where in queensland am i most likely to see minmin lights?

Answer 1

Boulia to the south of Mt Isa claims to be the Minmin capital of the country but under the right circumstances, you can see them anywhere with flat horizons. They are not uncommon on the Nullarbor plain.

They are different today from a hundred years ago as the source has changed. I wrote this explanatory piece about Minmin lights for a local radio station:

The Min Min lights of southwest Queensland and other places have seen many possible explanations including marsh gas and will-o'-the-wisps. Slim Dusty wrote and sang about them and their mysterious lure to travelers. The lights are often bright but with odd shapes and fluctuations. They were mainly in the white/yellow/red range but other colours have been seen more recently. They can appear close to the ground or up in the sky. These days people don't see the Min Min lights so often, they see UFOs instead.

The Morning Glory was caused by a temperature inversion - and so are the Min Min lights. A large high pressure system, the Sub-Tropical Ridge, lies over Australia. Air in the high is descending. As it descends it warms so that warm air is overlying cooler air. This produces a temperature inversion.

I said, when describing the Morning Glory, that the air above and below the inversion had different densities. We are familiar with another boundary between fluids of different densities. If we go under water in a swimming pool and look towards the surface, the surface looks like a mirror. This is the boundary between water and air that have different densities. The same thing happens with layers of air of different densities. When you look at the layer at a very sharp angle the inversion acts as a mirror. This produces a mirage known as Fata Morgana named after Morgan le Fey, the sister of Arthur of Camelot.

One form of this mirage is the reflection of surface lights. The angle, as I said, is very acute so the source lights are often not visible, only the mirage. The atmosphere distorts the lights so the shape of the source cannot be determined. Campfires and kerosene lamps were the source of the Min Min lights in the early days. Electric lights and cars and trucks are the modern sources. The source lights are not close by and can be a hundred or more kilometres away. The Min Min lights moved slowly in the old days because their movement was governed by the speed of the person carrying the lantern. These days they move a lot faster because the source is often a car or a truck. Modern lighting also introduces green and blue lights where once the lights were always the colour of flames. The distortion means that you cannot identify the source as a car or truck, all you see are the rapidly moving lights in the sky, which is why they are often called UFOs today.

The Min Min lights might have a logical explanation but they are still weird and mysterious and frighten people even today, which is what you would expect from something named after Morgan le Fey.

Answer 2

There is a place called Min Min but there isn't alot there, I think it is an old mining town.

The Min Min lights are definately NOT explainable as far as I'm concerned.

The aboriginals of Australia have their own interesting theories on the matter.

I believe the lights usually follow travellers along the outback highways to and from the areas surrounding Min Min.