Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Rob and I are
Speaker 2: out this week, so we are bringing you some episodes
Speaker 2: from the vault. This one originally published April twenty sixth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two. This is part one of our series
Speaker 2: called Fire from the Rocks. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. When we think
Speaker 1: about fire, and we do think about fire a lot
Speaker 1: on this show, it's come out time and time again.
Speaker 2: Are you confessing something that we love.
Speaker 1: Fire, that we worship fire, that we delight in its
Speaker 1: growth and its consumption. No, but it is be fed,
Speaker 1: It must be fed. But it is an import an
Speaker 1: aspect of Earth. You know, as we've discussed on past episodes.
Speaker 1: You know, Earth is the only planet known to have fire,
Speaker 1: and there was a time when there was no fire
Speaker 1: on Earth because it wasn't possible yet. You know, fire.
Speaker 1: When we think about fire, we think about its fleeting nature,
Speaker 1: but also its potential. It's tremendous power provided conditions are
Speaker 1: just right. It's always interesting to think about how fire
Speaker 1: is in many ways more an event than a thing.
Speaker 1: For it to happen, you need heat, fuel, and oxygen,
Speaker 1: and the fuel and the oxygen were not always present
Speaker 1: on our planet. Fire is more or less an aspect
Speaker 1: of the New Earth, and the earliest evidence of charred
Speaker 1: vegetation dates back a mere four hundred and forty million years.
Speaker 2: Right, So today natural forest fires are just part of
Speaker 2: the cycle of life on the surface of Earth. But
Speaker 2: there was a time when Earth had its first forest fire.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine that, like the first time that ever happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's crazy to imagine. And so this is
Speaker 1: this has been an aspect of life under the Earth
Speaker 1: ever since. And yeah, with fire, it's interesting too because
Speaker 1: there's this trifecta obviously that's necessary for it to exist,
Speaker 1: but it is a delicate tripod. Remove one of the
Speaker 1: legs of the fire tripod and the fire will perish.
Speaker 1: So yeah, our relationship with fire is sometimes like whoa,
Speaker 1: this is out of control, and other times it is
Speaker 1: you know, I can't get this thing to light at all,
Speaker 1: you know, So I think we're all familiar with that
Speaker 1: with the dual nature of fire. So for today's episode,
Speaker 1: and this will spill into into the next episode as well,
Speaker 1: I thought we might start with just what I thought
Speaker 1: was just a really tantalizing question because I'd never really
Speaker 1: thought about it before, not until you brought up this topic,
Speaker 1: And that is what is the longest that a single
Speaker 1: fire has raged? And I guess there are all sorts
Speaker 1: of sort of artificial parameters we might throw in, you know,
Speaker 1: what constitutes a single fire versus multiple fires spread out
Speaker 1: over time. I guess we kind of have to take
Speaker 1: the human scenario of like a hearth or a campfire
Speaker 1: and imagine that is sort of our basic principle, like
Speaker 1: a single a single flame that keeps eating things, keeps consuming,
Speaker 1: maybe it moves. But what is the longest that such
Speaker 1: a fire has raged without snuffing out completely and having
Speaker 1: to be reset one way or another.
Speaker 2: Great question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so of course you know the answer that I
Speaker 1: know the answer to now, But putting ourselves in the
Speaker 1: mindset of someone who doesn't know the answer, you might
Speaker 1: likely turn to a few different categories to start off,
Speaker 1: And the first would be what we just talked about,
Speaker 1: forest fires. So as long as we've had forests and fire.
Speaker 1: This has been a possibility here on Earth. Many of
Speaker 1: the worst forest fires in history, though, are measured in
Speaker 1: terms of acres, destruction, and fatality rather than in time.
Speaker 1: But if you dig down you can start seeing some
Speaker 1: time stamps on things. Many of the worst are dated
Speaker 1: to just a single day in human history. Others last longer, though.
Speaker 1: Some of the consist of multiple blazes, so it becomes
Speaker 1: perhaps a little more of a challenge to think of
Speaker 1: a continuous fire in these cases, though in many of
Speaker 1: the cases I think it does fit. Some wildfire seasons,
Speaker 1: of course, span many months, and then you have particular
Speaker 1: fires that have raged for a period of time. There's
Speaker 1: the Coyote Fire of nineteen sixty four in Santa Barbara, California,
Speaker 1: which lasted from September first to October first. So it
Speaker 1: seems we might think if we're thinking about modern forest fires,
Speaker 1: we're going to probably look at something lasting days, months
Speaker 1: somewhere in that range. Now, as for wildfires of yesteryear,
Speaker 1: as well as blazes caused by prehistoric extinction events, I
Speaker 1: couldn't find many stats on this, but I suppose it's
Speaker 1: worth thinking about. But it's also worth thinking about the
Speaker 1: fact that when you have a particularly large energetic fire,
Speaker 1: it can ultimately become something entirely different. You've become this
Speaker 1: fire storm which creates and sustains its own wind system.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I guess that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: when we start looking at some of these big blazes,
Speaker 1: they do tremendous damage, they can cover a pretty large area,
Speaker 1: but they're still not lasting that long in time because
Speaker 1: they're just eating through all of that fuel in a
Speaker 1: relatively short period of time. And of course, with when
Speaker 1: we're talking about wildfires, we also have to think about
Speaker 1: the fact that, you know, the human civilization has an
Speaker 1: impact as well on just how wildfires will play out
Speaker 1: through a given forest scenario, you know, and to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, you know, we've been able to jump in
Speaker 1: with with orchestrated burns, control burns to try and simulate
Speaker 1: sort of the natural cycle of fires that would normally occur.
Speaker 1: But another area where you have to factor in human
Speaker 1: civilization is of course, when you're dealing with urban fires,
Speaker 1: where the trees and various other aspects of the natural
Speaker 1: world have been remade into an artificial environment a city,
Speaker 1: and then what happens when that catches fire. Well, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of the same practicalities are involved here
Speaker 1: as well. Some of the great fires to ravaged cities
Speaker 1: are often measured to a single date and time, though
Speaker 1: there are some exceptions. There's the one forty six BCE
Speaker 1: burning of Carthage, which reportedly took seventeen days, but this
Speaker 1: was also said to be a systematic burning of the
Speaker 1: city by the Romans, So I'm not sure that would
Speaker 1: count so much because it was one of these situations obviously,
Speaker 1: where the Romans are like, let's burn the city down,
Speaker 1: let's make sure everything burns through. There are some other
Speaker 1: fires that are worth mentioning. There's the Great Fire of
Speaker 1: Utricht in the Netherlands that lasted nine days reportedly in
Speaker 1: twelve fifty three. There's the eighteen eighty nine first Great
Speaker 1: Fire of Lynn, Massachusetts, reportedly last two weeks, destroying roughly
Speaker 1: one hundred buildings. So it looks like if we were
Speaker 1: going to say, look to the world of like urban
Speaker 1: fires for some sort of a candidate for longest fire,
Speaker 1: you're going to be looking at something in the realm
Speaker 1: of days to weeks. But figures beyond that seem kind
Speaker 1: of doubtful. All right, The next area to think about, though,
Speaker 1: would be, of course, human sustained fires. What about situations
Speaker 1: in which a human cultivated flame, a flame that's kept
Speaker 1: and fed more or less like a pet, either for
Speaker 1: technological purposes, say like a forge or a pilot light,
Speaker 1: or something that's more religious or secular, or a secular
Speaker 1: symbol in nature, you know, something like a holy fire
Speaker 1: that's kept going, or some sort of a monument that
Speaker 1: has an eternal flame hooked up to it.
Speaker 2: I was shocked to discover how many monuments there are
Speaker 2: that have so called eternal flames on them because I
Speaker 2: don't know, maybe it's just my morbid brain, but it
Speaker 2: seems like calling a flame eternal is just tempting the fates,
Speaker 2: Like you know, this is not this flame will not
Speaker 2: burn forever. It's like settled down. You can't call it eternal.
Speaker 2: I was trying to think what you should call it instead.
Speaker 2: I can't come up with them. You think, I don't know,
Speaker 2: maybe the long burning flame or something, or the attempted
Speaker 2: eternal flame. It's just eternal is not going to happen.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I mean I guess to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: I guess this is obvious, Like they're getting into the
Speaker 1: idea of like the fire is something that is that
Speaker 1: it can go out and it has to be cultivated.
Speaker 1: And you know a lot of these are tied to
Speaker 1: to causes and memories with the with the idea of
Speaker 1: saying like, hey, let's let's let's make a point of
Speaker 1: remembering this individual or remembering this cause, and we'll use
Speaker 1: the fire as a symbol. But that Yeah, there have
Speaker 1: been a number of these that that have sprung up
Speaker 1: just at the end of the twentieth century and even
Speaker 1: you know, in the twenty first century, and it's certainly
Speaker 1: with the older ones it gets more difficult to really
Speaker 1: figure out, Okay, has this been truly a perpetual eternal
Speaker 1: fire or has it gone out at least once, if
Speaker 1: not multiple times over the span of time that is
Speaker 1: attributed to it.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry that Roger Korman is invading my brain right now,
Speaker 2: but I'm thinking of a line and Attack of the
Speaker 2: Crab monsters where the giant psychic crab they are assaulting
Speaker 2: it with different types of weapons. The humans are trying
Speaker 2: to defeat it, and at some point they use a
Speaker 2: fire based weapon and the crab counters by telling them
Speaker 2: he says something like that was quick thinking, Dale. But
Speaker 2: the pity is that all fires must one day burn out.
Speaker 1: True, it's true. But by the way, more fairly recently,
Speaker 1: someone was asking, I think in the discord for stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind, what are all the episodes in
Speaker 1: which Joe has mentioned attack of the crab monsters. No
Speaker 1: one had a clear answer, but a few episodes were
Speaker 1: brought up in which people remembered you mentioning it. We'll
Speaker 1: add this the list. Okay, So, out of the various
Speaker 1: examples that come up, one that I thought was pretty
Speaker 1: interesting is that of the Dasho in Temple complex in
Speaker 1: Japan that has a flame that is said to have
Speaker 1: been burning for about twelve hundred years. Obviously, it's impossible
Speaker 1: to say one hundred percent with something like this, and
Speaker 1: ultimately I guess it's the idea of the continuous flame
Speaker 1: that is most important here. But still, this is an
Speaker 1: example of one that has supposedly been burning for over
Speaker 1: a thousand years. Now, this is not quite a flame,
Speaker 1: but I ran across this as well, and I thought
Speaker 1: i'd mentioned it just because it's amusing, and maybe we
Speaker 1: have some listeners who can report on this first hand.
Speaker 1: But there is something known as the Centennial light bulb
Speaker 1: in Livermore, California, specifically in the firehouse there. It's been
Speaker 1: burning there the bulb since nineteen oh one, though this
Speaker 1: has not been continuous. There have been power outages and
Speaker 1: electrical issues, etc. So I'm not sure exactly like what
Speaker 1: the ratio is between the time during that century plus
Speaker 1: that the light has been out versus on, but it's
Speaker 1: certainly a very old light bulb that still lights up.
Speaker 1: And there is a webcam you can like check in
Speaker 1: on its status at centennialbulb dot org.
Speaker 2: So this is same filament, no replaced parts, it's the
Speaker 2: same bulb and it still works.
Speaker 1: Still works, yeah, and you can go visit it like
Speaker 1: on the website. It has information about how you can
Speaker 1: see this bulb for yourself.
Speaker 2: That is very impressive because obviously this is not an
Speaker 2: LED bulb or something. This is Lord knows how they
Speaker 2: were making light bulbs in nineteen oh one, but this
Speaker 2: was in some form an incandescent filament based light bulb.
Speaker 1: Yes. Now, now getting back to the idea of fire
Speaker 1: and technology, I will say that I don't have an
Speaker 1: answer regarding things like pilot lights or you know, forge fires,
Speaker 1: industrial flames so there might be a really good example
Speaker 1: out there that I just couldn't find a of a
Speaker 1: verified long burning pilot light or long burning forge fire,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But if listeners out there have
Speaker 1: something to submit on that count, let us have it. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: based on everything I've mentioned here and then this very
Speaker 1: much reflects my mindset going into this. I was thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, before we did any research, before we brought
Speaker 1: up the idea of the episode, I would have guessed, well,
Speaker 1: the longest raging fire. You know, maybe maybe it's gone,
Speaker 1: you know, a few weeks, a few months, and you know,
Speaker 1: if the conditions are just right. But beyond that, I mean,
Speaker 1: how how long can a fire rage? Joe, would you
Speaker 1: like to get into one of the answers that we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss in these episodes.
Speaker 2: Well, for the rest of the series, we wanted to
Speaker 2: talk about naturally fueled flames, Flames that can burn for
Speaker 2: a long long time because humans weren't e been necessary
Speaker 2: to create them that there, they can arise in various ways.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about some major categories, I think
Speaker 2: more in the next part of this series, but there
Speaker 2: are various kinds of burning and ignition processes that it
Speaker 2: turns out have been going on on the surface of
Speaker 2: the Earth for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Speaker 1: Which of course absolutely just dwarfs everything that I've mentioned
Speaker 1: so far. It really puts things on an entirely different timescale.
Speaker 2: Right, So I wanted to talk in this episode about
Speaker 2: one example that really struck me when I was reading
Speaker 2: up for this that's sort of an odd man out.
Speaker 2: It's not exactly fitting into the other categories that we're
Speaker 2: going to be talking about in part two, so I
Speaker 2: figured it'd be good to start with this one. So
Speaker 2: in the Northwest Territories of Canada, there is a stretch
Speaker 2: of seaside, cliff faces and hills along the eastern coast
Speaker 2: of a place called Cape Bathurst, where the earth and
Speaker 2: the rocks themselves seem to be perpetually burning, and they
Speaker 2: have been that way, probably for thousands of years. In English,
Speaker 2: this place is known as the Smoking Hills, or sometimes
Speaker 2: the Smoky Mountains, not to be confused with the ones
Speaker 2: along the Tennessee North Carolina border. Different smoking mountains literally
Speaker 2: smoking in this case, but in the language of the Inuvialuit,
Speaker 2: and these are the people native to the western Canadian
Speaker 2: Arctic region. It is known as ingnir Yuat, which means
Speaker 2: big fire, and I was poking around for good historical
Speaker 2: resources on this place. A lot of the articles I
Speaker 2: dug up actually seemed rather confused, offering contradictory details about
Speaker 2: early observations. So the best thing I found was a
Speaker 2: piece in a magazine called tusai Osat, which is a
Speaker 2: publication devoted to the language, culture in history of the
Speaker 2: inuvialu It. This article is by Charles Arnold and it's
Speaker 2: called ing near yat the Smoking Hills of Franklin Bay.
Speaker 2: So Arnold identifies the earliest written account of the Smoking
Speaker 2: Hills as one tracing back to a Scottish naturalist, explorer
Speaker 2: and naval surgeon named Sir John Richardson, who wrote about
Speaker 2: the hills in the eighteen twenties while documenting an expedition
Speaker 2: that he made to chart the coastlines of northern Canada.
Speaker 2: And as a side note, this mission was actually organized
Speaker 2: in cooperation with another Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin, who
Speaker 2: many years later, in eighteen forty five, would head up
Speaker 2: the infamous Lost Franklin Expedition, the goal of which was
Speaker 2: to fully chart a Northwest Sea passage through Canada. They
Speaker 2: were hoping to find a way to get around the
Speaker 2: northern part of the continent by water. Obviously, this is
Speaker 2: even though you know, if you look at a map
Speaker 2: you'll see a lot of gaps between the islands of
Speaker 2: northern Canada. This is more difficult than it might sound
Speaker 2: because often these waterways are choked with ice. So when
Speaker 2: Franklin got lost in the eighteen forties, he was trying
Speaker 2: to find this Northwest passage. And if you want to
Speaker 2: know more, you can look up what's known and unknown
Speaker 2: about the voyage of the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
Speaker 2: If you want some good hair raising mystery with hints
Speaker 2: of cannibalism.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's a fabulous story, you know what we've
Speaker 1: been able to piece together over the years through the
Speaker 1: original history and then the finding of the wreckage and
Speaker 1: so forth. Dan Simons wrote a fictional take on the
Speaker 1: Terror and the Arabis titled The Terror, which was a
Speaker 1: brick of a book that was then made to an
Speaker 1: excellent AMC mini series a few years back. In this
Speaker 1: Franklin is played by the actor Kieran Hines. But I
Speaker 1: highly recommend this series. It's a wonderful mix of detailed
Speaker 1: historic depiction as well as fantasy and horror. Jared Harris
Speaker 1: and Tobias Menzies also star in that.
Speaker 2: It's really good, Rob, can you do a short version
Speaker 2: of what we actually do know about the Lost Franklin Expedition.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a killer monster that shows up. No, No,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the that's the miniseries I'm thinking of.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's really really sorry. We could get into
Speaker 1: the full episodes really, but but basically, you have these
Speaker 1: two vessels that were that were seeking the Northwest Passage
Speaker 1: and they went missing, and you get into like what
Speaker 1: happened to the crew? Like how long were they marooned
Speaker 1: out there in the ice and there's ships locked in
Speaker 1: frozen in Where where did they get to? Did anybody actually,
Speaker 1: you know, make it out. It's presumed, I think still
Speaker 1: that they all died, but you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of there's been a lot of analysis over the years about,
Speaker 1: you know, what happened to them and then and then
Speaker 1: later on we actually found the wreckages.
Speaker 2: There's a famous painting I think that has to do
Speaker 2: with this, with this lost voyage called It's Got a
Speaker 2: real Metal album name is called something like Man proposes,
Speaker 2: God disposes or something, and it's the painting is just
Speaker 2: of polar bears fighting over scraps of the wreckage.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, for the longest the wreckage was was just
Speaker 1: lost entirely, but it was yeah. Twenty fourteen. In September
Speaker 1: of twenty fourteen, an expedition by Parks Canada discovered first
Speaker 1: the Arabis and then two years later they found the
Speaker 1: terror as well.
Speaker 2: Well. Anyway, coming back to the story, sorry, so, doctor
Speaker 2: John Richardson, the author of the account on about to site,
Speaker 2: was not involved in the lost expedition. He just was
Speaker 2: an early collaborator with Franklin. So turning back to his
Speaker 2: survey several decades earlier, in traveling along the shore of
Speaker 2: the place that would come to be known as Franklin Bay,
Speaker 2: Richardson made some observations of something marvelous cliffs that themselves
Speaker 2: appeared to be quote on fire giving out smoke, and
Speaker 2: where the ground appeared to consists of quote, burnt clays
Speaker 2: variously colored yellow, white, and deep red. I found another
Speaker 2: source quoting one of Richardson's accounts, where he says, quote
Speaker 2: at Cape Bathurst, the northern end of Franklin Bay, bituminous
Speaker 2: shale is exposed in many places, and in my visit
Speaker 2: there in eighteen twenty six was in a state of ignition,
Speaker 2: and the clays which had been thus exposed to the
Speaker 2: heat were baked and vitrified, so that the spot resembled
Speaker 2: an old brickfield. And I will say I understand what
Speaker 2: Richard is getting at here. Of course, brickfields are places
Speaker 2: where bricks are manufactured. You can look these up on
Speaker 2: the Internet and you can see the resemblance with the
Speaker 2: unnatural look of the baked earth. But when I look
Speaker 2: at pictures of the smoking Hills, my computer ruined brain
Speaker 2: sees these landscapes, and unfortunately, the first place it goes
Speaker 2: is that it looks like a level in doom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does. It. Also, I have to say it
Speaker 1: kind of delicious, like I'm also reminded of I don't
Speaker 1: like red velvet cake. It's like red velvet cake emerging
Speaker 1: from the earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's very interesting the way they produce these protruding
Speaker 2: rock formations. They're very jagged, and they seem to be
Speaker 2: rather resistant to weathering compared to the unbaked rock all
Speaker 2: around them, which is more smoothed over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very jagged, very and very bloody looking in some cases.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it looks like some sort of rock formation
Speaker 1: that has just gouged into the flash of a titan totally.
Speaker 2: So that's what Richardson saw in the eighteen twenties. He says, Hey,
Speaker 2: you know, we went past these cliffs. They appeared to
Speaker 2: be on fire. They're giving off smoke. We see a
Speaker 2: lot of burnt clay. It's yellow, white and deep red,
Speaker 2: very weird. Looks like an old brickfield. But then the
Speaker 2: written history of the Smoking Hills continues after the disappearance
Speaker 2: of the Franklin expedition in the eighteen forties. So Franklin,
Speaker 2: the two ships Franklin, and the crews go missing, and
Speaker 2: in the year eighteen fifty, a ship called the HMS Investigator,
Speaker 2: under the command of Captain Robert McClure, was searching for
Speaker 2: survivors of the Franklin party in the area around Franklin
Speaker 2: Bay once again, when the crew of this ship came
Speaker 2: across the same weird site cliffs by the sea that
Speaker 2: were strangely covered and were giving off plumes of smoke.
Speaker 2: And at first they thought these might be campfires or
Speaker 2: signals from the Franklin survivors, so they sent out a
Speaker 2: small boat to check it out, see what's going on.
Speaker 2: But no, it was not survivors of the Franklin mission.
Speaker 2: Arnold in his article identifies testimony left by a Moravian
Speaker 2: missionary named Johann Mirtsching, who was a member of the
Speaker 2: shore party. And this is one where I really wanted
Speaker 2: to find the original text, but I don't. I can't
Speaker 2: if this has been digitized anywhere, I could not find it.
Speaker 2: It appears to be from what's called the Arctic Diary
Speaker 2: of Johan Mirching eighteen fifty to eighteen fifty four, that
Speaker 2: those published in print form in Toronto in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: but I couldn't find the digital version, So I'm relying
Speaker 2: on Arnold's summaries of what Merching says. But he says
Speaker 2: that when they got to the source of the smoke,
Speaker 2: they found no human life alive or dead. Only quote
Speaker 2: a thick smoke emerging from various vents in the ground,
Speaker 2: and a smell of sulfur so strong that we could
Speaker 2: not approach the smoke pillar nearer than ten or fifteen
Speaker 2: feet flame there was none, but the ground was so
Speaker 2: hot that it scorched the soles of our feet. Arnold
Speaker 2: says that Mirching compared the landscape to a huge chemical factory.
Speaker 2: He says that water from nearby ponds had been fouled
Speaker 2: by something from the earth, and that the water tasted sour,
Speaker 2: and they brought back samples of rocks from the smoking hills,
Speaker 2: brought them back to the ship where Merching apparently claims
Speaker 2: that they ended up burning a hole in the mahogany
Speaker 2: table where Captain McClure kept them. So they took some
Speaker 2: rocks back to the captain and they're burning up his furnish.
Speaker 1: You know, this reminds me again of the mini series
Speaker 1: of The Terror, because one of the things that they
Speaker 1: stress in that show, and they have some of the
Speaker 1: people involved in the production that they'd mentioned this as well.
Speaker 1: They mentioned that when they were researching the ships to
Speaker 1: portray them on the show, there was this this realization that,
Speaker 1: you know, these were some of the most advanced vessels
Speaker 1: of any kind of that time period, and if we
Speaker 1: were to compare them to our modern world, we might
Speaker 1: well compare them to spaceships. We might well think of
Speaker 1: them in terms of something that is meant to venture
Speaker 1: beyond our atmosphere, and here we have one of the specifically,
Speaker 1: this was referring to the terror and the Arabis. I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure about the investigator, but I'm assuming that
Speaker 1: it may have been a similar in a similar fashion,
Speaker 1: may have been a very advanced ship. But here they are,
Speaker 1: with this ship essentially arriving at an alien landscape. You know,
Speaker 1: it must have just been such a strange site to behold.
Speaker 1: Here you are this far flung an ultimately very very hostile,
Speaker 1: very dangerous environment, and here here are shores where things
Speaker 1: are bloody and burning, and it's like a chemical vat.
Speaker 1: You bring a piece of it inside the ship and
Speaker 1: it begins to burn a hole through the table in
Speaker 1: front of you. It's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So here I guess we come to the
Speaker 2: question of what is actually causing these hills to smoke.
Speaker 2: You might assume, based on background knowledge, that well, okay,
Speaker 2: if there's heat and sulfurous gas coming out of the ground,
Speaker 2: the source is volcanic, right, that would be the obvious assumption.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's where your mind it simply goes.
Speaker 2: But in this case, no, I found one source on
Speaker 2: this that was pretty helpful. It was a paper called
Speaker 2: why do the Smoking Hills Smoke?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 2: It was published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty four by W. H. Matthews and R. M. Buston.
Speaker 2: And this paper invokes a term that I'd never heard before.
Speaker 2: It refers to areas of fire baked rock. As I
Speaker 2: think this word is French, so I think it would
Speaker 2: be pronounced bocan, but its boc a n n ees
Speaker 2: and the authors write that you find these these fire
Speaker 2: baked rocks in quote cretaceous mudstones along sea cliffs and
Speaker 2: in areas of recent slumping. So the fire baking of
Speaker 2: the rocks and the earth lead to these weird patterns
Speaker 2: of coloration that can easily be seen with the naked eye,
Speaker 2: and that we heard described in the literary sources we
Speaker 2: just mentioned. So these color changes include bleaching and reddening
Speaker 2: of the mudstone, which is otherwise dark in color. And
Speaker 2: these colors can remain even after one of the bocans
Speaker 2: has stopped burning. And in places where these rocks are
Speaker 2: still burning and baking, you get smoke pouring out, you
Speaker 2: get sulfurous fumes as well as high ground temperatures. So
Speaker 2: the earth you walk on gets hot, So what's the cause. Well,
Speaker 2: the authors of this paper, they performed a number of
Speaker 2: different analyzes including petrographic, mineralogical, chemical, and calorific analyzes, and
Speaker 2: they determined that quote the bocan are fumed by oxidation
Speaker 2: of pyrite and organic matter. With heating of the strata
Speaker 2: by oxidation, combustible gases are driven off that may burn
Speaker 2: in restricted areas, resulting in localized melting of the strata. So,
Speaker 2: in reading this and a few other sources and putting
Speaker 2: things together, I think I understand this now and trying
Speaker 2: to put my understanding into other words, A lot of
Speaker 2: the rock in this area is mudstone or type of
Speaker 2: shale rock. Mudstone is a sedimentary rock that can contain
Speaker 2: hydrocarbon or organic content. So some amount of fossil fuel
Speaker 2: is naturally present in this rock, even if in low concentrations,
Speaker 2: And in this case, one of the main carbon constituents
Speaker 2: seems to be a form of lignite, which is a
Speaker 2: soft brown type of coal that is generally formed by
Speaker 2: the underground compression of peat. But this rock also contains
Speaker 2: a significant amount of iron pyrite, a mineral form of
Speaker 2: iron sulfide. Which is also known as fools gold.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, I think it's always a shame
Speaker 1: we call it fools gold because it implies that it's
Speaker 1: in to a certain extent, that it's ugly and it's
Speaker 1: without value. But pyrite can look quite impressive, you know.
Speaker 1: I've seen examples of it in in mineral museums before,
Speaker 1: and of course in the fact that it can be
Speaker 1: used to ignite something. I believe it was used in
Speaker 1: firearms in the past.
Speaker 2: I did not know that, but that would make sense
Speaker 2: now reading about this, because so what's going on here
Speaker 2: is that when the cliff faces erode here at the
Speaker 2: smoking Hills and new faces of the mudstone strata are
Speaker 2: exposed to oxygen in the atmosphere, the carbon based fuel
Speaker 2: and the natural iron pyrite together undergo oxidation, a chemical
Speaker 2: reaction which leads to heating. The oxidation of the iron
Speaker 2: pyrite here is an exothermic reaction. It heats up the
Speaker 2: surrounding rock and this oxidation based heating leads to the
Speaker 2: release of flammable gases that are embedded in the rock.
Speaker 2: And so the authors think when these gases are released,
Speaker 2: they become a form of fuel evaporating in an environment
Speaker 2: of extreme heat with exposured oxygen. So here you have
Speaker 2: the three magic ingredients, right, you have fuel escaping, it's
Speaker 2: very hot, and you have oxygen nearby. So they burn,
Speaker 2: and these fires further heat and melt the st of
Speaker 2: the rock. And I believe the implication is that this melting,
Speaker 2: this melting and baking helps continue to reveal new faces
Speaker 2: of strata to the atmosphere so that more oxidation can
Speaker 2: happen and the process can just continue. It's auto ignition.
Speaker 2: It ignites automatically by being exposed to the oxygen, and
Speaker 2: the process is self sustaining. The author's right that you
Speaker 2: tend to find these bocan only in places where the
Speaker 2: strata of sedimentary rock has been suddenly exposed to the atmosphere,
Speaker 2: maybe by a landslide or some of their form of
Speaker 2: erosion or erosion that's left behind after the retreat of glaciers. Now,
Speaker 2: coming back to these historical accounts, While the stories from
Speaker 2: Richardson and the McClure expedition are the earliest written accounts
Speaker 2: of the Smoking Hills in New Vialuet, oral traditions about
Speaker 2: the mountains have been in circulation for much longer. As
Speaker 2: I mentioned, the traditional name for this place is ing
Speaker 2: near Youuat, which means big fire. And this article by
Speaker 2: Charles Arnold. Then after it recounts the literary section, it
Speaker 2: goes into a section on the oral tradition, including one
Speaker 2: excellent story that was told to the Danish anthropologist Canued
Speaker 2: Rasmussen in nineteen twenty four by a person living in
Speaker 2: the Cape Bathhurst, Aia named Alnaaritsayik. So this is the
Speaker 2: story told by alnaarit Sayik, recounted to Rasmusen and quoted
Speaker 2: in Arnold. Here in the early infancy of man, people
Speaker 2: were never alone, whether they lived in a settlement or
Speaker 2: were traveling on long journeys. They were surrounded by a
Speaker 2: spirit people who lived as human beings, and were in
Speaker 2: fact human beings, except that they were invisible. Their bodies
Speaker 2: were not for our eyes, or their voices for our ears.
Speaker 2: And when people traveled and pitched camp and began to
Speaker 2: build their snow huts, one might see round about the
Speaker 2: snow drifts that the snow blocks began to move, being
Speaker 2: lifted out of the drifts and piled together into a
Speaker 2: snow house, which seemed to grow of itself. Occasionally one
Speaker 2: might see the glitter of a copper knife, and that
Speaker 2: was all. They did not mind people coming into their houses,
Speaker 2: which were arranged just like those of human beings. All
Speaker 2: their belongings were visible, and people could trade with them
Speaker 2: very profitably. If one wished to buy something, all that
Speaker 2: was necessary was to point to it and at the
Speaker 2: same time show what one was prepared to give for it.
Speaker 2: If the spirit people agreed the object required, lifted itself
Speaker 2: up and moved towards the man who wanted it. But
Speaker 2: if they declined the bargain, the object remained where it was.
Speaker 2: So people were never alone. They always had small, silent
Speaker 2: and invisible spirits around them. But one day it happened
Speaker 2: that during a halt, a man seized his knife and cried,
Speaker 2: what do we want with these people who were always
Speaker 2: right on our heels. Saying this, he flourished his knife
Speaker 2: in the air and thrust it in the direction of
Speaker 2: the snow huts that had made themselves. Not a sound
Speaker 2: was heard, but the knife was covered in blood. From
Speaker 2: that moment the spirits went away. Never again did anyone
Speaker 2: see the wondrous sight of snow drifts forming themselves into
Speaker 2: snow huts when one made camp and forever the people
Speaker 2: lost their silent, invisible guardian spirits. It was said that
Speaker 2: they had gone to live inside the mountains in order
Speaker 2: to hide from man who had mocked and wounded their feelings.
Speaker 2: That is why to this day one can see the
Speaker 2: mountains smoking from the enormous cooking fires flaming inside them.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's wonderful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought this was beautiful. It also made me
Speaker 2: so sad that like the humans betrayed their invisible companions.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, But it also of course reminds me of
Speaker 1: various other accounts that you see, particularly like Irish traditions,
Speaker 1: where you have these traditions of the former people or
Speaker 1: other intelligent being be they some sort of spirit folk
Speaker 1: or what have you, or something very humanoid in form
Speaker 1: and they've been driven into the earth by the newer people.
Speaker 1: And we see a similar trend here. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Arnold Site's story is remembered by other Inuvialuate people of
Speaker 2: the present describing their memories of the stories about these people,
Speaker 2: describing the smoke from the hills as the cooking fires
Speaker 2: of the little people who live inside the mountains. And
Speaker 2: there was one story he recorded that really struck me.
Speaker 2: This was wonderful. This was quoting a source named Fred
Speaker 2: Wolke who said, quote, they are as big as a
Speaker 2: fork that you eat with. They use a caribou's ear
Speaker 2: for a parka. They turn it inside out and they
Speaker 2: just have to put it on, just take the inside
Speaker 2: off skin it already made parka.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: One thing that strikes me as interesting is how there's
Speaker 2: a convergence on everyone identifying in some way the smoking
Speaker 2: hills or in near you at as as artificial in nature.
Speaker 2: So in these oral traditions, the smoke coming off of
Speaker 2: the hills or the cooking fires of the little people
Speaker 2: or the invisible people living inside the mountain, but also
Speaker 2: some of the earliest written records, like Mirching's compared the
Speaker 2: area to a huge chemical factory. Richard compared it to
Speaker 2: a brick field. Both of these are products of human industry.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that everybody seems to look at these things
Speaker 2: and think artificial, made by people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean we just as Earth as the fire planet,
Speaker 1: like we are the people of fire. We are the
Speaker 1: only organism that has come to master it and created
Speaker 1: works with it. So yeah, it makes sense that the
Speaker 1: various cultures would look to this and their mind would
Speaker 1: at least temporarily go in the same direction.
Speaker 2: In any case, coming back to the question about some
Speaker 2: of the longest burning fires, I guess part of this
Speaker 2: would be dependent on what you're what you're counting as
Speaker 2: a fire when you look at some thing, So, like
Speaker 2: I think the Smoking Hills, you will often not maybe
Speaker 2: sometimes you will, but you will often not be seeing
Speaker 2: big gouts of flames like you would see at a campfire.
Speaker 2: You'll just see this continuous smoking and baking of the rock.
Speaker 2: And so the burning there I think would be more
Speaker 2: akin to what you'd see probably with like a burning coal,
Speaker 2: you know, a piece of coal that has been ignited.
Speaker 2: But considering that, we can know for pretty sure that
Speaker 2: the Smoking Hills have probably been burning for hundreds or
Speaker 2: thousands of years. And there are multiple ways you know this.
Speaker 2: I think there are some geological methods. But actually came
Speaker 2: across one study offering one interesting piece of evidence for
Speaker 2: how long these hills had been burning that I wouldn't
Speaker 2: have thought of, which is archaeology. So there was a
Speaker 2: paper by Raymond J. LeBlanc in American Antiquity in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one called prehistoric clinkery use on the Cape Bathurst Peninsula,
Speaker 2: Northwest Territories, Canada, the dynamics of formation and procurement, and
Speaker 2: talking about the background going into this study, LeBlanc says,
Speaker 2: quote fieldwork conducted on the Cape Bathurst Peninsula and that's
Speaker 2: where the Smoking Hills are has resulted in the discovery
Speaker 2: of seventy five sites representing occupation spanning more than three
Speaker 2: thousand years. Nearly all of these sites are characterized by
Speaker 2: the predominant use of a distinctive rock called a clinker,
Speaker 2: resembling a basalt to obsidian like material. It is formed
Speaker 2: by the spontaneous combustion of local organic rich shales. So
Speaker 2: some of the weird baked rocks left over at these
Speaker 2: auto ignition Sitesking Neruat these rocks have been used to
Speaker 2: make tools by the people living in the area, spanning
Speaker 2: back thousands of years. And I found that so interesting too,
Speaker 2: that you would take these these strange clinker rocks and
Speaker 2: turn them into technology.
Speaker 1: From this site that we interpret through the lens of fiotechnology. Interesting.
Speaker 2: Now, one more paper I wanted to mention before I'm
Speaker 2: done with the Smoking Hills is by Magda Havas and
Speaker 2: Thomas C. Hutchinson, published in Nature in nineteen eighty three
Speaker 2: called the Smoking Hills natural acidification of an aquatic ecosystem.
Speaker 2: So you remember how those early reports of the area
Speaker 2: they said that the water of nearby ponds was foul
Speaker 2: and sour. Well, we know why that happens now. This
Speaker 2: is due to the acidification of the water by the
Speaker 2: sulfur dioxide produced by these mineral burning sites. So the
Speaker 2: water is very acidic, and this has actually changed the
Speaker 2: composition of the local microbial life and insect life and
Speaker 2: stuff the life that inhabits the area. So the author
Speaker 2: is here right quote. In an area of typically alkaline
Speaker 2: ponds with pH above eight point zero, ponds within the
Speaker 2: fumigation zone have been acidified below a pH of two
Speaker 2: point zero. Elevated concentrations of metals including aluminium, iron, zinc, nickel, manganase,
Speaker 2: and cadmium occur in these acidic ponds. Soils and sediments
Speaker 2: have also been chemically altered. The biota in these acidic
Speaker 2: ponds are characteristic of acidic environments worldwide, in contrast to
Speaker 2: the typically arctic biota in adjacent alkaline ponds. So the
Speaker 2: burning of the earth alters the chemical characteristics of the landscape,
Speaker 2: which in turn changed the bioecology. The chain reaction started
Speaker 2: thousands of years ago when these cliff faces and rocks
Speaker 2: were eroded and exposed the minerals to oxygen. The oxidation
Speaker 2: of the pyride and the organic contents of the mudstone
Speaker 2: and the burning began. And this led to, over the
Speaker 2: thousands of years, a complete transformation of the surrounding ecosystem
Speaker 2: into one of these strange extremophile, acid rich biosystems.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's import pressive, you know. And in thinking about
Speaker 1: this and thinking about you know, extreme environments and and
Speaker 1: so forth, and then also kind of going back to
Speaker 1: the idea of these these these these ships being sort
Speaker 1: of like space ships sailing upon these these strange, alien
Speaker 1: seeming environment. I ran across a twenty twenty two paper
Speaker 1: in Chemical Geology the Journal Chemical Geology by Graspy at
Speaker 1: All that looked at the Smoking Hills as a possible
Speaker 1: analog for some geological conditions that have been observed on Mars.
Speaker 1: Just to read a quick quote, oxidative weathering of this
Speaker 1: unit creates extensive gerocite rich deposits and banded gerocite and
Speaker 1: pilos silicate rich mudstones similar to those observed on Mars.
Speaker 1: So I read through this paper here and it's it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty pretty deeply. It's the Chemical Geology Journals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a.
Speaker 1: Bit dense for my taste anyway, but the author is,
Speaker 1: if I'm understanding this correctly, they're suggesting that such signs
Speaker 1: on Mars, some similar looking details that we've observed on
Speaker 1: Mars via the probes we've sent there, if we interpret
Speaker 1: them through the lens of the smoking hills, it could
Speaker 1: possibly suggest a more habitable period in mars ancient past.
Speaker 1: So that's fascinating to think about that as well.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so, I think maybe this is where we need
Speaker 2: to cap it for part one here, But there's so
Speaker 2: much more to talk about because the world is full
Speaker 2: of surprising and fascinating naturally fueled flames, and I think
Speaker 2: it will make for a carnival of geological wonders to
Speaker 2: explore in the next part of this series.
Speaker 1: That's right, So tune in on Thursday as we continue
Speaker 1: with more Fire from the Rocks. In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you'd like to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your mind, you can find them on Tuesdays and
Speaker 1: Thursdays in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed.
Speaker 1: I think most of the invention episodes that we recorded,
Speaker 1: several of which had dealt with fire technology and fire
Speaker 1: related technology. I think most of those have been republished,
Speaker 1: if not all of them have been republished in this feed,
Speaker 1: but if not, you can also find the podcast feed
Speaker 1: for Invention out there. That was a fun though short
Speaker 1: lived show that we did on the side dealing with
Speaker 1: inventions in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed,
Speaker 1: though we also do listener mail. On Mondays, we do
Speaker 1: a short form artifact or monster fact on Wednesdays, and
Speaker 1: on Friday we do something called Weird House Cinema. That's
Speaker 1: our time to set aside most serious concerns and just
Speaker 1: talk about a strange film.
Speaker 2: Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 2: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 2: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 2: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
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