Hot As Hell In Ventura County

You don’t see things like this every day. In Ventura County, the ground just started to get hot, baking to the point that it could fire ceramics. The reason is likely some kind of underground combustion of petroleum; this has been seen around an oil field. Apparently, this does happen, naturally, from time to time. But it’s very weird, and scary, to think about the ground suddenly smoking and becoming that hot. It makes me think, if that sort of thing could happen in Ventura, it could happen elsewhere, too. That’s the kind of natural phenomenon that probably fueled the ancients’ vision of what hell was like. That we moderns understand this sort of thing in natural terms in no way diminishes how awesome, and scary, something like that is.