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Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962
- posix_compliant 6y agoAnecdote: I went there two months ago with a shovel, and couldn’t find any burning sites.
- vanattab 6y agoHere is the Wikipedia article about coal seam fires, apparently there are over 1000 active fires. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
- markgall 6y agoNot exactly news then, is it?
- arcticfox 6y agoI'm not sure I follow, but is that questioning whether it's on-topic for HN? If so, worth a quick recheck of the guidelines. I personally found the wiki article interesting from beginning to end.
- sumthinprofound 6y agothis is my first time hearing of it. only other thing similar I'm familiar with is the Springfield tire fire on The Simpsons, and I always thought that was hyperbole, until now.
- Breza 6y agoIf you're ever in the area, it's worth driving over and walking around. It's a bizarre place.
- robbiep 6y agoThere’s also this in Turkmenistan https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/news/energy/2014/07/140716-door-to-hell-darvaza-crater-george-kourounis-expedition https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/d...
- handedness 6y agoNon-AMP version for anyone who wants it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/07/140716-door-to-hell-darvaza-crater-george-kourounis-expedition/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/07/14071...
- tech-historian 6y agoNews != something being interesting
- xwdv 6y agoWhy not just put it out?
- neverartful 6y agoThe linked article describes multiple attempts to do just that. However, it's pretty difficult (if not impossible) to do.
- alexchamberlain 6y agoPresumably it's burning hot enough and with enough fuel that putting it out is difficult using conventional methods (ie cooling). You see a similar problem with field fires or battery fires. That being said, in this case, I'm surprised you couldn't say its supply of oxygen, unless I missed something in the article?
- Retric 6y agoDepriving it of oxygen and cooling run into the same issue, namely after burning this long heat has penetrated deep into the surroundings. To the point where it likely takes years to cool off.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoShould be an easy way to reduce carbon emissions at least.
- alamortsubite 6y agoIf that's even possible, it would be extremely expensive to do so. To make things more complicated politically, the problem is very localized and the town has already been abandoned. But hopefully, at some point we'll have the technology to do this, because otherwise it's hard not to imagine the fire will continue to burn forever.
- quaffapint 6y ago20 years ago or so we would drive through the area and smell it. We went back there about 5 years ago and wandered around the graffiti highway with the family. It was an interesting experience. You just pulled along basically an old road and wandered around some abandoned graffiti'd up roads and woods. It didn't really smell like before. There were still homes on the edges, which I was surprised to see. Good to read the article to understand why they were still there. I imagine they're happy that the 'attraction' has been shut down.
- alamortsubite 6y agoIn the 80s and 90s many row homes in Centralia had ad hock supports keeping them standing upright- their next-door neighbors had already been evacuated and demolished due to subsidence from the fire depleting coal veins below. It was impressive. Besides the smoke and odor, on the outskirts of town you could sometimes see fire coming up out of the ground.
- jennyyang 6y agoWhat exactly is burning at this point? I would suspect there is little oxygen left down there. Is it some other form of chemical reaction? They can't just dump boatloads of water to douse the flames? There appears to be enough water for things like fracking, we can't do the same here?
- Hamuko 6y agoIf there's smoke coming out, wouldn't it mean that there's a route for oxygen to get in?
- jennyyang 6y agoIf that's the only route in, then no. Because most of that is expelled gasses due to heat, there's no way that oxygen could go in if the gasses and smoke were being driven out by the fire.
- alamortsubite 6y agoThe scope of the problem is huge. Oxygen can enter from a highly elaborate network of abandoned mines and boreholes that stretch for miles, as well as any number of surface fissures. As far as the coal component, keep in mind that this region has the highest concentration of anthracite in the world.
- riffraff 6y agoSee also Brennender Berg[0], which has been burning since 1662. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennender_Berg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennender_Berg
- 323454 6y agoI wonder if this type of phenomena is the origin of the dragon under mountain type of myth. E.g. Tolkien's Smaug
- kangnkodos 6y agoOr hell
- m463 6y agoThere are nuclear reactors that have been around a while too. Don't know if they've been going the entire 1.8 billion years though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
- mannykannot 6y agoIIRC, this could not happen today, as the concentration of U235 in natural uranium has decreased (by decay) to the point where there's not enough for a chain reaction to be sustained with any naturally-occurring moderator. Some of the mined uranium was found to have a lower concentration of uranium-235 than expected, as if it had already been in a reactor. When geologists investigated they also found products typical of a reactor. They concluded that the deposit had been in a reactor: a natural nuclear fission reactor, around 1.8 to 1.7 billion years BP – in the Paleoproterozoic Era during Precambrian times. At that time the natural uranium had a concentration of about 3% 235U, and could have reached criticality with natural water as neutron moderator allowed by the special geometry of the deposit. It sputtered on and off for hundreds of thousands of years: https://ans.org/pi/np/oklo/ https://ans.org/pi/np/oklo/
- nelsonmandela 6y agoI wonder what the effect on the plant life around it is like Doesn't seem like there is anything in the wikipedia about CO2 ppm
- Breza 6y agoFrom my wandering around the ruins, the plant life looked the same as the rest of the area. My hunch is that the difference from the CO2 is smaller than if the plants were being actively fertilized, for example.
- alamortsubite 6y agoCompared to the damage done to the ground and surface water in that area due to mining, probably little-to-none. The fire is burning slowly, if indefinitely, and anthracite coal is relatively clean-burning.
- nelsonmandela 6y agoI was thinking it would be beneficial to have an abundance of co2
- alamortsubite 6y agoGotcha. Given how ecologically screwed up that area is, it seems like it'd be tough to separate that effect. We can at least hope for a silver lining.
- voisin 6y agoIs t burning hot enough that the heat could be harnessed like geothermal energy?
- alamortsubite 6y agoI'll always remember Centralia fondly as the post-apocalyptic wasteland of my childhood. Before the state was forced to close off the section of Route 61 that later became known as the "Graffiti Highway," you were likely to encounter abrupt drops and ridges in the pavement as you drove through, the result of subsidence caused by the fires burning through the coal veins below. You were also treated to the sight of smoke wafting up from fissures in the ground, and sometimes even flames. I took my girlfriend for a visit 7 or 8 years ago. At that point the town had been almost completely razed. Without explanation to an uninitiated viewer, curbs and fire hydrants bizarrely poked out from a field of weeds that had grown over much of the town's streets, the houses behind them long bulldozed and abandoned. The strangest thing to me, though, was the juxtaposition of the newly-constructed Locust Ridge Wind Farm high on a neighboring mountain, its enormous windmills plainly visible from the rubble on the hill in town, all offering a stark and beautiful reminder that even after the apocalypse things can get better.