Source of New York State’s famed eternal flame proves elusive

Daily Mail : Although a flame has been burning in New York State for potentially thousands of years, scientists have so far been unable to determine the source of the natural gas feeding the flame. Arndt Schimmelmann of Indiana University and colleagues recently studied the rocks beneath Chestnut Ridge County Park, long assumed to be the source. What they found was that the shale layer is not hot enough to cause the rock’s carbon molecules to break down. From the size of the flame, the researchers have determined that a gas “macroseep” must be emanating from deep shale source rocks, and that there may be similar macroseeps elsewhere in the world. “If that’s true, and [if] gas is naturally produced this way in other locations, we have much more shale-gas resources than we thought,” said Schimmelmann. The group’s paper was published in the May issue of Marine and Petroleum Geology.