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India's premier store of coking coal — and the site of underground fires that have burned for a century.

Jharia holds the country’s best coking (metallurgical) coal, laid down in a Gondwana rift basin of the Damodar Valley some 280 million years ago, when cold-climate forests accumulated in a subsiding trough. These Permian seams feed India’s steel industry.

Decades of mining have ignited persistent underground coal fires, which smoulder through the seams, subsiding the surface and making Jharia a stark case study in the costs of coal.

Sources

• Geological Survey of India

A short reference note: this summary draws on third-party sources such as the Geological Survey of India and Wikipedia. In time I plan to give every geological feature its own learning-oriented write-up — with custom diagrams, graphs, and study pointers — as I’ve already done for the 11 locations that have an Instagram reel.