THE FIRES BELOW
ON A HOT, DRY, WINDY SUMMER MORNING in 2014, rancher John Bailey drove along the edge of a wildland fire in southeast Montana. The fire had started inconspicuously — no lightning strike or neglected campfire involved, just flames appearing on open range owned by Jared Broadus, Bailey’s cousin. The county’s official fire warden was stationed about an hour away, so Bailey, 53 at the time and Rosebud County’s volunteer fire chief, drove a state-owned pickup out to check on the fire line. The blaze was small, only a few acres, and Bailey, who had fought fires his entire life, wasn’t worried. He didn’t own any fire gear, so he wore his regular ranching clothes: jeans and a Stetson that shaded his eyes as he looked across the valley below, where slabs of beige rock the size of three-story houses littered the landscape.
Here in the high desert, generations of rivers — the Yellowstone, the Powder and the Tongue — had eaten into the soft sandstone, leaving a fortress of ochre and amber walls, webbed by steep escarpments and narrow drainages. Black Angus roamed between them, the calves running on their tippy legs. The whole eroding country looked like it was settling, like someone sinking into the folds of a giant armchair. Bailey drove slowly through the smoke from the fire, trading jokes with another cousin, Pat Bailey, who rode shotgun.
They were driving through a smoky gap — the fire line on their right, and a steep drainage, the Rough Draw, that dropped to a 60-footdeep ravine to their left — when the ground beneath them suddenly disappeared. Ghostly fumes rose up from the space where two men and the pickup had been just moments before.
Inside the pickup, shaken but unhurt, Bailey looked through a windshield at a world now split between earth and sky. The truck had sunk into dry yellow grass, as though the ground they’d been driving on had eerily, and swiftly, deflated. The two men rolled down their windows and scrambled out of the truck, crawling back up to soil that was hot to the touch. The truck’s tires were smoking, and the rotten-egg smell of sulfur and ash poured out of tiny fissures surrounding the sinkhole.
The moment the truck was swallowed, Bailey knew what had happened: They’d fallen into a sinkhole created by a burning coal seam, a type of fire that starts on natural outcrops of coal before quickly moving belowground, eating through seams that can range in thickness from a few inches to dozens of feet. Once underground, these fires become extremely difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish.
Locals like the Baileys were familiar with these fires; the area had long been nicknamed Coal Seam Alley. But the fires were changing, becoming more common and more dangerous, and foretelling a new era of climate catastrophe in southeast Montana — an era in which devastating wildfires were no longer caused just by humans or lightning, but also by the fires below.
glinting ribbons of flammable ore that unspool across every continent except Antarctica, have caught fire for millions of years. They ignite on the surface, sparked by lightning or nearby wildfires, or through spontaneous combustion. They devour the surface coal and burrow deep belowground where they continue to smolder, lasting anywhere from a few years to centuries; Australia’s Mount Wingen has been burning underground for at least 6,000 years. While there
