The Smoking Hills

Joel Houle

Have we got a burning hot story for you today! In Cape Bathurst, where Canada's mainland meets the Arctic Ocean, an entire coastline is burning.

Barb Ustina

That's amazing! And this location is aptly named the Smoking Hills. It's home to a really unique geological feature: a deposit of sedimentary rock that's been burning and smouldering continuously for thousands of years.

Joel Houle

On this episode, we'll be speaking with a research scientist who visited the "hellish landscape" to study it first-hand. And this is not an exaggeration! The air is so toxic, you need to wear a gas mask if you want to put boots on the ground. Boots, by the way, that could very well start melting depending on where you step.

Barb Ustina

Wow! I can't wait to hear all about this. But why are scientists fascinated with the Smoking Hills? How do we even know that these Hills have actually been burning for so long? And what's this link between this phenomenon and our understanding of life on the planet Mars? Stay tuned. We're about to find out.

Joel Houle

Welcome to a new episode of Simply Science — the podcast that talks about the amazing scientific work that our experts at Natural Resources Canada are doing. My name is Joel Houle.

Barb Ustina

And I'm Barb Ustina. Welcome, everyone. And Joel, as you said, off the top, we have a really smoking hot episode for you today. We have a really rare natural phenomenon, we get some insight into how Arctic explorers operated 200 years ago, and we talk about the potential for life on Mars. This episode really has it all.

Joel Houle

Oh, it's going to be great for sure. But just before we start, I just want to encourage everyone to subscribe to the podcast. If you haven't already, make sure you don't miss an episode. And also if you can take the time to leave a review, that would be absolutely amazing. It helps us reach more people and grow our podcast. So thank you so much. Ok, Barb, should we bring in our guest?

Barb Ustina

Let's do it.

Joel Houle

Our guest today, Steve Grasby is a research scientist working on the geochemistry of sedimentary rocks. Steve, welcome to the show!

Steve Grasby

Great! Thank you for having me.

Joel Houle

So you look specifically at sediments deposited in oceans. Could you please explain or expand a little bit on this?

Steve Grasby

Yeah. I mean, ever since the Earth was formed, we've had oceans that all the settlements that kind of erode off the continents get washed in. In rivers, and then they end up in the ocean basins and they just accumulate through time. So you get these layers of sediments that build up. And what happens then is that for every little layer marks a point in time. So that stack of layer becomes a record of the ocean that it was deposited in. And each layer gives you a little window into what was the chemistry of the ocean at that time. So if you change the ocean chemistry, it changes some of the chemical parameters of sediments. And now tens of millions of years later, we can go look at the sediments. You can measure the chemistry and use that to interpret what the ocean was like at that time. And by looking at these series of layers that have deposited over time, we can start to tell the whole history of the world's oceans. And normally things are pretty stable and calm. But there are periods in the Earth's past where we've had ice ages and the planet got very cold, and we've had periods where we've had hot houses and the planet got very hot. And we've had just dramatic events, like huge volcanic eruptions that have caused chaos and mass extinctions on the planet. And we can start to look at these sediments and the chemistry of them and start to read into what was the changes in the Earth's environment and how did life respond to these dramatic events. And it gives us insight to both the history of the planet, but also into the future as we go into a period of climate warming and environmental stress. And we can better understand by looking at the past how the planet and the oceans respond to these types of stresses.

Barb Ustina

Oh really, very interesting. Now we're here today to talk a bit about the work you're doing at a location called Smoking Hills, which sounds absolutely incredible. I'm wondering, most of us will never have a chance to go there to see it in person. Could you set the scene for us briefly? What's it like to be there? What was it like the first time you set foot on ground there?

Steve Grasby

Yeah. And I guess it's a hard question to answer in a way, because it's very diverse. So the general area is just beautiful. It's the Arctic tundra and that's remote, and you see a lot of wildlife and just this unspoiled, untouched part of the world. But when you get to the areas of the Smoking Hills, it's called that because the rocks there are naturally burning. And, boy, the first impression when I got there was that I have to leave. It's just really like hell on Earth. And it's just everything about it is absolutely horrible. The ground is really hot. It's black. Everywhere is black. It's just kind of deep muck that you walk through. So you feel like you're going to get stuck in this hot mucky ground. And then there's chimneys of smoke coming out. Loud, steam sounds. And then you get this strong smell of hydrogen sulfide. So the steam coming out is actually sulfuric acid. So you have to wear all this protective gear or else you're just going to burn your eyes and your throat. It would just probably kill you instantly if you got too close to these sites. So really just everything about it says you do not belong here.

Joel Houle

It sounds like a really interesting location. I haven't heard anything about Smoking Hills. You think it's the kind of thing that you would be learning about in school, but from my understanding, it's not something that's of interest just from a scientific perspective, but also from a historical perspective. Can you tell us a little bit about Smoking Hills and its place in Canadian folklore, in Indigenous records and all that?

Steve Grasby

Yeah, certainly. Like you say, it's kind of surprisingly unknown. It's a fairly unique place in Canada, for sure, and if not the world. There's not many spots like it. Maybe it's just this remoteness that people don't know about it or hear about it, but certainly Inuvialuit who live in that area have known about it for generations. They have Legends of there being people living in the ground. And then the smoke that you see is smoke from their campfires, and they were trying to hide away, apparently in the legend. But you can find this online, there are some good records of the Inuvialuit legends of the area. And the first sort of written record was by members of the Franklin expedition, but not the one that got lost but the one before. They had an overland expedition where they went down the Mackenzie River and Franklin and his group went west, and then another party went east, and that party came across the Smoking Hills and made record of that. And that was sort of the first kind of written record. And then later on, when the Franklin expedition got lost, the next time they went to the Arctic with the ships, there's all the search parties looking for them, and there's the McClure search party. And then they went into that same area and saw smoke on the shorelines. And at first thought, well, maybe this is a campfire for the people we're looking for. And they went to check it out and discovered it was these burning shales. And they even brought back samples to the ship, and they apparently put them on the desk of Captain McClure. And they burned holes in his nice mahogany desk. So he wasn't very pleased with the people that brought these samples back to show them. They were still so hot that they could set fire to his desk. So when you read these written records, they even describe that when they got to the site, they saw these ponds of this red, ruby red water, and they decided to taste it for some reason. And what's funny, though, as you read this, it says it tastes like sulfuric acid, and you just don't understand. How do they know what sulfuric acid tastes like?

Joel Houle

Yeah!

Steve Grasby

And why did they even decide to taste this bright red water in the first place? So it's quite, almost humorous when you read some stories about the first explorers that were in the area.

Joel Houle

Wow! Have you had the urge to test it yourself?

Steve Grasby

Well, no. I read the descriptions, but we did test it with some scientific equipment. And sure enough, this is actually the other funny part is that they're right. It is basically sulfuric acid that's in these ponds, and they're just full of toxic metals. So it's probably some of the most toxic natural waters anywhere on Earth. And the PH is so low, it's actually a negative PH value. And there's some complex chemistry that can explain how that can happen, because most people think of PH as kind of running between one and four. Neutral PH is seven. We learned this in school. But there, we're measuring PH's of, like, -1.4, 1 .5 so it's probably some of the most acidic waters in the world as well.

Joel Houle

It sounds like a weird superhero origin story gone horribly wrong. Wow. That's crazy!

Barb Ustina

And it's pretty amazing that they were able to live to tell the story. Right. You think taking sips of that water would put you out for a long time.

Steve Grasby

Yeah, I guess maybe they just had a few sips. They also noted that it burnt holes in their clothing as well.

Barb Ustina

So we know that the Hills have been smoldering for at least a few hundred years. Is there any way of knowing exactly how long they've been smoldering?

Steve Grasby

Yeah, that's a great question. And one that we've been pondering how we can test that. There are some techniques you can try to date the age of the rocks that have been cooked by the high temperatures. Another thing you see in this area is that where these burning has occurred is that the shales beside that, they get really cooked, and they turn into, like, a bright red brick material. And it's called clinker. And it comes from the sound when you walk across it, it has this kind of clinking sound to it. And that name comes from smelters where they smelt ores to get medals out of it. And then they have this byproduct of clinker, and we see the same thing there. We pondered how we could maybe date that. We're still trying to look at some methods that could do it. But the age we know that it probably has been able to burn since at least the glaciers receded in that area about 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. And certainly, again, if you look at the Inuvialuit traditional knowledge, it's been long known that this is an area that's been burning. So everything that we know of suggests that this has been a burning site for quite a long time. But yeah, we're trying to resolve how long.

Barb Ustina

Wow. Now tell us a bit about your research project there. What was it about the Burning Hills that sort of first captured your attention? And what were you curious about? What did you want to discover?

Steve Grasby

We had a group of people. It was a group led by Rod Smith from my team office. And we had a field camp set up, and everyone's looking at kind of different parts of the natural history and the geology of the area. For me, it was just to understand better, why are these shales burning and what's the process that occurs and why do they set on fire. And also then just to look at all the products of this burning that's going on. And we're looking at the minerals that are formed, and you just have this bizarre range of very rare minerals that you don't find in many places because you need these very hot, moist environments to form them. And some of them are just beautiful green, kind of almost look like Emerald crystals and things like this. But the problem is, one when you try to collect them, it would just burn holes in our sample containers because they're still so hot. So they're just melting their way through our containers that we're trying to collect them into. And then too, even if you did collect them, they just turned like a white powder by the end of the day, just because as soon as they're outside that environment, they just altered to another mineral. And they're no longer these beautiful crystals that we see. But just trying to understand and characterize the nature and diversity of this very unique site in the world and to understand the processes that are going on and characterize the various unique minerals and chemistry and understanding the whole site.

Joel Houle

What did you actually discover through your research?

Steve Grasby

Well, one of the kind of sideline discoveries, it wasn't really what we're looking at the burning sites, but we are also looking at the shales that do burn. So we looked at these away from where the burning is occurring. And one of the interesting things is that the shale is just like piles of mud, I guess. And there's these very distinct layers that occur within the shale. And we're trying to see what these layers are. And it turns out to be a mineral called jarosite. And it's not a common mineral, it's a fairly rare mineral on Earth. But here, we just saw these bands of it formed within the shale unit itself. And we're then trying to understand why do we get these bands of jarosite within the shale? And from that we discovered what it was is that when these shales were deposited, the oceans at that time were anoxic, so there was no oxygen in the water. And when you have those conditions, you can form a mineral pyrite. It's iron and sulfur that joined together to form a mineral pyrite. This is known popularly as fool’s gold, so it looks kind of golden in color. And in this area, in this kind of cold permafrost region, when that pyrite is exposed to some moisture in the air, it oxidizes and is forming this mineral jarosite. And this became quite interesting because although it's not common on Earth, that jarosite has been found quite commonly on Mars. And it's been used a lot to try and interpret what we know about the history and the oceans or the water bodies historically that occurred on Mars.

Barb Ustina

Were you surprised when you saw the layers and layers of jarosite there in Smoking Hills?

Steve Grasby

Well, it was unusual, just as they say, because it's not a common mineral on Earth and not something you'd expect to find. Where you do find it would be in places like acid mine drain site, or it's found in some acidic lakes in Australia. And also some other sort of places where you might have exposure of ore minerals that are oxidizing, and you're forming these kind of acidic ponds and rivers. So it's been associated then with these acid environments. And because of that where it's found on Mars, it's interpreted to mean that the water on Mars had to be very acidic to form these layers of jarosite that they see in rocks and Mars. What's different between that and what we see is that we know these jarosite layers and these shells that we see was deposited in very normal ocean at the time. We can see abundant fossils and marine life in the same shales. We know it was a very lush ocean, full of life, full of diversity of animals. So it wasn't a harsh environment and it wasn't in an acidic environment when the shales were deposited. So that these jarosite layers are just a modern weathering feature. It's nothing to do with the environment of the ocean of when the shells were formed.

Barb Ustina

So jarosite is not necessarily formed in an acidic environment, then. What would this finding mean for scientists who are studying life on Mars, for instance?

Steve Grasby

Yeah, well, this is what we've kind of pointed out, and we just publish these results. Up until now, when people have observed a lot of jarosite on Mars, and then they said, oh, well, the only place we see this on Earth are in these acid ponds. So that means that the sedimentary rocks on Mars must have been formed in the same kind of acid pond environment. And this makes it tougher for models and evolution of life on the planet. Part of the whole reason of exploring Mars is to see if life could have occurred outside of Earth. And if all you had were these really acidic ponds, that's a much harder environment for life to form and to diversify. But what we find here now at the Smoking Hills is that these jarosite layers are just a modern feature, and they have nothing to do with the nature of the environment that those shales were deposited in. These shales are just full of marine fossils. We know that it was a very diverse, abundant life in the ocean at that same time. And it was just these pyrite layers that were forming at the bottom of the ocean that are now in the modern oxidizing to form jarosite. The presence of jarosite says nothing about the environment that the shales were formed in. And this makes it much more interesting in the sense that the jarosite on Mars doesn't mean that it was an acid environment. Then it could be that you have much more friendly conditions for evolution of life on the planet than has been assumed to date. So we're just trying to point this out to say, well, just because you see jarosite, it doesn't mean that that was the environment that those sediments were formed in. It could be a similar kind of weathering feature, just like we see at the Smoking Hills.

Barb Ustina

And if it's on Earth in these conditions, then maybe it's the same story for Mars.

Steve Grasby

Exactly right. So we're just trying to use the conditions we see on Earth and say, well, this is another way that you can interpret the jarosite you see on Mars. That it's just weathering that's occurring much later than when the shales were deposited and nothing to do with the environment that they were deposited in.

Barb Ustina

What have people told you? How are people responding to this?

Steve Grasby

Well, this has been the main thing where we've been talking with some people who've been involved with the Mars exploration, and now they're interested to understand what would the detectors that are used on Mars satellites or rovers, how would they see the same site at the Smoking Hills? We use different methods to measure what the mineral composition is than we use on Earth, where we have a big lab and everything. Right? So they have a different, more compact instruments that use an entirely different method to detect minerals. And so what we see might look different for a Mars Rover, for instance.

Joel Houle

Well, this is all really interesting, and it goes to show, really, that geoscience is not really limited to the Earth. And what we know about our planet helps us learn more about the universe. So thank you so much, Steve, for taking the time to come and chat with us today and capturing our imagination.

Steve Grasby

Great. Well, thanks and that's been great.

Barb Ustina

We can't wait to hear more thank you.

Joel Houle

So, Barb, are you booking your trip to go visit the Smoking Hills any time soon?

Barb Ustina

You know what? I would actually love to visit the Smoking Hills in person. And I'm a bit surprised that we didn't learn about them in geology class in grade school. And truth be told, I'm a bit disappointed in my dad. He was working as a geologist in the North when I was a kid, and he never mentioned them. But I'm glad that we've learned all about them today. And it's a good reminder of the incredible places we have in Canada.

Joel Houle

That's so true. Do you know where I'd love to go if I had the chance?

Barb Ustina

Where?

Joel Houle

Sable Island. It's so beautiful. For those of you who don't know, a few episodes back, we interviewed this research scientist who was doing research on the integrity of the Island. And it's this island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean near Nova Scotia. And it's made of sand. It's beautiful. Sandy beaches everywhere. There's magnificent wild horses running around. It is amazing. I would love to go there!

Barb Ustina

I wonder if they get winter there.

Joel Houle

I don't know. You know what? I'll go, okay, I'll check and I'll report back.

Barb Ustina

Okay, sounds good.

Joel Houle

Awesome! So if you're interested in learning more about... Actually that episode. We can link that episode of Sable Island in the episode description. And also, if you're interested in learning more about the type of work that we do in Canada's northern landscapes, we'll have those links available in the episode description as well. You can also leave a review or share this episode. That would be amazing! We would appreciate it so much. And if you share over Twitter, make sure to tag us @NRCanScience. Or even better, you can tag us directly. I'm @JoelScience.

Barb Ustina

And I'm @SimplyScienceB. That's the letter B. I might remind everyone that Simply Science also has a website and a YouTube channel, which you should check out. We have in-depth articles of interest and videos that showcase the fascinating scientific work that we do here at Natural Resources Canada. And you can find those links in the episode description as well, plus our social media channels.

Joel Houle

Thank you, Barb! And thank you so much everyone for listening. We'll see you in the next episode.

Barb Ustina

Bye.