00:00There is a fire on earth that has been burning for 6,000 years.
00:04And it has never once been put out.
00:06It has no flames, no smoke.
00:08Stand on top of it and you feel only a strange heat under your feet.
00:12The air stings your throat.
00:14Every year it creeps forward about 1 meter, and everything it passes turns to dead, bare
00:18ground.
00:19Like an invisible beast crawling through the belly of the earth.
00:22Some scientists suspect it may have been burning for half a million years.
00:26In 1829, humans finally noticed it.
00:28At first they thought they had found a volcano.
00:31But this was no volcano.
00:33It was a coal seam, buried 30 meters underground, quietly on fire.
00:38And what happened next would teach us something terrifying, underground coal fires are nearly
00:42impossible to extinguish.
00:43An entire American town was forced to relocate because of one.
00:47China once announced it had put one out.
00:49Years later, the flames broke through the ground again.
00:52So what keeps these fires alive?
00:54And why do they defeat everything we throw at them?
00:56Right now, this particular fire is creeping toward another town.
01:01Slowly.
01:02Relentlessly.
01:03The fire has a name, Burning Mountain.
01:06Local aboriginal people call it Windjen, and in their language, Windjen simply means fire.
01:11The mountain has existed in their culture for longer than any written record.
01:15Their ancestors passed down a legend.
01:17Long ago, a tribesman was dragged underground by an evil spirit.
01:21Trapped, he set the whole mountain alight with a fire stick, sending smoke into the sky, warning all who came
01:26after to never go near it.
01:27The legend sounds like myth.
01:29But what scientists found underground is stranger than any myth.
01:33Beneath Windjen lies a coal seam formed 280 million years ago.
01:37Back then, the earth was in the Permian period, and this part of Australia was not a dry wasteland.
01:42It was a humid tropical belt covered in giant ferns and ancient pines.
01:46Countless plants died, their remains sank into swamps, and under immense heat and pressure, over millions of years, they became
01:52a coal seam about 2 meters thick.
01:54That seam is the fuel.
01:56Roughly 6000 years ago, on some forgotten day, a lightning strike may have ignited a coal seam exposed at the
02:01surface.
02:02Or the coal may have spontaneously combusted in the dry heat.
02:06Either way, the fire started.
02:08And from that moment on, it has never stopped.
02:11How do scientists calculate 6000 years?
02:14The method is beautifully simple.
02:16They track the path the fire has taken underground and find a trail of scorched rock 6 and a half
02:20kilometers long.
02:21The ground above it is discolored, the soil is volcanic red, and nothing grows.
02:26The fire moves about 1 meter per year.
02:296500 meters, 1 meter a year.
02:32The math gives you the answer.
02:34But another group of scientists disagrees.
02:36They argue the fire has traveled far more than 6 and a half kilometers, and that its earliest starting point
02:41has been completely erased by weathering and erosion.
02:44If that is true, the true age of this fire could be as much as 500,000 years.
02:49So here is the question.
02:50How can a single fire burn for so long?
02:53What keeps it alive?
02:54The answer comes down to a self-sustaining loop.
02:57The coal seam is the fuel.
02:59The underground fire generates intense heat.
03:02That heat fractures the rock above, opening countless small cracks and fissures.
03:06Fresh air flows down through those cracks, feeding oxygen to the fire.
03:10More oxygen means more burning.
03:12More burning means higher temperatures.
03:15Higher temperatures fracture even more rock, opening even more cracks.
03:19Fuel, oxygen, heat.
03:21Each one feeds the next, a near-perfect loop.
03:23And there is one more crucial detail.
03:2630 meters of rock and soil above the fire acts as the perfect insulation.
03:30The heat cannot escape upward, and water cannot seep in.
03:34The fire is wrapped in the earth like a blanket.
03:37That is the root reason it cannot be extinguished.
03:39Pour in water, and it evaporates before it ever reaches the thousand-degree core.
03:43Your water simply becomes steam.
03:46Cover the ground with soil, and new cracks tear open within days.
03:49Dig down to fight it directly, and exposing the fire to a rush of fresh air does not put it
03:54out.
03:54It can instantly turn a smoldering seam into a violent, roaring inferno.
03:58Every method humans have tried makes it worse.
04:01Against this kind of fire, we are almost helpless.
04:04And earth does not have only one.
04:06On May 27, 1962, in Pennsylvania, a small town called Centralia prepared for Memorial Day.
04:12The council arranged for workers to clean up a landfill sitting over an abandoned coal pit.
04:17The method was simple and brutal.
04:19Set the trash on fire.
04:21When the flames died down, workers sprayed the surface with water and everyone went home.
04:26But the fire was not out.
04:28It slipped along the base of the pit, through a gap nobody noticed,
04:31and crept into the abandoned coal mines running beneath the town.
04:34Within days, carbon monoxide began seeping out of the mine openings.
04:38Months later, residents noticed smoke rising from their own backyards.
04:42In 1979, a gas station owner checked the temperature of his underground tanks and
04:46found they were 30 degrees hotter than normal.
04:48Beneath their feet sat a moving furnace.
04:50In 1981, a 12-year-old boy was walking through his family's yard when the ground
04:54suddenly split open, revealing a sinkhole nearly 50 meters deep.
04:58Boiling steam and toxic gas burst upward.
05:01He clung to a tree root and barely escaped with his life.
05:04The whole town was filled with carbon monoxide and sulfur.
05:07The ground could collapse at any moment.
05:09Children stopped playing outside.
05:12The elderly stopped sitting in their yards.
05:14In 1983, experts estimated that permanently extinguishing the fire would cost $663 million.
05:20The government's conclusion was blunt.
05:23Too expensive.
05:25Abandon it.
05:25In 1984, Congress approved $42 million, not to put out the fire, but to relocate the people.
05:32A town that once held 1100 residents now holds only 5.
05:35The roads are closed.
05:37The houses are gone.
05:38The church is abandoned.
05:41This town, which truly existed on the map of America, became a ghost town.
05:45And the fire beneath it is expected to keep burning for at least another 250 years.
05:50China fought this battle too.
05:52Beneath the coal fields of Xinjiang, a coal fire burned from the Qin Dynasty all the way into the 21st
05:57century.
05:58129 years.
06:00Every year it consumed more than a million tons of coal, destroying resources worth over 2 billion yuan.
06:05Deep underground, the core temperature hit 1290 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava.
06:11Nearly 2 million square meters of coal field were burned to ash.
06:14The ground temperature stayed above 60 degrees Celsius year-round.
06:18Step on it in leather shoes, and within seconds the salts begin to scorch.
06:22The Kazakh hurting families who had lived there for generations were all forced to leave.
06:26After the founding of New China, the government organized firefighting efforts several times,
06:31but early technology was limited to local suppression.
06:33Time after time, the fire was declared extinguished, and time after time, within a few years,
06:38it clawed its way back up from below.
06:40Then, in the year 2000, the state issued a hard order.
06:44Nearly 100 million yuan in special funding.
06:47The nation's top geologists, firefighters, and environmental experts assembled.
06:52Satellite remote sensing locked onto the hottest zones.
06:55Drones mapped the surface cracks.
06:57Ground-penetrating radar scanned the underground structure.
07:00Three systems working together split the entire fire zone into 18 separate battle units.
07:05The extinguishing process had four steps.
07:08Bulldozers leveled the ground.
07:10Water was pumped in around the clock to cool the coal seam below 70 degrees Celsius.
07:14Deep boreholes were drilled and filled with slurry to seal off every oxygen channel.
07:18But look around the planet, and such victories are vanishingly rare.
07:22Right now, more than a thousand underground coal fires are burning across the earth.
07:27In Jurya, India, a fire has burned since 1916, over a century, with 73 fire zones still expanding.
07:33The United Nations lists it as one of the world's worst pollution hotspots.
07:37On the southern coast of Turkey, the flames of Yanardas are fueled by underground natural gas
07:41and may have burned for 2500 years.
07:44Ancient Greek sailors used its glow as a lighthouse.
07:47Some scholars believe the fire-breathing monster Chimera, from Greek mythology, was inspired by these
07:52mysterious flames rising from the earth.
07:54And Turkmenistan's Darvaza gas crater is even stranger.
07:58In 1971, Soviet engineers drilling for oil in the desert accidentally punctured a huge underground
08:03natural gas cavern.
08:04The ground collapsed, forming a crater 70 meters wide and 30 meters deep.
08:08To prevent toxic gas from spreading, they set it on fire, expecting it to burn out in a few days.
08:14That fire has now burned for more than 50 years, and it is still burning today.
08:18Now let us return to Australia.
08:20The fire of Burning Mountain is still there, 30 meters down, burning quietly,
08:24creeping south at 1 meter per year.
08:27Scientists have tracked its path and found that not far ahead lies a small river.
08:31When the fire reaches directly beneath that stream, it may break back through the surface,
08:35producing visible open flames.
08:37And the water will not stop it.
08:39The intense heat will evaporate the river, fracturing even more rock,
08:42helping the fire cross the channel and keep moving south.
08:45Across the river sits a small town.
08:47If this fire keeps advancing at this pace over the coming centuries,
08:51that town could repeat the fate of Centralia,
08:53driven into ghost town silence by a fire that was first lit 6000 years ago.
08:56And the coal scene beneath Burning Mountain belongs to a vast Permian coal belt.
09:01No one knows how much fuel is left in that scene.
09:03No one can predict how long this fire will burn.
09:06Maybe another 6000 years.
09:08Maybe another half a million.
09:10It does not care about human existence.
09:13It does not care about the rise and fall of cities.
09:16It simply follows its own rhythm, meter by meter, smoldering inside the body of the earth.
09:21From the day the first Mesopotamian city rose,
09:23to the day the last pyramid stone was set, it has been burning.
09:26All of human civilization is nothing more than a single moment in a long,
09:30long burning of this fire.
09:31And the third one is nothing more from us.
09:32And in fact the cross-cor
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