Hell on earth - Google Earth special

There are areas of the earth where fire always prevails and other areas that have been destroyed because of man. To this chapter, bookmarks and images on Google Earth are attached.

(This chapter can be read while wandering in Google Earth, the free software from Google. Link to download the markings file and the pictures of the episode)

Centralia: Hell on Earth

Until 1962, the town of Centralia in Pennsylvania, in the eastern United States, was a small and ordinary mining town. Centralia was established in the mid-19th century by a coal mining company in an area very rich in large coal deposits.

In May of 1962, as every year, the local council decided to proactively burn the town's landfill to make room for new garbage. Five volunteers were recruited for the purpose. They approached the dump that was located in the south of the town - its location is marked on the screen - not far from a small cemetery, and set the garbage on fire. The landfill began to burn. The volunteers returned home.

But unlike every year, the fire in the small dump next to the cemetery refused to die down. Several days passed, and the flames in the garbage pile continued to burn. The volunteers returned to the scene, splashed water on the fire and returned to their homes thinking they had extinguished the fire. They were wrong, the fire continued to burn under the piles of trash and the smoke continued to billow.

It was already worrying. The local authority made several more unsuccessful attempts to extinguish the fire, but it was already clear to everyone that this was not another ordinary fire. Several geologists and firefighting experts arrived in the small town, looked into the matter and came to the conclusion that everyone feared. The volunteers didn't know that the pile of trash they were igniting was sitting on a rich deposit of natural coal, very close to the surface. Now, the coal beneath Centralia began to burn.

As the months passed, the residents began to feel a change around them. The ground under their feet was warm. At first the phenomena were interesting, nice even. Snow that fell didn't pile up on the roads and there was no need to bring shovels. In the heated gardens, the gardeners grew summer vegetables at the height of winter. But then residents started passing out in their homes without warning, and some people started complaining of headaches, nausea and dizziness. Measuring devices installed in homes showed high levels of carbon monoxide, a clear, odorless gas that accumulated in shelters and closed rooms. The carbon monoxide is a product of imperfect combustion - burning in the presence of an insufficient amount of oxygen, as occurs underground.

The effects of carbon monoxide poisoning are manifested in those places where oxygen is most needed: in the central nervous system, and in the heart. It causes serious neurological symptoms - from headaches and fatigue to hallucinations and of course death at high concentrations. It is interesting to note that there are studies that have linked carbon monoxide poisoning to the 'haunted houses' phenomenon that we hear about from time to time. In an old house, the stoves do not work well and may emit carbon monoxide in a high concentration, which may lead to hallucinations, hearing strange voices, seeing demons and spirits, and the like.

Anyway, the carbon monoxide being released from the bowels of the earth was a good enough reason to try and fight the underground fire. Engineers and geologists operated heavy mechanical equipment and dug deep trenches around the town to try and contain the fire, preventing it from spreading. But it was too little, too late - the underground fire had already spread beyond the trenches.

Over time, the residents realized that this fire cannot be extinguished, and it is better to let it die out on its own. The sixties passed, and the seventies followed. The warm earth and the smoke that occasionally erupted from holes in the ground became part of the local landscape.

But in 1979, the owner of the local gas station decided to check the level of oil inside his underground tank. He took out the measuring stick, and the stick was boiling. The temperature in the tank reached eighty degrees Celsius. The authorities of the state of Pennsylvania began to realize that this cannot continue, that the danger to the lives of the residents is beginning to be tangible.

Two years later, Todd Domboski, a 12-year-old boy, went for a walk in a grove not far from his home. Suddenly the ground beneath his feet opened, and a fiery hole about two meters in diameter and about twenty meters deep threatened to swallow him. Todd managed to hold on to the roots of a tree and cry for help, and was saved at the last moment when his cousin pulled him from the fiery inferno - about four hundred degrees Celsius. If he had fallen another meter or two he would have burned to death for sure. This hot sinkhole is another well-known phenomenon in coal fires: the burning coal underground turns over time into fine ash, and at some point stops supporting the weight of the rocks above it. The result is a sudden collapse, similar to the one we know from the Dead Sea sinkholes here.

This event was the straw that broke the camel's back. The local administration decided to evacuate Centralia, and quickly. The state bought with money the houses of those who were ready to leave the town - and a thousand people left it overnight. A few hundred more residents did not agree to sell their homes, and in 1992 the state of Pennsylvania decided to confiscate all property in the town. All the empty houses were demolished and shaved from their place. The roads leading to the town were blocked with piles of dirt, and the postal authority even canceled the town's zip code. The residents, who became illegal invaders of state property in their own homes - no longer had a choice. Except for twelve tough and stubborn residents, there is no one left in Centralia. A ghost town for everything.

Today, in 2008, the ground beneath the town of Centralia continues to burn. The fire continues to spread under the roads and fields and no expert can estimate when it will die out. The predictions are all bleak. In Australia there is a mountain under which the coal deposits have been burning for six thousand years. In order to save Centralia, ditches forty meters deep and more than hundreds of kilometers long must be dug - the estimates speak of an expenditure of over half a billion dollars, much more than the value of the small town.

That's why no one lifts a finger for Centralia. The ground is charred and broken in hundreds of places, the roads are crumbling. The trees are white, dying and leafless. The air has a strong sulfur aftertaste. Indeed, hell on earth.

Trinity, destroyer of worlds

The Manhattan Project, the project to design and build the first atomic bomb, was one of the largest scientific and engineering operations in history. The culmination of this huge American operation, in which tens of thousands of people were involved in complete secrecy, took place on the sixteenth of July, 1945 in a remote, desolate and arid area in the southwest of the United States, in the state of New Mexico. Click on the 'Trinity' folder to float to this piece of desert.

In 1945, the Americans already had two atomic bombs ready for use. The first was a fairly simple bomb, based on uranium-235, and named 'Little boy'. The second was much more complicated, based on plutonium and called 'Fat Man'.

The scientists and engineers who worked on the Manhattan Project were among the best and brightest that the United States government could recruit for the matter. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller and others invested all their energy and abilities in the matter - they were quite sure that the simple uranium bomb would work as planned. But they could not assure the military with certainty that the complicated plutonium bomb would do the job. The problem was that uranium-235 had a significant drawback: it was very difficult to produce it with the technology that was available at the time. This meant that the Americans only had enough uranium for one bomb and so the military wanted to be XNUMX% sure that it had another atomic bomb just in case the war didn't end after the first bomb was dropped. This additional bomb had to be the plutonium bomb, hence the necessity to know for sure that it actually worked. Fortunately for them, plutonium is a natural byproduct of a process that took place inside certain atomic reactors, so there were larger amounts of it. A lot of plutonium meant that the scientists could afford to conduct a preliminary test of the plutonium bomb.

But how do you test an atomic bomb? No one had any idea how an atomic explosion behaved. There were lots of guesses, but no one knew for sure. The scientists argued among themselves about the predicted strength of the explosion: some scientists estimated that the explosion would be equivalent to five kilotons (five thousand tons) of a standard explosive of the TNT type, others thought that the strength would be around ten thousand kilotons. The more pessimistic scientists speculated that there was a chance that the chain reaction would get out of control and cause the molecules of the air to undergo nuclear fission - and then the entire state of New Mexico, or even the entire world - would be destroyed in an explosion. There were also those who believed that nothing would happen and that the bomb would not work at all. For such a case, the army prepared a huge container, weighing two hundred and forty tons, into which the remains of the nuclear material that has not undergone fission will be collected: this container was given the name "Jumbo", and it was placed in the location marked on the screen.

The name given to the experiment was 'Trinity', and the bomb was called 'The Gadget'. Before detonating the gadget, it was necessary to make sure that the measuring devices were working properly, so the scientists conducted a preliminary mini-explosion: one hundred and eight tons of TNT, detonated not far from the planned test site of Trinity, also marked on the map. This 'tiny' explosion, in quotation marks, was the largest controlled explosion in history - until Trinity itself.

The sixteenth of July arrived, and the technicians put the gadget on a high tower in the heart of the desert. The scientists and generals retreated to special bunkers, waiting for the countdown. The tension was huge. The weather was inclement and there was a fear that the rain and wind would increase the danger of nuclear fallout, or that a stray lightning strike on the high tower would trigger the bomb prematurely.

At five thirty in the morning, the button was pressed and a gadget exploded with the force of just over twenty thousand tons of TNT. The shock in the earth was felt over two hundred kilometers from the place, and the atomic mushroom that is so familiar to us today, was transformed to a height of about twelve kilometers. In the place where Gadget's tower stood, only a crater about three hundred meters wide and three meters deep remained, and the sand in the crater was melted into a greenish, radioactive glass that was named 'Trinity'.

The army tried, as expected, to keep the fact of the explosion quiet. It wasn't easy, because the explosion was heard in five states around New Mexico or as one of the soldiers pointed out - "Why don't you give us an easier task, for example hiding the Mississippi River?". The official version of the event was that a large ammunition depot exploded in the heart of the desert, with no casualties.

The initial reaction of the viewers of the event was elation, a confirmation of a tremendous effort of years that ended with a dizzying success. Glasses of whiskey passed from hand to hand, people shook hands. Physicist Isidore Rabi collected twenty dollars from his colleagues after winning a bet on the expected strength of the explosion.

But after the initial euphoria passed, the true meaning of what happened at Trinity began to seep into people's hearts. Like Prometheus who was punished by Zeus after stealing the fire from Olympus for the humans, everyone realized that the world would never be the same after the atomic demon was out of the bottle. Robert Oppenheimer wrote in his memoirs that at the moment of the explosion a sentence from a sacred Hindu book flooded his mind: "Here I became death, I was the destroyer of worlds." Three weeks later death came to the city of Hiroshima in Japan and took with it about eighty thousand people, and destroyed the worlds another forty thousand, three days later, in Nagasaki.

* This article is taken from the show's script.Making history!', a bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology.