The Door To Hell / The Gates of Hell: Darvaza Gas Crater, Turkmenistan

**[FYI Subscribers: this is a catch-up post of a video that was posted to Shorts in an abridged version about a month ago...]

Turkmenistan is one of the least visited countries on the planet. The former soviet state is tightly controlled and doesn’t have a great welcoming reputation. Some call it North Korea in the desert.

But there’s one thing that always pops up when the country’s mentioned (besides this fantastic monument to the president’s favorite dog). It’s called the Door To Hell, or the Gates of Hell, or some other variation of entrance to hell. I’m guessing I don’t have to explain why.

This is the Darvasa Gas Crater. It’s a burning crater over 200 feet long and 100 feet deep in the middle of the massive karakum desert. It’s been continuously on fire for more than 50 years.

It’s not totally clear how it came to be, but most say Soviets were exploring for resources, they hit a pocket of gas which started spewing massive amounts of toxic methane. They ignited it to burn off the gas and waited for the flames to die. That was sometime in the 1970s (or maybe 1960s). As of today, there’s no sign the flames are dying.

Since it’s notoriously hard to get to, the crater has become a big bucket list item for adventurers. Turkmenistan has a love/hate relationship with it … they’ve announced they would extinguish it more than once. Though that hasn’t happened, the president did do doughnuts around it in 2019, apparently to prove he wasn’t dead. There’s huge potential if the gas can be captured safely, but some experts think they only sure way to stop it is by dropping a nuclear bomb. Surprisingly, that’s actually been done before.

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