Natural Coal Seam Fire at Burning Mountain, Wingen, NSW, Australia

Recent Coal seam fire at Burning Mountain, near Wingen, New South Wales, Australia.
About 300 km north of Sydney and 17 km north of Scone.

The area was occupied by the Wanaruah people before colonial settlement and it is presumably from their language that the word 'Wingen' derives. Appropriately it is said to mean 'fire'.
Burning Mountain takes its name from a naturally combusting coal seam running underground through the sandstone.
Burning Mountain is contained in a Nature Reserve administered by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS).
The coal seam and associated sandstone, shale and claystone layers at Mt Wingen are called the Koogah Formation, and assigned Early Permian.
The fire is moving in a generally southerly direction at a rate of about one metre per year.
The ‘burnt-out’ zone extends north-easterly for at least 6.5 kilometres  from the present zone of burning at Burning Mountain. The land surface above the ‘burnt-out’ zone is characterized by subsidence features such as fractures, closely-spaced parallel faulting, small grabens (fault-bounded gullies) and open gash-like fissures, which appear to have been controlled by the jointing system in the rocks of the Koogah Formation. Thus, if the coal has burned in the past at the current rate, then the fire started probably at most about 6,000 years ago.