A patch of land in Ventura County’s section of Los Padres National Forest where the ground recently heated up to 812 degrees continues to puzzle firefighters and geologists after weeks of monitoring.
“It’s a thermal anomaly,” said Ron Oatman, spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.
Shoot…between this and the earthquake last week, someone should make a call to Tommy Lee Jones…looks like a volcano may pop up!! 
Besides buried tar and oil deposits, as suggested in the article, I have read where old tree root systems can burn underground for months. The other possibility is that there are some coal deposits under there. Buried methane and coal fires can burn underground for years.
djm
This place in Uzbekistan is called by locals “The Door to Hell”. It is situated near the small town of Darvaz. The story of this place lasts already for 35 years. Once the geologists were drilling for gas. Then suddenly during the drilling they have found an underground cavern, it was so big that all the drilling site with all the equipment and camps got deep deep under the ground. None dared to go down there because the cavern was filled with gas. So they ignited it so that no poisonous gas could come out of the hole, and since then, it’s burning, already for 35 years without any pause. Nobody knows how many tons of excellent gas has been burned for all those years but it just seems to be infinite there.
http://www.englishrussia.com/?p=1830
Mine fire
In May 1962, Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. The firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire, and let it burn for a time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not extinguished.
In her 2007 book about Centralia, Joan Quigley asserts that the fire began on May 27 when one of the two commercial haulers serving the borough “hurled hot ashes onto the dump.”[3] Quigley cites “interviews with volunteer firemen, the former fire chief, borough officials, and several eyewitnesses, as well as contemporaneous borough council minutes” as her sources for this explanation of the fire.
The fire remained burning in the lower depths of the garbage and eventually spread through a hole in the rock pit into the abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Adverse health effects were reported by several people due to the carbon monoxide produced.
Where PA Route 61 terminates due to the mine fire
Where PA Route 61 terminates due to the mine fireIn 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). State-wide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12-year-old Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet. He was saved after his older cousin pulled him from the mouth of the hole before he could plunge to his probable death. The incident brought national attention to Centralia as an investigatory group – including a state representative, a state senator, and a mine safety director – was coincidentally on a walking tour of Domboski’s neighborhood at the time of his incident.
Section of PA Route 61 closed due to mine fire.
Section of PA Route 61 closed due to mine fire.In 1984, Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. A few families opted to stay despite warnings from state officials.
In 1992, Pennsylvania claimed eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents to have the decision reversed failed. In 2002, the United States Postal Service revoked Centralia’s ZIP code, 17927.
A handful of occupied homes remain in Centralia. Most of the buildings have been razed, and at a casual glance the area now appears to be a meadow with several paved streets through it. Some areas are being filled with new-growth forest. Most of Centralia’s roads and sidewalks are overgrown with brush, although some areas appear to be mowed.[4] The remaining church in the borough holds weekly Saturday night services, and the borough’s four cemeteries are still well-maintained. Centralia’s cemeteries now have a far greater population than the town, including one on the hilltop that has smoke rising around and out of it.
The only indications of the fire, which underlies some 400 acres (1.6 km²), spreading along four fronts, are low round metal steam vents in the south of the borough, and several signs warning of underground fire, unstable ground, and carbon monoxide. Additional smoke and steam can be seen coming from an abandoned portion of Pennsylvania Route 61, the area just behind the hilltop cemetery, and various other cracks in the ground scattered about the area. Route 61 was repaired several times until its final closing. The current route was a detour around the damaged portion during the repairs and became a permanent route in the mid-1990s, thus abandonment occurred to the old route with mounds of dirt being placed at both ends of the former route, effectively blocking the road. Pedestrian traffic is still possible due to a small opening about two feet wide at the north side of the road, but this is very muddy and not accessible to the disabled.[citation needed] The underground fire is still burning and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. There are no current plans to extinguish the fire, which is consuming an eight-mile seam containing enough coal to fuel it for 250 years.[1]
WOW!!! Man…there sure is some freaky stuff out there that you don’t ever really hear about…
Sorry, but Centralia has been in the news on and off for decades.
I’m surprised none of the anti-smoking lobbies have picked up on this one yet.
djm
Thermal anomalies can be expected in a region of oil and gas production, it seems to me. Temperatures of 800 degrees one foot below the surface means that something is burning under the surface. It could be coal, oil, gas, or even molten rock or magma. One of the officials in the linked article mentioned that the area was “a disaster waiting to happen”. But in a larger sense, California is a disaster waiting to happen. Millions of people living on top of a seismically active fault zone can only mean big trouble ahead.
I was a student of geophysics in 1964, and I saw the seismograph recording in the lobby of the geology building at Indiana Univeristy go completely off the chart during the Alaskan earthquake in March. It was a magnitude 9.2 earthquake. I was in Alaska this past summer, and the devastation over forty years later was very apparent. I hate to think of the destruction that would occur if a similar earthquake would strike near a metropolitan area of California. Woody Guthrie said that “California’s a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see”, but, folks, I would have difficulty sleeping at night knowing what was about to move underground.
You ain’t far from the New Madrid fault, y’know. 
The underground fire is still burning and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. There are no current plans to extinguish the fire, which is consuming an eight-mile seam containing enough coal to fuel it for 250 years.[1]
If it were possible to extinguish the blaze, even at considerable expense, it would be a painless way to cut down on carbon emissions. allowing an eight-mile seam of coal to burn up, releasing tons of fossil carbon for no gain seems like a really bad idea, if it can be avoided.
And if not, what about a small steam turbine or heat exchange system that could pump some of the energy elsewhere?
I thought the same thing…except that they have already had the ground collapse from the mere weight of a child at certain points…how do you figure out where to build the machinery where it wouldn’t fall in?
Presumably, someone must have mapped the coal seam, or else how would they know it’s extent?
If they sited the turbine, or the heat exchanger or whatever on safe(ish) ground nearby, then all that needs to be risked is some pipe, which can be treated as expendable if it isn’t expended too often.
We recently had a small earthquake that that woke me from a deep sleep, but for the most part the central part of the USA is more stable than the more seismically-active western states. The New Madrid earthquake of 1812 was estimated at 8 on the Richter scale, whereas the Good Friday Alaskan earthquake of 1964 was a whopping 8.4 magnitude, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North American history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Earthquake
you know whats funny Doug?
I have lived in California my whole life and have never even felt a shrug of an earthquake.. 
hey…who knows..maybe in a few years I will live closer to the ocean… 
Not as big as that 9.2 March Alaska quake, though!
There was an earthquake in Oklahoma in 1952 that made a 49 foot crack in the state capitol.
That’s an amazing picture! I love it!
This gets a little complicated. The Good Friday Alaskan earthquake had a moment magnitude of 9.2 but measured 8.4 on the Richter scale. We are talking about the same event, just different ways of expressing the magnitude. The mathematics is explained on the link that I provided previously.