For 6,000 Years, the World's Oldest Fire has been burning

The fire has been burning for at least 6,000 years, according to most experts, while others say it is considerably older. It is approximately 30 meters (98 feet) below beneath Mount Wingen. Wingen literally means "fire" in the native language of the local Wonaruah people. Because the fire is underground, it cannot be seen or measured, but smoke billowing from the mountain indicates its presence.

"No one knows the size of the fire beneath Burning Mountain; you can only infer it," Guillermo Rein, a fire science professor at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, told ScienceAlert in 2022. "It is probably a 5 to 10 meter [16 to 32 foot] diameter ball that reaches temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius [1,832 Fahrenheit]," he stated. It is powered by the coal stacks beneath the mountain. The flameless fire steadily crawls through the coal at roughly 1 meter (nearly 3 feet) every year, similar to a lump of coal going white in a fireplace.

The ages are calculated by measuring the fire's route, which is around 6.5 kilometers (4 miles), and the rate at which it burns. The fact is that no one knows when it began. It is unclear how the fire originated, although it very definitely was not set by people. The best explanations are a lightning strike or a major brush fire. Professor Rein says in a blog post about his visit to Burning Mountain that the heat poured out from the coal fire has formed a 50-meter (164-foot) region surrounding the mountaintop that is barren of any flora.

Similar underground coal fires have been discovered across the world, most notably in China, India, and the United States. For example, the Centralia mine fire in Pennsylvania was accidentally started in 1962 amid a maze of abandoned coal tunnels. Despite many attempts to put it out, it is still burning and is predicted to do so for another 250 years.

Burning Mountain may be seen from the Burning Mountain Nature Reserve, which is less than a four-hour drive from Sydney. But do not smoke a cigarette here - the nature reserve's website states unequivocally that this is a no-smoking zone.

Rev. Wilton was referring to the smoldering burning of a coal seam as nature's amusement. The clearest illustration of this natural occurrence is the Burning Mountain, which slowly burns subterranean coal when it is exposed to atmospheric air. Smouldering is the slow, low-temperature, flameless burning that is the most persistent sort of combustion phenomenon that results in the largest and longest-lasting flames on the planet. This Australian coal seam began to burn more than 6,000 years ago, and other experts believe it began to burn more than 500,000 years ago. At the very least, the British are not to blame.

The fire is currently around 30 meters below ground. The fire has reached the summit of the hill (illustrated in Figure 3) at a rate of 1 m each year. The gradual and strong heat has formed a landscape devoid of any flora in an area 50 meters surrounding the hilltop due to its creeping spread pace. The soil's color palette includes white sinter, yellow sulphate, black char, and red iron oxide. A flourishing green forest of old and tall trees may be observed on brown soil where the fire and heat have not yet reached. The forest slowly grows again along the previous fire route, and new and smaller trees may be seen on red soil.

As soon as you reach the summit, you can immediately feel the hot combustion fumes and smell the sulfur that is being emitted from numerous deep fissures. There are fissures everywhere around the site, some of which are up to 0.5 m wide, and which are more apparent in front of the fire than in back of it. About 20 meters from the active site, the cracks stopped releasing gas, suggesting to me that airflow was going into the seam, fueling the fire with the oxygen it needed.

Less than a four-hour journey from Sydney lays the Burning Mountain Nature Reserve, where you can get a peek at the mountain. The nature reserve's website makes it very clear that smoking is not permitted here, so be careful to refrain from doing so.