The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been on fire since 1962.

The anthracite coal industry gave birth to Centralia, Pennsylvania. Coal destroyed the town, too.

Centralia was founded in the 1800s. By the mid twentieth century, the town of 2,000 had its own school district, seven churches, five hotels, and a couple of theaters.

But in 1962, the town’s sanitation department decided to incinerate garbage in a landfill on the outskirts of town. It turned out to be a bad move. A very bad move. The landfill was located on an abandoned coal mine. Coal, as coal is wont to do, began to burn.

Underground Spread of Coal Fire

Several attempts were made to put out the fire. Workers tried to dig out the burning coal, and they tried to smother the flames with wet sand and cement. They even tried to dig a fire trench to stop the creeping flames. But all that digging only succeeded in ventilating the flames. The underground fire continued to spread.

In 1979, the seriousness of the fire became clear. A gas-station owner checking the fuel level in his station’s underground tanks noticed his measuring stick getting hot. He dropped a thermometer into the tank’s gasoline and was shocked to discover the explosive fuel cooking at 172°F.

By 1984, sinkholes and carbon monoxide made living in the town dangerous. Congress set aside $42 million to relocate remaining residents to nearby towns. In 1992, all the remaining buildings were condemned, and in 2002 the US Postal Service retired the town’s 17927 zip code.

Today, the fire continues burning beneath 400 acres, sending up smoke and steam from cracks in the ground and abandoned roads. The fire is consuming an eight-mile seam of coal large enough to fuel the fire for another 250 years.

Coal Fires Around the World

There are thousands of underground coal fires around the world. They’re started by humans, lightning, brush fires, and even spontaneous combustion.

One such fire is still burning in an old coal mine in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It started over a hundred years ago, and in 2002, it ignited a 12,000 acre forest fire that cost $6.5 million to put out.

Australia’s Burning Mountain, the oldest known underground coal fire, has been burning for over 6,000 years.

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Over 50 species are going extinct every single day.

Scientists have concrete evidence that the Earth is currently undergoing the largest mass extinction in 65 million years.

It’s called the Holocene Extinction — Holocene being the current epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.

From Earth’s fossil record, we know about Six Great Mass Extinctions:

• The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction occurred about 444 million years ago.

  At the time, all complex organisms lived in the sea. The most common theory is that the onset of an ice age caused the extinction, which wiped out over 100 families of marine life. Many trilobite families bit the dust during this event.

• The Late Devonian Extinction happened 364 million years ago.

  This event saw a major worldwide extinction of coral reefs and the marine life they supported, as well as other groups of animals and plants. Nobody’s sure what caused it, but scientists speculate global cooling and several medium-sized asteroid impacts within a few million years of each other may have been the culprits.

• The Permo-Triassic Extinction occurred 251 million years ago.

  The granddaddy of all mass extinctions, this event saw 96% of all marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species kick the evolutionary bucket.

  The die off happened in less than a million years (a very short time in geological terms) and the recovery took 5 million years to crank back up, and another million years after that to get rolling. While not deemed the smoking gun yet, this event coincides with the largest known volcanic eruption in history.

• The Triassic-Jurassic Extinction occurred 200 million years ago.

  Was it caused by climate change, asteroids, or volcanoes? The verdict isn’t clear. What is clear is that 20% of marine life and many large amphibians were wiped out. At least half of all species on the planet bit the dust.

  This event occurred over less than a 10,000 year period, just before the supercontinent of Pangea began to break up.

• The Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction occurred about 65 million years ago.

  This event was probably caused, or at the least aggravated by, the impact of an asteroid around the size of Manhattan. About 16% of marine families and 18% of land vertebrate families ceased to exist. In North America, over 50% of plant species may have been wiped out.

  And of course…this is the event that doomed the dinosaurs.

• The Holocene Extinction is occurring now.

  Studies of the fossil record show that the normal “background” rate of extinction is about one species every four years. The current rate is between 30,000 and 100,000 per year.

You are now witnessing the fastest of the six great mass extinctions.

And this extinction, without a doubt, is the result of human population growth. By the end of this century, over five million species (half of the species on Earth now) will likely be gone.

“It’s not just species on islands or in rain forests or just birds or big charismatic mammals,” says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist researcher from the University of Tennessee. He notes fish, birds, insects, plants, and mammals. “It’s everything and it’s everywhere…it is a worldwide epidemic of extinctions.”

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Twice a year, you can watch the sunset from almost every street in downtown Manhattan.

On May 28 and July 12, the setting sun aligns with the east-west street grid of New York City’s most densely populated borough, Manhattan. And on December 5 and January 8, it’s the sunrise that aligns with cross streets.

In 2002, the term Manhattanhenge was coined by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse to describe the phenomenon. The term makes reference to England’s Stonehenge, a prehistoric circular array of large standing stones where the sun aligns during the summer solstice.

Manhattan’s streets run along the length of the island, so they’re actually about 30 degrees off of a true east-west line. Otherwise, Manhattanhenge would fall on the equinoxes. Still, when the sun does align, commuters who are suddenly blinded realize something’s different. And the site of Earth’s nearest star setting into each street’s centerline is pretty amasnic.

See more by clicking below:

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In the Skuon region of Cambodia, tarantula spiders are deep fried and eaten by the plateful.

What’s black, hairy, loaded with garlic and butter, and, oh yeah—has eight legs? Correctimundo! Deep fried spiders!

Ask the locals in Skuon, Cambodia, and they’ll tell you the best fried spider is one plucked straight from its burrow and quickly fried with garlic and salt. Crispy on the outside with a gooey center, fried spiders should be served piping hot.

How Did Cambodians Start Eating Fried Spider?

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when the Khmer Rouge and leader Pol Pot’s Communist guerrillas force you out of the city and into the fields where there’s no food (that’s what happened to Cambodians in 1975-1979), you stay alive by eating grubs, crickets, and giant water beetles. And, you discover new delicacies like crispy fried tarantulas.

Fried Spiders Are Popular Snack Food

Skuon has become quite famous as “Spider Town.” Many tourists and regular minibus taxi passengers on their way to Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh can’t pass through Skuon without stopping to eat a few arachnids. Women bring the fried spiders to the traveler’s car windows on heaping plates, drenched with butter.

One fried spider costs the equivalent of $0.08, so a good day of selling a couple hundred fried spiders can earn $10-20. That’s not bad in Cambodia, where a third of the population live below a poverty line drawn at an income of $1.00 per day.

But what do they taste like? One aficianado says: “They taste a bit like crickets, only much better.”

Watch Nora and Sky munch some deep fried spiders:

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The tallest vehicular bridge in the world is the 1,125 foot tall Millau Viaduct which spans the River Tarn Valley in France.

Built by the Eiffage group, which also constructed the 62-foot-shorter Eiffel Tower, the Millau Viaduct is only 125 feet shorter than the Empire State Building in New York City. It opened to traffic on December 14, 2004.

The bridge was built to clear the heavy congestion that plagues the nearby town of Millau at the beginning and end of the July and August vacation season. It was the last link in the A75 autoroute, a continuous high-speed motorway between Paris and the French Riviera.

The bridge cost £390 million ($517m) to build (you could build over 65 identical bridges for less than the cost of the Iraq War…)

The Eiffage group, under a government contract which allows the company to collect tolls until 2080, charges each automobile £5.10 ($6.70) to pass. The fare goes up to £6.80 ($8.94) during the peak summer months. With 10,000 travellers per day (25,000 during peak season), the bridge should pay for itself in a decade.

Colossal Engineering Feat

The Millau Viaduct has eight steel roadway spans between seven concrete piers. The 1.52 mile roadway, with two lanes of traffic in each direction, weighs 36,000 tons.

Second Highest Span

Although the Millau Viaduct is the tallest bridge, it’s 885 foot high deck is only the second highest bridge at roadway elevation. A much higher bridge span crosses the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, U.S., where you can stroll 1,053 feet above the Arkansas River.

And now…take a motorcycle ride across the Millau Viaduct:

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