Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

The author mentions a 56 year old coal fire in Pennsylvania for some reason. It's not the most extreme example he could have reached for. The New Straitsville mine fire in Ohio has been burning for 134 years, and is still slowly spreading.

http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/New_Straitsville_Mine_Fi...

View on HN

This is just up the road from where I grew up in Australia and has been burning for 6,000 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain

That one is rather refreshing compared to the New Straitsville and Centralia fires, which were both directly attributable to some pretty blatant human stupidity. New Straitsville is attributed to arson by some strikers and Centralia was caused by an attempt at cleaning up a landfill situated in a former coal mine, an attempt that relied on methods worthy of Mr. Carlson from WKRP in Cincinnati.

> It is estimated that more than two hundred square miles of coal has burned

Why would they measure the amount burned in square miles??? How thick? This measurement is meaningless!

Granted, it's not a measure of how much coal has been burned, but it is a measure of how far the fire has spread.

At only 200 square miles, we can fix it. Assuming the area is square, the perimeter is just 56.56 miles. We can go around with a tunnel boring machine, replacing coal with a concrete-lined tube. We can dig a trench, like a road cut or canal, lining it just as we sometimes line our road cuts and canals.

Yeah only 200 square miles

The best case is a circle, giving a perimeter of 50 miles. Some other projects to compare it by:

94 miles total for the three bores of the Channel Tunnel

120 miles for the Suez canal, finished 149 years ago

51 miles for the Panama canal, finished 104 years ago with steam shovels

Clearly, we can do this.

If it were laid out on an identifiable surface, then perhaps that could be done. But veins of coal in the earth branch unpredictably in 3D space. You'd be following a fractal surface.

It may not be possible to know or accurately estimate the scope of it.

Well, coal is mostly carbon and its atomic radius is around 70pm. Converting miles to metric and calculating based on that, we can assume at minimum 72 liters of coal was burned, but not more than the total volume of earth.

i lol

They measure it in square miles because it's most direct impact on our way of life is at the surface. The thickness is unlikely to be uniform and the volume of the coal doesn't exactly tell the lay person much.

The Centralia fire is the most famous one by far.

I've never noticed this to be the case, but I'm from the area (a few hours from each site). Looking online it appears you're right: one fire is 40x bigger and much older, but the new one gets 20x the google hits.

I think the newer fire, by virtue of its location and having started more recently, is probably a lot more photogenic because of the infrastructure damage it causes.

It depends on your parameters - Yanartas / “Mount Chimera” was in the Iliad, it’s hard to beat that level of fame.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanartaş

Reply on news.ycombinator.com