Man finds one of Planet Earth's nine 'eternal flames' inside a waterfall

A man visited one of the eternal flames located around the world which can just keep burning pretty much forever.

In a handful of places on our planet there are flames which continue to burn without being tended to and require nobody to bring fresh fuel supplies.

Each one is an eternal flame, a fire that keeps burning without an end in sight with some having been ablaze for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Mike Loughran is a chap who came across one of these eternal flames on his travels, at the aptly named Eternal Flame Falls in New York.

At the base of the waterfall there's a small grotto where an eternal flame burns, and Mike got a video of this fascinating natural phenomenon to show people just what it was like.

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Was he only dreaming or was this burning an eternal flame?

If you want to get technical about it, while the flame Mike found is eternal it can be extinguished and occasionally has to be re-lit.

Most eternal flames come from an ignition of a natural gas leak and are sitting on a big enough fuel supply to keep going pretty much indefinitely.

While many of them were lit by people, and with some eternal flames the person lighting them really didn't know the fire would just keep burning, others were caused by natural phenomenon like lightning strikes.

Several of the natural eternal flames which burn in places around the world such as Turkey, India, Iraq and Nepal are reputed to have been blazing for thousands of years without end.

Then again, if one did occasionally go out it'd only be a matter of someone relighting it and managing to keep it a secret before anyone really noticed.

National Geographic

When Mike said there were nine main eternal flames around the world - he was talking about the 'natural' ones - there are actually even more than that.

The majority of eternal flames are natural gas deposits which keep burning while there are also a handful of burning coal seams as well.

A particularly famous one is the 'door to hell' in Turkmenistan which is an entire crater that has been burning for decades as it sits atop a natural gas field.

Some of the eternal flames around the world are man-made, and are usually kept burning as an act of commemoration so there is a light that never goes out in the memory of something important.

In the UK there are eternal flames at New Scotland Yard, London, to commemorate police officers who have lost their lives, at Liverpool's Anfield stadium for the memory of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster and one in Derry to symbolise renewed hopes for peace after The Troubles.