This coalfield has been on fire for a century. The first fires were reported around nineteen sixteen. Some are still burning. And the coal itself was once a forest, from before the dinosaurs.
This is Jharia, a coal town in eastern India. Around it lies one of the country's great coalfields. Smoke and steam leak from cracks in the ground. Old boreholes breathe it out. In places the ground has sunk. Down in the seams, coal is burning. Some of those fires sit right beside the town. Homes and a railway line stand at the edge of the smoke.
How can coal catch fire by itself? Mining here began around eighteen ninety. Early mine owners cut rooms into the coal and left pillars standing to hold up the roof. Many of those mines were badly run. Pillars were crushed, and the ground above them cracked. Air seeped down through the cracks. Coal that sits in air slowly warms up. If the heat cannot escape, it keeps building. Miners call it spontaneous combustion.
By around nineteen sixteen, some of that coal was hot enough to catch fire. Those are the first fires anyone wrote down here. That was about a hundred and ten years ago. Since then, fire has never fully left this coal.
In nineteen seventy-one, the government took over the mines. Its new company took on about six hundred collieries. Many were already burning.
And this is not one fire. In the nineteen nineties, surveyors counted about sixty-five of them. Counted another way, there were more than a hundred. Most burned where seams lay open in the walls of quarries. Others ran underground, some more than four hundred feet down. A fire would die down in one place and break out in another. By then the fires had eaten about forty million tons of coal. Forty million. The engineers wrote that they would burn for many decades.
But what exactly is burning? The coal here lies in seams, stacked one above another. There are as many as forty-six. Some are up to a hundred and eighty feet thick. That is taller than a fifteen-story building.
Each seam was once a swamp forest. Its main tree was called Glossopteris. It had long leaves shaped like tongues, with a net of fine veins. Its fossil roots look like little ladders. When the trees died, they fell into waterlogged ground and did not fully rot. Buried layer on layer, they were squeezed into coal.
These were no tropical swamps. India then sat far to the south, joined with Africa, Antarctica and Australia in a supercontinent called Gondwana. A great ice age had just loosened its grip there. As the ice sheets melted back, forests spread across the wet lowlands. Their relatives in Antarctica grew even nearer the pole, through months of winter darkness.
That is where our calendar stands. About two hundred and eighty-seven million years ago, these swamps were growing. They kept burying themselves for millions of years. The coal burning hardest today is the younger coal, near the top of the pile.
So what do you do about a town next to a fire? In two thousand and nine, a government plan set out to fight the fires and move people to safer ground. It counted nearly four hundred thousand people living in the danger zones. The danger is not only fire. Old workings below can cave in, and the ground drops.
Moving them has been slow. The latest plan aims to resettle fifteen thousand and eighty families by twenty twenty-eight. By January twenty twenty-six, about eleven hundred families had moved.
And the coal is still being dug. Jharia's coal is the kind used to make steel. For years this was India's only source of the best of it, called prime coking coal. Across India, coal still makes about seventy-two percent of the electricity. So a forest from before the dinosaurs is still burning here, and still being mined.
The fires themselves are smaller now. In two thousand and twenty-one, satellites found them across less than two square kilometers. That is about a tenth of the ground they once covered. But they are still burning.
This coalfield has been on fire for a century. And every piece of that coal was once a forest, growing far to the south.
