Channelknight Fadran

There's a mine in Centralia, Pennsylvania that has been on fire since 1962.

It's a coal mine, from back in ye olde days before we'd figured out just how bad for the environment coal could be. The company had cut a bunch of costs by stripping out the coal and dumping it illegally throughout the area, which eventually caught the attention of the Centralia Council who ordered it all to be cleaned up at once.

These dumps were historically quite the fire hazard, which is probably what prompted them to dispose of the landfills via a controlled burn. Long story short, it didn't turn out well, and a few carbon monoxide tests later showed that the underground was, in fact, quite on fire.

You might wonder how a fire can burn underground for so long, and the answer is that they're just burning reeeeeeally slowly. There's enough(ish) oxygen down in the deep for the coal to slowly smoulder into ashes, expelling the fumes to make just enough room for more oxygen. And if you're skeptical, then just go on by where the town used to be and find some rocks in a field - I did, several years back, and you can indeed feel the heat coming out from the fire.

And these coal-seam fires aren't just in Pennsylvania - there are tons in China, New Zealand, Europe, etc. Centralia's just the most famous and longest-burning.

Or, at least, that's what I thought. Curious, I looked up "longest-burning fire," expecting ol' Centralia to get at least top three - but what I found wasn't a list. It was a singular, undebated fact:

Burning Mountain, Australia, is so-named because it has been on fire for -

- I shrimp you not -

Six. Thousand. Years.