Eternal Flame Falls: The Fire That Should Not Burn
In the wooded hills of Chestnut Ridge Park, just south of Buffalo, New York, a modest stream called Shale Creek slides over a rock ledge. Behind the falling water, tucked into a shallow grotto, a golden flame roughly twenty centimeters tall burns day and night. Hikers descend the trail to find fire living inside a waterfall, and the sight is strange enough to have made this one of the most photographed spots in western New York.
The basic mechanics were never the mystery. The flame is fed by natural gas seeping up through fractures in the rock, and at some point in the past a human hand set it alight. It is not even literally eternal: gusts of wind and splashing water snuff it out from time to time, and it endures only because visitors make a quiet tradition of relighting it. The real enigma lies underground, and nobody examined it seriously until 2013.
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