Submitted by jamescookenotthatone t3_11xdorh in todayilearned
That's insane. I can't imagine. How long had you lived there before discovering your angry dirt?
18 years! The soil itself is fairly new as far as dirt goes, as the mine was open less than 150 years ago though I don't know the exact date
Whaaaaaaat?! So fascinating! Did the snow stick in those spots over the years? Oh my gosh I have a million questions.
Yeah the snow had no problem sticking, and we get so much rain the ground gets soaked a long ways down. It had to have been a very recent event, we did burn some wooden construction waste a few months prior but we'd never had a problem like this before so I'm not sure. It's quite a mystery
Post some pics man! Would love to see it!
Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures :( I was pretty occupied, but I wish I had gotten some
Have you looked into whether there is any sort of comeback or cleanup/compensation available from the former mine owners? This doesn’t seem right.
No? I mean, I live on seven acres and 4 of them have this coal wash going down like three feet. I don't think there's anything to do about it, and besides the plants seem to like it. I don't even know if the mining company is active, a logging company runs the hill now.
That’s some twin peaks shit. fascinating!
Wonder if you could use the heat to make power somehow
My first job was at a sawmill. They had an area for air drying timber that was previously a dump for sawdust and bark, and it was capped with a metre of fill.
One of my tasks was to take the temperature of the ground around a crack in the fill that had been smoking for ten or so years.
There was no way to put out the fire, but the concern was if it broke through, all the semi-dried timber stacked on top would go up in flames. Plus, the site backed onto the forest, so a fire would be disastrous.
Who decided to store drying timber on top of smoldering sawdust?
Dave did, he liked the job security.
It was only Partly_Dave's fault.
Just how toxic is your yard? Coal wash is not exactly known as good healthy ground right?
No clue! The plants like it, the grass grows very sugary and none of our animals have like cancer or anything. In fact they usually live their full lifespans, all our dogs get to be ancient and our cats get old as balls too. The horses like the grass so much they get fat and the elk make a point of eating up the yard. All things considered it doesn't seem very toxic!
In the Pacific Northwest?
We have rainforests and deserts; Ski mountains and hot springs; Volcanoes and cedar groves. Don't judge us by Portland and Seattle.
Fair enough but hot springs, snowy mountains and volcanoes can be found almost anywhere.
Yes.
Half of Oregon looks like Arizona. It has scorpions and snakes
Didn’t know the first part but snakes aren’t exclusive to desert climates.
Generally they aren't a fan of damp though, unless sea snakes. Should have seen my face when we found a scorpion though, colour me surprised!
Also I recommend the movie even cowgirls get the blues not as good the book obvs but the rock makes an appearance
every rainforest on earth would like to disagree
You are correct. I forgot about the other snakes
Yes. That's where Oregon is
I'm not sure what you're surprised at
Just for that level of dryness to be present in that region. Since it’s a temperate rainforest and everything.
Look at a satellite map of Oregon. Most of the green is concentrated in the Cascadian range of the west. It's mostly desert as you go east.
Ah yeah, the rainforest is only in the Olympic peninsula from what I've seen. It gets wet a lot there
Edit: to add we've been at like 80% of our regular water table and in a drought the last few years
Yeah, that’s what everyone thinks, that it rains every day. I assure you, it does not.
We do not get enough average annual rain in most parts of Oregon to be a temperate rainforest by about 10 inches. And even without that, the wooded, foresty areas that everyone thinks of when thinking of oregon are on the northwestern coastal areas. The rest of the state is varying states of grasslands and dessert, and while less poplated, is the larger portion of the state by far.
Billy Joel was brought in for questioning but continues to deny involvement, authorities say.
Fantastic guide.
When I was a kid I used to think the line "trouble in the Suez!" was "trouble in the sewers!" because I was a child and didn't know what the Suez was. Around the same exact time, I walked out into the living room while my mom was watching IT and it was the part where Pennywise was trying to lure Georgie down into the sewer. So I spent an unreasonable amount of time in 1990-'91 thinking there was some epidemic of child-murderers lurking in the sewers.
found philomena cunk's reddit account
Haha. Similarly my first musical memory was at 3 or 4 years old and it's sitting in the back of my mom's car thinking BJ is singing "Harmonicaaa harmonicaaa."
The tune made sense in my preschool head. :-)
Wait, which song did you think that was part of?
Ask a tween how old a boomer is…
Ask a twink how moldy my bloomers are.
How is it possible that you have 2 million comment karma?
The same way you get to Carnegie Hall.
Mapquest.
But what about Carnegie Mellon?
Their acceptance rate is about 14%, same as my Reddit comments. You don't get to 2 million karma without taking countless thousands of downvotes.
Quantity over quality.
Quality is an oddly subjective thing. The vast majority of my most-upvoted shit is just sorta meh, whereas there are some absolute gems out there that land with a resounding thud and die with three upvotes. I click save on them all the same so I can go back and giggle when I'm bored and/or sad Landlubber.
Sooo quantity then?
Depends on who you ask I guess. I encourage anyone to get out there and try to throw endless comments out and see if it gets you to 2 million. There's some dude out there with like 20-something million comment karma, he's probably the one to ask. I used to be 50th on Earth, now I'm barely scraping top-100. I got banned from my main karma sub six years ago, now I just grab a bit here and there.
Amazing use of your free time. I wish I had such low standards. I’m rich, but sad. I envy your meaningless karma.
Oh I suspect you're mocking me. Here's a shiny. Cheer up.
Actually, I was just being a clown. It wasn’t a serious comment.
He didn't start the fire!
It's reported that his comment on it was "it was always burning, since the world's been turning."
Ah, I see Billy subscribes to the 6000 year-old world theory.
Oct 23rd, 4004 BC
The Grateful Dead did.
RYAN STARTED THE FIRE!
Everything in Australia wants to kill you. Even the ground.
At least the ground in Australia is honest about its intentions.
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This episode of Bluey is called "Coal Fires".
Bluey-fied picture of a lump of coal...on fire.
However, as hot air rises, the burning ground in Australia is perfectly safe.
So you’re saying It’s above the environment?
There is one thing that is not doing that: Volcanoes.
Send in the Emu’s….bbq…..
> The site's name is Mount Wingen but is commonly called Burning Mountain
Nobody knows how it earned the nickname.
>The Aborigines named the mountain Wingen, which means 'fire'.
I'd say they asked the locals but this is probably more of a "great minds think alike" situation. lol
Actually got the nick name because that's where they used to 420 blaze it
I get not putting it out (hugely impractical scale), but it's weird that nobody's found a way to monetise it.
Free heat enough to scorch the earth and nobody's come up with a way to make electricity from it?
Because we can't export it, so no cunt is interested
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That'll be wrong & totally against the ethos of selling more fossil fuel
The Centralia, PA mine fire is only 61 y/o. Barely even on the chart! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
Has anybody considered that this might be the gateway to Hell?
Nah. That's in Turkmenistan
And in ancient times, the the Greco-Roman Ploutonion at Hierapolis.
*Highway to hell
That's in Kansas.
With all the environmental things going on, why not put it out?
There's something similar going on in the abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. In the 60s or something the coal mine underneath the town caught on fire, has been on fire since then and everyone moved out. I'm assuming it's impossible to put the fire out.
There’s some long running fires underground along the Colorado Front Range too. They were cited as a possible source for a wild grassland fire that burnt down almost a thousand homes at the end of 2021.
They used an old pit mine as a dump. Then they set the dump on fire. Fire spread to the coal seam underground.
Because putting out a fire that rages through a million tiny cracks in the ground requires that you find ALL of those tiny cracks. This is not something science has an answer to yet.
Ok I got it, fracking but with... Foam.
1 Government contract pls.
Foam? Why not seawater? No shortage of salt water any time soon.
2 government contracts, pls.
Because salting the earth is almost as bad as a low, slow fire
That’s why you get a contract to get rid of the salt water you used to get rid of the fire
It's Australia, when they're done they can just tow the saltwater out of the environment.
Oh yeah, i forgot about that. Well eityer way fracking wouldn't work because it covers too small an area.
Also fracking is pretty short-ranged as i understand it, damn inverse square law. If it were that small we could just comb the whole thing with enough people, the problem is that its a lot bigger than that.
It could be excavated in advance? Travels at 1m/year. Begin 50 meters down the road..
Its a vein of coal in the earth, its not gonna expand beyond the bounds of the coal, its just that short of excavating the ENTIRE thing theres no way to make it stop, and making a pit that big costs a lot of money. That much funding would frankly do more good elsewhere.
Coal is being dug in mines for profit all over. How deep is this burn? It has air. It scorches the earth..
I imagine it would also be incredibly dangerous to even attempt, you're exposing coal thats been burning off of a tiny stream of o2 for ages, to a ton of air all at once.
True. But then there is no coal. Removing the fuel would make it stop burning.
Coal being dug for profit depends on many things. Ease of access, both in the mining sense (how easy is it to dig a mine, and how safe is the soil around it to prevent subsidence) and the distance to where it is needed. In a remote area, transportation costs might soon exceed mining profits even if it's high grade coal.
Tbt. I imagine someone would have done it if there was profit to be made. It may drive a sick kind of tourism? I donno. But stopped it can be. Probably not worth it.
i mean you’d probably have to redirect a river into it to stop it
I don't think that would do it.
It's clearly got its own oxygen source down there and open spaces that aren't braced frequently collapse protecting the front edge of the fire from the burned sections and the unburned sections aren't that permeable to water.
It would cost way way way too much. Even then probably impossible. We don't control nature.
Maybe, because it has nothing to do at all with anthropogenic climate change?
According to the Aborigines it is anthropocentric though...
I’m assuming the downvotes are from people scared of the word anthropogenic
It still contributes to the same issues, even if it's not caused by humans.
The vast amounts of resources needed to even try to put this out probably far outweigh the benefits.
But i don't think it's accurate to say that just because it's not human made it can't haem us.
What I am saying is, that it is totally irrelevant to current climate change. It doesn't "contribute to the same issues", because natural sources just don't have the same, critical effect, even if you take all of them combined, as anthropogenic climate change.
Dunno what to say to this. That's simply not true.
You can't say that human coal burning contributes to our climate change but coal burning that we didn't cause doesn't contribute.
What /u/Vlacas12 means is this; There are $X tons of CO2 released naturally. There are $Y tons of CO2 released due to human activity.
$X isn't such a big deal, taken apart from $Y, because nature recycles it. Add in $Y, which is more than nature can make use of, that's a big deal.
Does that makes sense? OP is breaking it down, you're taking a total approach. One can't say either view is wrong.
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Woosh
1m per year, sounds dumb but can’t we just dig a fire break like we do in the tree lines
We probably could but the practicality of it would depend on how deep and wide the vein is. If it's 100m deep and 50m wide it's probably too expensive to dig a suitable trench out to completely cut off the vein. Also, it wouldn't stop the fire, it would just prevent it from spreading any further.
They COULD do that to save the environment. OR say fuck it and ignore it.
Holy smoke batman
I remember going there quite some years ago, you could see the path the fire had taken, where the trees had died and the ground had subsided.
Where's Roshi when you need him
How does a fire burn underground? Wouldn't lack of oxygen put it out?
Cracks and crevices in the ground allow air in. Not very much air - the coal is just barely alight, just barely smouldering, like charcoal and a barbeque.
Normally, coal would go out with so little air. However, it's trapped deep underground and the heat can't escape. So, even just smouldering, with the heat being trapped, will keep the fire alight.
Sounds super efficient, do you think this coal thing has legs? I'm sure there are no drawbacks.
My ex-bf once tried to convince me that the “eternal flame” was burning because of Jesus
Is that 1 mile per year or one meter per year?
Meter
Fire, fire on the mountain.
Australia never ceases to be more terrifying to me.
Grateful Dead wrote a whole song about it
Oi why don't they just put water on it. Problem?
Because it’ll turn into steam?
Catch the steam with a tarp, it condenses and falls back down. Boom you got yourself a self sustaining fire putter outer.
I’m not an engineer or scientist so I can’t say whether that would work or not.
You know damn well it'd work, don't steal my idea
Usually takes a crane to put them out..
I'll add one more wHy DoNt ThEy JuSt PuT iT oUt to this thread and then my shitty idea that wouldn't work/is impossible followed by waxing poetic about how passionate I am about climate change and then finally put a bow on the whole thing by making an incredibly forced Australia upside down joke.
I'd recommend sending in an army of Russian 5th graders to put out the fire but they will probably be sent to the front lines in Ukraine here pretty soon =(
<Serious> How can coal burn underground with no oxygen source?
Thats why its burning for so long its just smoldering if its good material even a small bit can smolder for very long time look up amadou tinder fungus.
Probably slow convection through the soil
Who says there is no oxygen source?
Why don't they put it out with a kame hame ha blast?
At last: We've identified the source of global warming climate change!
Fuck… American here. 1m a year?? Which M?? Mile? Meter? Milli something 😂??!
Meters.
I think I thought that but was really more interested in being lazy and wanting to not google how much a meter is in comparison to feet. I know it’s bitchy. It’s enough that I know 3 feet is one yard!
Did this thousand-years fire punch a hole in Earth's fart shield?
The local explanation is so blunt, a man fell down a sinkhole. He lit a torch and incinerated himself. No magic sky birds, just a poor unfortunate who warns us to this day of his folly.
Did you, like, intentionally read around the stuff you didn’t like?
Not everything, especially concerning ancient human societies, has to boil down to “religion bad.” Until fairly recently (in the grand scheme of our existence) religion and the supernatural was how all people alive understood the world.
> The Aborigines named the mountain Wingen, which means 'fire'. Their explanation of the origin of the burning mountain was that one day, a tribesman was lighting a fire on the mountainside when he was carried off deep into the earth by The Evil One. Unable to escape, he used his fire stick to set the mountain alight, so that the smoke might warn others to keep away.
He is literally carried into the mountain by an evil spirit and lights the mountain on fire to warn others of the spirit’s presence. The complete opposite of your understanding.
valkyrjuk t1_jd3jr01 wrote
My whole yard is coal wash from a nearby mine. Two years ago when the PNW had that really bad summer where it got to 114 degrees we had a fire start in the yard. We got it taken care of and started looking for the source. Using our excavator and some kind of a heat vision thing we dug into a really hot spot underground. Dude, the dirt in the pit we dug was fucking boiling. It's normally a thick black mud out here, but it looked like bubbling black sand. Like I was boiling ink.
I'm not sure what started it, it could have been burning for years and the drout is all that was needed to set the lawn on fire, but it was spooky man.