Smoking Hills

Let's face it; Canada is beautiful, but it's also pretty weird. From the alien-like Spotted Lake in British Columbia to the mesmerizingly electric blue lakes of Banff National Park to their favorite delicacy, poutine, there's definitely some strange stuff going on up North. Canada's Northwest Territories are home to another such oddity: the Smoking Hills. Located on the Arctic Ocean, the rolling, barren hills are constantly belching out smoke-- but despite what you might think, they're not geothermal at all! As if that wasn't weird enough, the story of how the hills were discovered is even more interesting... The hills were discovered by explorer Captain Robert McClure while on an expedition to find and rescue Sir John Franklin and his crew, who had been lost for a few years while trying to map the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. Imagine how pumped McClure was when he first saw the smoke-- believing it to be the smoke from fires set by the lost crew (because what else could it be???) he promptly sent out a few men to investigate. The search crew was disappointed to find that the billowing clouds weren't coming from fires, but from vents in the ground. They copped a sample of the smoldering rock and returned to the ship. When they set the sample down on McClure's desk, it burned a hole into the wood-- strange! McClure assumed the rock was volcanic in nature, and simply continued searching for Franklin, but McClure was actually wrong (about both things-- he never found Franklin and his crew, and the hills weren't the result of volcanic activity). The smoke is actually caused by naturally-occuring lignite (also known as "brown coal") which is known to spontaneously combust-- in this case, erosion and exposure to oxygen autoignite the coal, causing it to smoke. The lignite has a ton of sulphur in it, and when its burned it emits sulphur dioxide, which, besides being known for smelling horrible, has turned the hills into a Martian landscape, more acidic than Arctic. Anyways, that was back in the mid-19th century, so it's a little mind-blowing to realize that the Smoking Hills are still burning-- they had been burning long before they were discovered, and will continue to smoke for many more years. -Roadtrippers The Smoking Hills are located on the east coast of Cape Bathurst in Canada's Northwest Territories, next to the Arctic Ocean and a small group of lakes. The cliffs were named by explorer John Franklin, who discovered them on his 1826 expeditions. They contain strata of hydrocarbons (oil shales), which have been burning continuously for centuries. The fires result from autoignition of sulfur-rich lignite deposits. The clouds of smoke have given the region its name. Over time the sulfur dioxide from the smoke has acidified the shallow ponds (