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Firefighters are monitoring a patch of land north of Fillmore where the ground climbed to 812 degrees on Friday for unknown reasons.
Time for a little oil bidness schooling.
Lesson One: Where there's oil, there's always natural gas - sometimes small amounts, sometimes large. How much gas there is in relation to how much oil (refered to as the Gas Oil Ratio or GOR) is one of the factors used in classifying a well as either an oil well or a gas well.
Lesson Two: What creates a "reservoir" is a geological event that forms a "trap" for oil, gas & water that's migrating. A formation folded into a dome would be one type of trap. Another would be where a geologic shift caused a fault line and lifted the block (of rock) on one side of the fault enough that a layer of porous rock was directly opposed by non-porous rock.
Lesson Three: Fluids and gases migrate through connecting holes in formations (called permeability), underground fissures/faults, or usually a combination of both. If the migration of those fluids/gases don't encounter a trap, it will eventually migrate to the surface. Mother Nature "spills" more fossil fuels that all the oil companies combined.
All that said: if the fissure/fault is large enough to allow the escape of natural gas to the surface, it's large enough for oxygen to seep down and replace the escaping gas. The only thing needed is an ignition source which could be something on the surface or something underground like heat from magma or a tiny spark created by a fissure shift involving a formation of chert.