Yanartaş, Turkey's Eternal Flame

There are some places that just always burn. One is the eternal flame installed at the grave of John F. Kennedy. That one's fed by a gas pipe. Then there's Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a cold seam caught on fire in 1962 and is still burning all these years later. The Darvasa Gas Crater in Turkmenistan is a methane vent that has been burning for more than 40 years after it was deliberately ignited.  

Turkey has its own eternal flame in Yanartaş, which used to be called Mount Chimaera, in Olympos Beydagları National Park. There are quite a few totally natural torches burning in holes, and will keep burning long after Centralia or Darvasa exhaust their fuel. These eternal flames in Turkey are fed by methane rising from the deep underground, which is ignited when reaching the oxygen at the surface, with the help of the catalyst called ruthenium in the igneous rocks that make up the mountain. Read about the perpetual flames of Yanartaş and how you can visit them at CNN Travel. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: William Neuheisel)