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Homeparis 2015India's Jharia coal field has been burning for 100 years

India’s Jharia coal field has been burning for 100 years

One of India's largest and most productive coal fields is also home to some of the longest-burning fires in the world.

About 70 fires have sprouted up at eastern India's Jharia coal fields, which cover more than 100 square miles and have been mined since the late 1800s. The first recorded coal fired broke out in 1916, and fires have burned there ever since.

It is just one of the thousands of coal fires that are burning around the world — a costly and dangerous phenomenon involving a fuel source that has helped power economic development but is under attack in the age of global warming.

India's government reportedly hopes to increase production at the fiery mine, even as representatives from New Delhi discuss the effects of carbon emissions on climate change at the COP21 summit in Paris. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reportedly charged officials with putting out the fires at Jharia, in the hope of improving output. The government has already spent money to move villages and settlements away from the mines, and those costs are forecast to reach $1 billion, according to Reuters.

Flames at Jharia have been recorded reaching heights of 60 feet, said Glenn Stracher, a professor emeritus of geology and physics at East Georgia State College, who has studied coal fires around the world extensively.

Many of the fires are believed to have started through spontaneous combustion or what is sometimes called self-heating,caused by the oxidation of minerals in the exposed coal. Much of the mining at Jharia is done at the surface, exposing the coal to open air. Certain varieties of coal contain minerals that heat up when they are exposed to oxygen; those minerals can in turn burst into flames.

More than 37 million tons of coal, worth billions of dollars, have been lost to fires at Jharia, and 1.4 billion more metric tonnes are inaccessible because they are blocked by fires, Stracher said.

16 year old MD Kahn is a worker at the Jharia coal mine.Jharia in India's eastern Jharkand state is literally in flames.Jonas Gratzer | LightRocket | Getty Images

Another estimate from the company that controls the mine places the amount of blocked coal much higher, at around 2 billion metric tonnes (or roughly 1.8 billion U.S. tons), which would place total losses around $220 billion.

It is also a huge environmental and health problem. The burning coal pumps all sorts of gases and particles into the air, and underground fires at Jharia have created sinkholes that have swallowed people, Stracher said.

"Just imagine the emissions that are being produced by these fires," he said. "I have collected gas samples from different fires, and there are usually 40 to 50 hydrocarbon compounds, and many of them are toxic or carcinogenic. So this stuff is bad, really bad."

Coal mine fires are a global problem, and there are numerous ways they can start, Stracher said. Thousands of coal field fires are burning globally, on every continent except Antarctica. No one has a good idea of the emissions they are producing, and it's hard to estimate, since the fires can be erratic in their behavior — sometimes they calm down, and then sometimes they suddenly intensify.

"There are for sure toxins or poisons in these fires, and they certainly exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards," he said.

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