These sorts of mine fires can stay lit for a very long time. One burned in the city of Zwickau, Germany from 1476 to 1860. Another coal fire in Germany, at a place called Brennender Berg (Burning Mountain), has been smoking continually since 1688!— Joshua Foer, @ Boing Boing
It's dismaying that a few hyperintelligent — yet short-lived — bits of living carbon routinely start fires in their planet's crust that could last a thousand orbits, by accident.
Imagine zapping into a universe in which someone could just trip at the wrong moment, and thus spark every river for miles to turn into a perfectly transparent, contiguous pane of glass, and remain so for thirty generations. And you might have something approaching my level of panic here.
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