From the Vault: Fire From the Rocks, Part 1

just right. It's always interesting to think about how fire is in many ways more an event than a thing. For it to happen, you need heat, fuel, and oxygen, and the fuel and the oxygen were 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.

So yeah, our relationship with fire is sometimes like whoa, this is out of control, and other times it is you know, I can't get this thing to light at all, you know, So I think we're all familiar with that

with the dual nature of fire. So for today's episode, and this will spill into into the next episode as well, I thought we might start with just what I thought was just a really tantalizing question because I'd never really thought about it before, not until you brought up this topic, And that is what is the longest that a single

fire has raged? And I guess there are all sorts of sort of artificial parameters we might throw in, you know, what constitutes a single fire versus multiple fires spread out over time. I guess we kind of have to take the human scenario of like a hearth or a campfire 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.

But if you dig down you can start seeing some time stamps on things. Many of the worst are dated to just a single day in human history. 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, though in many of the cases I think it does fit. Some wildfire seasons, of course, span many months, and then you have particular

fires that have raged for a period of time. There's the Coyote Fire of nineteen sixty four in Santa Barbara, California, which lasted from September first to October first. So it seems we might think if we're thinking about modern forest fires, we're going to probably look at something lasting days, months somewhere in that range. Now, as for wildfires of yesteryear, as well as blazes caused by prehistoric extinction events, I couldn't find many 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 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 that long in 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, you know, the human civilization has an impact as well on just how wildfires will play out through a given forest scenario, you know, and to a certain extent, you know, we've been able to jump in with with orchestrated burns, control burns to try and simulate sort of the natural cycle of fires that would normally occur.

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 ravaged cities are often measured to a single date and time, though

there are some exceptions. There's the one forty six BCE 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 that would count so much because 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 worth mentioning. There's the Great Fire of Utricht in the Netherlands that lasted nine days reportedly in twelve fifty three. There's the eighteen eighty nine first Great Fire of Lynn, Massachusetts, reportedly last two weeks, destroying roughly one hundred buildings. So it looks like if we were going to say, look to the world of like urban fires for some sort of a candidate for longest fire, you're going to be looking at something in the realm

of days to weeks. But figures beyond that seem 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 can't come up with them. You think, I don't know, maybe the long burning flame or something, or the attempted eternal flame. It's just eternal is not going to happen.

the fire as a symbol. But that Yeah, there have been a number of these that that have sprung up just at the end of the twentieth century and even you know, in the twenty first century, and it's certainly with the older ones 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.

add this the list. Okay, So, out of the various examples that come up, one that I thought was pretty interesting is that of the Dasho 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 one hundred percent with something like this, and ultimately I guess it's the idea of the continuous flame that is most important here. 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'd mentioned it just because it's amusing, and maybe we have some listeners who can report on this first hand. But there is something known as the Centennial light bulb in Livermore, California, specifically in the firehouse there. It's been burning there the bulb since nineteen oh one, though this

has not been continuous. There have been power outages and electrical issues, etc. 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 centennialbulb dot org.

much reflects my mindset going into this. I was thinking, 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 gone, you know, a few weeks, a few months, and you know, if the conditions are just right. But beyond that, I mean, how how long can a fire rage? Joe, would you like to get into one of the answers that we're going to discuss in these episodes.

figured it'd 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

along the Tennessee North Carolina border. Different smoking mountains literally smoking in this case, but in the language of the Inuvialuit, and these are the people native to the western Canadian Arctic region. It is known as ingnir Yuat, 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 observations. So the best thing I found was a piece in a magazine called tusai Osat, which is a publication devoted to the language, culture in history of the inuvialu It. This article is by Charles Arnold and it's called ing near yat 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 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 Erebus. If you want some good hair raising mystery with hints of cannibalism.

historic depiction as well as fantasy and horror. Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies also star in that.

frozen in Where 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, you know, what happened to them and then and then later on we actually found the wreckages.

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 consists of quote, burnt clays

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 twenty six was in a state of ignition, and the clays which had been thus exposed to the heat were baked and vitrified, so that the spot resembled an old brickfield. And I will say I understand what

Richard is getting at here. Of course, brickfields 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.

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 were giving off plumes of smoke.

And at first they thought 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 identifies testimony left by a Moravian missionary named Johann Mirtsching, 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 Johan Mirching eighteen fifty to eighteen fifty four, that those published in print form in Toronto in nineteen sixty seven, but I couldn't find the digital version, So I'm relying on Arnold's summaries of what Merching 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 vents in the ground, and a smell of sulfur so strong that we could not approach the smoke pillar nearer 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 Mirching 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 the water tasted sour, and they brought back samples of rocks from the smoking hills, brought them back to the ship where 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 furnish.

well compare them to spaceships. We might well think of them in terms of something that is meant to venture beyond our atmosphere, and here we have one of the 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. But here they are,

with this ship essentially arriving at an alien landscape. You know, it must have just been such a strange site to behold. Here you are this far flung an ultimately very very hostile, very dangerous environment, and here here are shores where things are bloody and burning, and it's like a chemical vat. 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.

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 mudstone, 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 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 bocan are fumed by oxidation

of pyrite and 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 type of shale rock. Mudstone is a sedimentary rock that can contain

hydrocarbon or organic content. 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 coal that is generally formed by the underground compression of peat. But this rock also contains a significant amount of iron pyrite, a mineral form of iron sulfide. Which is also known as fools gold.

pyrite 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, it's

very hot, and you have oxygen nearby. So they burn, and these fires further heat and melt the st of the rock. And I believe the implication is that this melting, this melting and baking helps continue to reveal new faces of strata to the atmosphere so that more oxidation can happen and 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 their form of erosion or erosion that's left behind after the retreat of glaciers. Now, coming back to these historical accounts, While the stories from Richardson and the McClure expedition are the earliest written accounts of the Smoking Hills in New Vialuet, oral traditions about

the mountains have been in circulation for much longer. As I mentioned, the traditional name for this place is ing near Youuat, 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 Canued Rasmussen in nineteen twenty four by a person living in

the Cape Bathhurst, Aia named Alnaaritsayik. So this is the story told by alnaarit Sayik, recounted to Rasmusen 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 mountains 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.

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 parka.

a brick field. Both of these are products of human industry. It's interesting that everybody seems to look at these things and think artificial, made by people.

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 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 know this.

I think there are some geological methods. But actually came across one study offering one interesting piece of evidence for how long these hills had 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 clinkery 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 fieldwork conducted on the Cape Bathurst Peninsula and that's where the Smoking Hills are 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 Sitesking Neruat 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.

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 insect life and stuff the life that inhabits the area. So the author is here right quote. In an area of typically alkaline ponds with pH above eight point zero, ponds within the fumigation zone have been acidified below a pH of two point zero. Elevated concentrations of metals including aluminium, iron, zinc, nickel, manganase,

and cadmium occur in these acidic ponds. Soils and sediments have also been chemically altered. The biota in these acidic ponds are characteristic of acidic environments worldwide, in contrast to the typically arctic biota in adjacent alkaline 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 pyride 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.

seeming environment. I ran across a twenty twenty 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. Just to read a quick quote, oxidative weathering of this unit creates extensive gerocite rich deposits and banded gerocite and pilos 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 Journals.

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 podcast feed for Invention out there. That was a fun though short lived show that we did on the side dealing with inventions in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, though we also do listener mail. On Mondays, we do 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.