

Absolutely biblical. Um. There's another great paragraph in this, uh, this ap story that reads, quote feeding on timbers, coal and gas in a maze of abandoned anthracize tunnels that date back to the eighteen eighties. The creeping inferno is believed to have spread beneath forty acres despite repeated attempts to curb it. Yeah, so this article, part of what it's reporting on is attempts to put out the mind

fire that have failed. I think at the time this was written already more than three and a half million dollars had been spent on trying to fight the fire, and to no avail. It just didn't work, and so Another thing this article cites is quotes from local towns people talking about their fears about the mind fire. Like one says that it's kind of scary going to sleep at night and not knowing if you'll wake up in the morning because you've been poisoned in your sleep by

fumes from the mine. And it quotes a local teacher named Bob Goodinski who says, we feel like rats in a laboratory. No one knows what the effect of the carbon monoxide is going to be in the future. The children, what will be the effect on them. All of this, I mean all all this sounds like something you'd encounter in a in a horror movie, except it is. It is real life. It's a real life, horrible situation. Concerned for the children, the creeping darkness beneath the uh, the earth,

eruptions preying on the innocent. Yeah. Another quote it gives is from a resident named Sally Sulik, who says, my nose burns my eyes here, I'm like a zombie. I just feel like going to sleep all the time. If they don't soon do something for us, they'll drive us crazy. So in the years since, the population of Centralia has been steeply declining. It basically I think between nineteen eight and two thousand and declined to almost nothing as the

residents moved away. The local homeowners were offered buyouts from the government to to relocate, and then at some point the government essentially condemned the all of the property in

town on by way of imminent domain. There were a few residents left who didn't want to leave, but most of the recent articles I read mentioned only like a handful of people still living in the area, fewer than ten and uh and apparently nobody is going to be allowed to move to the area, So it's just it's just those people there as long as they stay or

until their deaths. Another thing that struck me about the story is I was reading an article in Atlas Obscura by a freelance writer based out of Pennsylvania named Jim Cheney who was writing up the history of the Centralia fire but also had been there and taking a bunch of pictures on the scene, and there was one that struck me as really interesting. It was a picture of what the author says are the remains of Route sixty one, which is a section of roadway a highway that's now

abandoned since it was re routed elsewhere. And if you look at the pictures you can see why. Right down the middle of the road is a gigantic crack, like again like bad earthquake movie, uh and the so the road is just sort of split down the middle. And it actually reminded me a bit of the cracks and crevices that have been forming in Mount Wingin for the past six thousand years or more when you look at

the pictures of that. I don't know the exact cause of every surface feature we're looking at here, but if I had to guess, I would say this is probably some kind of collapse caused by the by the burning out that's going on underneath the surface, just like we saw in these other cases, or like would have caused the sinkhole. Now. Of course, sometimes um real life tragedy

does inspire great art. It's worth noting that the town of Centralia inspired the fictional town of vulcan Vania UH in the film Nothing But trouble Really, Dan dan Ackroid's uh uh weird um horror comedy about a bunch of sort of sort of. I guess you would say Texas Chainsaw massacre esque family residing above a big coal mine fire. Um. Quite a film. Quite a film. Trystar Pictures or whoever it is should have a standing cash prize for anybody who can manage to watch that whole movie. It has

a lot of fun things in it. You've got a wonderful digital underground performance. I think you've got to make it through a lot of stuff before you get to that is clearly having the time of his life in this film. Yeah. So if it's if it's, if you considered a film for an audience of one an absolute success, I think you know. There's another interesting tidbit I came across that's related to the Centralia coal mine uh and seems geologically interesting, but I couldn't tell if it was

because of the fire in particular. So there was a news report I read on the site for a news station called w n E P sixteen. I guess that's an ABC affiliate, and this was out of Butler Township, Pennsylvania, and it's talking about a geyser in Pennsylvania. That's not something that you would expect to find in Pennsylvania. I'm looking at the footage here though it it looks guysory,

but this is not a natural geyser. This is a geyser that was created when many years ago, the mining company I guess that ran the Centralia mine drilled a hole in the ground connecting to one of the tunnels for ventilation of the mine shafts, and somehow now with the tunnels partially flooded. I think it's especially when there's been heavy rain or when the snow melts in the spring. Uh, you you get suddenly a geyser gushing up out of this ventilation hole, and it looks like a real geyser.

It's just spraying up into the air and then running off into a nearby creek. And they say that the guys are has a distinct smell. It smells like like eggs, which I guess is an indication of sulfurous compounds. And that would again make sense since you know you've got the coal down there and it's on fire. And I was unable to tell if if this guy's are is actually related to the fire or if it's just an

unrelated weird feature of the same mind. You see, Like there's a quote in the tweet that's attached where the reporters saying that that it's been there as long as quote anyone can remember. Uh, there's a mention of like some people say, oh, there used to be a second one, and it is kind of I mean, all of this is a stark reminder of how an enterprise like coal mining,

how you're you're you're changing the earth. Uh, you know, at least on a local level, and of course you can get into larger issues of of of actual climate change as well, but even just on a local level, like you're just you're you're vastly altering how the uh the ground beneath your feet is functioning. Yeah, all right, let's move on to another fire in the earth. This

is a fun one. I'm excited to talk about it because it concerns natural fires that may have been burning for two and a half millennia, as well as a mythical monster, and that monster is the chimera, uh and the chimere. Of course, I think most folks out there will have some image of this in their mind. There's some wonderful depictions of it. There's the Chimera of of of Arezzo. It's an Etruscan bronze statue of four b

C E H. That's absolutely gorgeous. If anyone has seen this or seen a reproduction of this, I've been to a retzo, but I don't think I've seen this well I'm not sure. I didn't put in my notes where it is currently how so I don't know where its current status is, but I've I've seen plenty of images of it. You know, it's this wonderful uh, you know, dark bronze finish and uh. And it looks impressive for a creature that is not always impressive in artistic renditions,

because it is it is not only a chimera. It is the chimera. It is this uh, it is this uh, this hybrid form that some have criticized for not completely making all that much sense and maybe being too counterintuitive. So at the heart of things, the chimera is, of course a goat monster. Um. Most of its recognizable body

is usually that of a goat. I guess one of the interesting things about the Chimera of Arezzo is that less of it is a goat and maybe that's why it's more impressive, Like it looks like the artists decided to lean more into the into the lion aspects of its body. But but generally, when you here here talk of it, you were talking about something that is uh in a large part, a monstrous she goat. Uh. It

roams the myths of ancient Greece and Rome UH. And the name itself means she goat, and in all depictions it has at least some goat properties to its hybrid form. That's funny. I certainly believe you that that's true, But I do not really associate the Amira with a goat at all. I think, like, yeah, like lions, snake, eagle or something. Yes, some depictions it has wings. I want to stand that. In the Dungeon Dragons Monster Manual they

give it wings um specifically. Now, the oldest records of the monster can be found in the sixth book of

Homer's Iliad Uh. And this is you know, written down at some point in the eighth century BC, and the beast here is described as a great fire breathing she goat with a lion's head and the tail of a serpent, and then slightly More recently, hess the Odd wrote of the Chimera in his book The Ageny, composed between seven thirty and seven d c h. So, So in uh Theogny, hes Odd is discussing the monstrous at Kidna quote divine, stubborn hearted at Kidna, half nymph with dark eyes and

fair cheeks, and half on the other hand, a serpent, huge and terrible and vast, speckled and fled, devouring beneath caves of sacred earth. And there in the depths of Kidna mates with the deadly giant uh Typhon, and they produce quote fierce hearted children uh monsters, all including the two headed dog Orthos, the three headed dog Cerebus, and even then the even more headed uh larnaean Hydra, as well as the Sphinx, the Nemian lion, and of course the Chimera Uh. And here's what Hesiot had to say

about the Chimera. And these are these are all translations from the Reverend J. Banks translation. Quote. But she Kidna bore Chimera, breathing, restless, fire, fierce and huge, fleet footed as well as strong. This monster had three heads, one indeed of a grim visaged lion, one of a goat, and another of a serpent, a fierce dragon in front of lion, a dragon behind, and in the midst a goat breathing forth the dread strength of burning fire, and in the midst a goat. So like, mostly a goat.

That's what you're saying, mostly mostly, that's what That's what I take it to me, is that he's saying the middle head is the goat head, I think, or wait, but it's also saying in front a lion and a

dragon behind. Yeah, So I'm trying to picture this I'm having and I think this is This is why you have a lot of variation and how it's depicted, like that the Etruscan statue, for instance, and other depictions will have the goat head just straight up growing out of the back of the creature your head, but it's a good head. And the goat always looks a little awkward there, like,

what what do you even doing there, buddy? Like you can imagine the creatures moving around the gast just sort of awkwardly making a play for vegetation and stuff to nibble on. You see a ripple in the water. The Jaws theme plays, but it's a goat's head poking out over the Yeah wait the goats bare, They don't really, they bleat, Yeah, the bleating. So yeah, you say. Then you see it depicted other ways where the all the heads are sort of arranged up front and so forth. Um,

but yeah, you can. I imagine a lot of this is coming from different interpretations of of like this passage. Now, every monster must have its slayer, of course, and in this case it is mighty Bellerophon, sometimes described as a half human son of Poseidon, who uses Athena's bridle to capture the winged Pegasus right into battle against the Chimera, and then he thrust his spear into the monster's flaming ma where what happens? The metal instantly melts. Oh no,

he's defeated. Oh no he's not, because then the liquid metal chokes the deadly monster to death. So I always found that to be kind of a nice twist. Oh yeah, Now, surely the hero didn't intend for the metal to melt and choke the monster. I don't know. Never doubt these these heroes, these uh, these Greek heroes are are are wicked smart. That strikes me as more like a like a war of the world's type in ng where yeah,

something you didn't even expect kills the monster. Now you're probably asking, okay, well, how does this tie into places and fire? Well, this, this myth is certainly tied to specific places. For starters, it is written that the Chimera was for a time the pet of the king of Karia before it escaped and rampaged. This was a region of western Anatolia from the eleventh through sixth centuries b c.

This region is now part of Turkey. But then the chimeras said to descend upon an area to the southeast of Karia in Alicia, where it generally devours every mortal in sight and just sets everything on fire. So this

is the realm of Mount Chimera. In the Book of Imaginary Beings, jore Louis Boges rights that Virgil describes the Chimera in the Aeid, and that the fourth and fifth century commentator Servius ties the monster uh to Lycia and went so far as to say that the monster was a metaphor for a volcano there, and this was apparently echoed by plenty of the elder as well. Okay, interesting, this is how Bores summarizes it. Quote, the base of

the volcano is infested with serpents. On its sides, there are meadows where goats pasture, and on top flames shoot forth and lions have their dens. I see. Okay, so it's like combining the different types of local wildlife, at least allegedly the serpents around the base, and then the goats grazing in the meadow and the lions in their caves, and then uh, and then you have, of course the

flames coming out. I guess that's the dragon aspect, right, Yeah, so yeah, I have to say, like when I when I was reading this, it sended a little far afetched to me because we talked about geomethology before, but I don't remember like a version of geo mythology where like the aspects of a given geographical feature are then just sort of cobbled together or into a into a hybrid

monster and uh. And as it turns out, Borges also finds this ridiculous and mentions that he thinks it's absurd as well as uh an idea that I think was put forth by Plutarch that uh Chimera is the name of a pirate who just happened to have these three different animals as part of his iconography and his flag and so forth. It was a pirate. Now. One of the advancements in the sort of figuring out this myth and tying the myth into actual geology. Uh, this occurred

during the early nineteenth century. In eighteen eleven, hydrographer and Irish rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort linked Mount Chimera to the geographical features in the region known as Jana or yann Artis. And he explored this region, I believe, in eighteen eleven through eighteen twelve, basically going around looking at various ruins, citing various winds, and he's he's noted during this time for rediscovering Hadrian's Gate built for built there

for Roman Emperor Hadrian in the year one thirty. So you know our n artists. What does it look like? Well, it's it matches up with some of these other descriptions we've discussed in these episodes. You have a rocky mount here with active gas seeps that have produced burning flames for depending on what sources you're looking at, perhaps two and a half millennia, so perhaps years so some still kind of interpreted and say, well, this site could have

been the inspiration for the monster itself. UM, And I guess you can kind of open that up and you can look at ideas of the monster being a metaphor for them, for for this mountain, or just kind of like the who, here's this weird landscape with fire, and you end up with this idea of will a monster lives here? Surely this is the habitat for some sort of monstrous fire breathing creature. So the seeps in question here are largely um on barren ground, and they follow

various fissures and perhaps faults. According to a two thousand fifteen paper UM I was looking at from Meyer Dombard at All, published in Frontiers and Microbiology. Uh. These researchers also reported a fluid seat that they discovered um in this area, and numerous papers mentioned as well that sailors used the fires of the mountain as a kind of

natural landmark at night in ancient times. Today, however, hikers visit the flames and they do things apparently like brew ti uh, cook marshmallows over them, or do you know, just just look at them as well. Because this is all part of the Olympus National Park. So if you know, if if you if you're in Turkey, this is a site you can go and see. Now, the seeps here are reportedly stronger, as are the flames during winter, and apparently this is linked to changes in atmospheric pressure and

groundwater recharge. Um and uh. And this kind of takes us back to where we're just talking about. You know, when you disrupt the underground environment through extensive coal mining. UM. You know, these are the sort of things like groundwater recharge or there are are the situations you're potentially interfering in. UM, the vent gases that come up. I was looking at a profile of these and it is mostly methane and

there's some other ingredients in there as well. Now as to whether there are actual snakes there, UM, I mean one presumes I know there there there are snakes in Turkey. UM, I guess it's we can presume that there either are goats or could have been goats there as well. Goats like a rocky area with some vegetation to munch on. Um. And as far as lions go, you won't find any lions here today, but there were once lions found throughout

what is now Turkey. So um, I mean, I guess all of that is plausible as well to at least a certain extent. Oh yeah. If you compare maps of the historic distribution of lions to the present distribution throughout

Africa and Eurasia, it's well. On on one hand, it's it's kind of sad to see how much their range has been constricted, but it's also eye opening too, Like it's eye opening about how so many ancient myths and stories all throughout the Middle East and the Greek myths and stuff, it seems that they're lions everywhere, And you're like, what because they're you don't really think that there are lions wandering around and say Greece or Turkey today, but

you know, thousands of years ago there absolutely were. It brings us back to the topic we discussed in the past about the first known human animal hybrid represented an art that of the lion man. Yeah. Yeah. Now this side of this a side is also interesting because there is a link to the Greek forge god Hephestus here as well. Hephestus, of course, was the blacksmith's god, who was also deformed after his father Zeus cast him off Mount Olympus for taking his mother Hera's side in an argument,

or at least that's one version of the story. The remains of a temple to he Festus, Yeah, I can be found at this site just below the fires, which again makes sense, given that the you know, sites of natural flames like this seemed to be inevitably tied to human industry. Like we've discussed in these various other examples, people see them and they think of of like cook fires and the depths maintained by the little people, or uh, you know, we think of of of industrial processes, uh,

chemical fires and so forth. But then sometimes we also tie them to fire breathing monsters. And I wanted to mention one more thing that that Boees brings up about the chimera. He discusses how he thinks that the chimera was ultimately quote two heterogeneous. In other words, these parts were all too dissimilar, and it all resists quote merging into a into a single animal. So I guess in that you could say that these sort of saying that

it's too counterintuitive. To a certain extent, he contends that people got a bit tired of the idea of the chimera, and you we see that reflected in the the use of chimeracle and the use of chimera as referring to something that is just too outrageous to be true, too outrageous to actually exist in the real world. Uh, something that just doesn't jell together in a form that you

can believe in. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm always curious about why our intuitions about imaginary beings work the way they do. And I'm sure I've asked questions like this on the show a bunch of times, but like, why does one unreal monster seem plausible in quotes and another one doesn't? Like the chimera is, yeah, it's got a goat head in the middle of its back, or at least in some depictions, and people are just like, no, no, that doesn't work. The hydra, which has many heads coming out

of the Yeah, that that works. Yeah, I mean even the vegetable lamb of tartary, as fantastic as that is, and as you know, with that, the gulf existing between plant, plant and mammal like that feels more believable, and I think clearly was more believable for a very long period of time, uh, compared to the chimera. Yeah, so what are the underlying psychological factors? Like what subconscious criteria do we use to judge an unreal being that makes sense

to us versus an unreal being that doesn't. The camera goathhead, Yeah, that's just that doesn't make sense. Yeah, maybe part of it comes down to like a basic uh, you know, primal estimation of another animal, like what is the head on this thing going to bite me? What is the head on this animal seem to want to do? And uh, if you look at that goat head sticking out of the middle of the chimera is back, Like what am

I supposed to make of that? What's it even doing? Now? Cyclops, on the other hand, one big guy in the forehead. I picture that all day long. That works. Yeah. One of the interesting things about these uh, I guess you could call them, you could think of them as minimally counterintuitive monsters and um and hybrids, is that the best of them we continue to to look at and and and reconsider and also apply like theoretical biological models like

I've read. I know, I read a wonderful paper once on the biology of the centaur where the author was discussing how the centaur's body would work, and uh, you know, really focusing on on the the circulatory system and and the fact that it would need two hearts, one in the human part and one in the horse part. You know, I love I love examinations like that. So but it's an example of how the centaur, as fantastic as it is, is not so far removed from reality that we can't apply, uh,

this line of thinking to it. Whereas, yeah, I don't think I've ever seen anybody go out on a limb and write a uh, you know, a paper like this is how the biology of the chimera would work. This is how would breathe fire. This is the function of the the live goat head growing from its back, and this is why its tail is a live snake. This is the diet it consumes. Yeah, this, it's just it's

just ridiculous. Now, coming back just a little bit to uh, you know, to what we've been talking about here, eternal flames and all I do want to point out that this is the examples we've brought up are are certainly not the only examples of natural gas seeps and so forth, where eternal flames have evoked mythic ideas, religious devotion and so forth. Um I was reading Seeps in the Ancient World, Myths, Religions and Social Development by Causseppe Etope of the National

Institute of Geophysics and Volcanogiology in Italy. Uh and he has a book titled Natural Gas Seepage. But one of the chapters is devoted to just looking at some of these examples. M so. He mentions the camera in there that he mentions the fires of back we previously discussed, as well as a couple of other examples. There's the Baba Gurger seep in Iraq, he writes, was probably the burning fiery furnace into which King Nebuchadneezer cast of the Jews.

I've seen this claim before, I say, so Boba Gurger is. Uh, it's like an oil field near kier Cook, I believe, And uh, there there is at least one place there where Yeah, there's a there is a natural gas seep where the the volatiles that are coming out of it

have been set aflame and they're burning. And yeah, I've said, I don't know what the actual evidence is that this is the basis of the Bible story one of these many cases where somebody like connects a story from ancient history or mythology or legend to a an observable feature today. And and in some cases you can do that like there's a pretty clear link, and in other cases I'm not quite sure what how how strong the evidence for

that direct connection is. But so yeah, there is the story of King Nebuchadnezzar throwing uh what is it shad rack mishek in a bed nego into a burning furnace. Uh. And and I have read some modern authors saying, ah, maybe the furnace was this geological feature we see today. Boba gurger, by the way, I think, means something like

like father flame or daddy flame. Another example that he brings up is the sacred um Mangarmas flame in Indonesia, which has been active at least since the fifteenth century, he writes, and is still used in annual Buddhist ceremonies. And then there's the Oracle of Delphi in Greece, which we we've discussed at least a little bit on the show. In the past. Um, there's there's talk of their having been an eternal flame at the at the Temple of

Apollo there at least at one point uh. And then there was there's this idea that I believe researchers have kind of gone back and forth on this idea that vapors from the earth contributed to the vision is granted

to the priestess of the sacred site, the um. The the idea I think kind of fell out of favor for a while, but more recent geological research I was looking at it from two thousand four, two thousand five, they argue that Okay, the side here lies over a fault where gas leaks could theoretically cause oxygen reduction uh in an in an individual that would then result in

a mild hypnotic state complete with hallucinations. I mean, even coming back to this um this ap article about Centralia, you have this quote about the you know, the woman talking about feeling like she's a zombie walking around due to the fumes, which is an altered state. And in this and in this case, I mean, she she knows that it's not the divine trying to speak through her, etcetera.

But you can you can well imagine a situation where if you're combining holy expectations religious expectations and and ritual. With this sort of environment, you could easily get to this point. If only we could get a medical readoubt on the the oracles of Delphi that uh, that might be really illuminating. Yeah, information exists. I wouldn't mind going back and looking at the oracle again in the future. Um, it's there's a there's a lot of interesting writing about it.

It as a as a wonderful history. All right, we're gonna go and close it out there. Um, this this was a fun journey. We got to talk about a number of fascinating locations around the earth, some wonderful history, mythology, and religion. Um, if there's a particular site we didn't discuss that you would like to bring to our attention,

certainly right in and let us know. And especially if you have visited any of these locations and you have direct firsthand experience, perhaps you've actually glimpsed the flames emerging from the earth. Uh, definitely, right in and tell us about to share your photos, etcetera. We would love to

hear from you. In the meantime, core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind published every Tuesday, and there's Day and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed short form, monster fact or Artifact episodes on Wednesdays, listener mail on Mondays, and on Friday. We set aside most serious concerns and just discuss a weird film with Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

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