Incredibly rare outback discovery stumps Aussie farmer: ‘Spooked’
After a patch of ground spontaneously combusted at a farm on the weekend, efforts to extinguish it failed. But why is the ground on fire?
Cattle at an outback farm became spooked, one witness feared aliens had invaded, and a fire scientist called the phenomenon “fascinating”. That was the reaction after a dry, grassless paddock spontaneously combusted and began to smoulder.
Third generation farmer Julie Turner has spoken with her 70-year-old father about the mysterious environmental event, and there’s no record of it occurring on their 6,000 hectare Queensland property until recently.
“It’s a really strong smell, like burning hair. When I was by the gate and could smell the smoke, I thought there was a fire,” she told Yahoo News.
“When it started it was just a tiny patch, so I tried to put it out but I couldn’t.”
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Cattle avoid water where smouldering is occurring
The first occurrence was in November last year during a heat spell when there was a lot of moisture in the air, but heavy rain quickly put it out. The problem returned last Saturday, with half a dozen plumes of smoke appearing across a 15-metre square area in front of a water trough. Now she’s praying the skies will open up again.
“It’s pretty weird. One person thought it was aliens, but it makes you think, what’s come and lit it all up?” Turner wondered.
"The cattle are a bit spooked by it because it’s right near the water. They mostly go to the other side of the trough where luckily it’s not burning.”
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Perfect storm creates spontaneous combustion
Turner’s farm is just 23 kilometres out of Clermont, a small town in the Isaac region, that’s a major resource extraction hub. There were early suspicions the smouldering could have been the result of underground coal deposits catching fire, but a pyrogeography and fire science expert who studied Turner’s images doesn’t think the fossil fuel mining is directly related.
Professor David Bowman from the University of Tasmania described the Clermont incident as “fascinating”. It’s similar to a rare occurrence he studied in 2019 at a Northern Territory farm.
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It’s no coincidence that both incidents occurred at cattle properties, as the animal's manure is highly combustible and even burned in the developing world as a fuel source. Bowman believes a perfect storm of events are causing the problem in Australia.
"You have this rough, not perfectly digested manure, which contains grasses and is combustible. Then you add a lot of urine which is bonding it together," he told Yahoo News.
"It’s getting stampeded by the cattle into powder. And then you've probably got microbes in there digesting this beautiful fuel mix because it's carbon and nitrogen rich."
The energy from the microbes creates heat on the soil's surface, and the rapidly changing climate only compounds the problem.
"Fire is just basically heat, fuel and oxygen. And the microbes digesting the fuel and the high temperatures on the soil surface are probably just tipping it over to being combustible," he added.
How climate change is escalating the combustion problem
What’s fascinating to Bowman is that the reports of spontaneous combustion are a relatively new occurrence.
“People have been working cattle in Australia for 150 years… and they know cattle really well. And when cattle people are telling you that they're seeing something they don't have an explanation for, that's really very interesting,” he said.
“Because it’s yet another little sign that something in the world is not the same, and we all know what that is – the climate's changing. We’re getting higher temperatures and different weather, and so we're starting to see strange manifestations.”
Changes to weather systems are more complex than heating along. In his home state of Tasmania, where there has been recent heavy rains, the landscape remains dry.
"You think how on Earth is this possible? But the reason it's possible, is we've had incredible wind and higher temperatures," he said.
"The climate is basically a Rubik's cube. There are all these dimensions, and you're twisting them around, and we're seeing new patterns. It's really intriguing."
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