The landscape is home to two other bubbling, gassy craters, one full of water, the other a muddy mess filled with weak flames.
#Darvaza gas crater sea of stars how to#
But to understand its origin story - and how to quench its unending flames - you need to pan out a bit wider. “When I was digging and gathering these soil samples, fire would come up through the hole that I was digging, because I would open up new paths for the methane,” Kourounis said. It turns out the crater floor was indeed full of confounding critters, an astounding find considering how dynamic and precarious the environment was. He spent no more than 17 minutes down there, gathering soil samples as he went so scientists could check to see whether this Hadean pit was home to any extremely hardy microorganisms. (On record, anyways.) Attached to a complex pulley system, he carefully made his way down to the crater floor courtesy of his Kevlar-imbued fireproof harness and a heat-deflecting suit, the sort occasionally donned by volcanologists. “You expect to see the devil waving back at you,” he said.īack in 2013, Kourounis enjoyed the spectacle so much that he climbed into the crater itself, becoming the first and, to date, only person to have done so. If you peer over the rim, the heat roars into your face as if you’re standing in front of a blast furnace. The “of hell” part of the locale’s name is “100% understandable,” George Kourounis, an explorer and documentarian, said. It’s certainly a spectacular sight, particularly at night: Under a canopy of stars, the unyielding pyre within Darvaza (which means “gateway” or “doorway”) flickers and hisses as the darkness above. In recent years, the crater has become something of a tourist attraction. Officials, he said, had been ordered to “find a solution to extinguish the fire.”īut… how exactly does one extinguish a seemingly eternal fire? And, frankly, why the hell would anyone even try to do battle with this demonic geologic force? “We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people,” Berdymukhamedov noted.
He also implied that the natural gas going up in flames could be tapped and used as fuel. For some strange reason, as the new year dawned, Turkmenistan’s authoritarian President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov decided he’d had enough of Darvaza’s incandescence.ĭuring televised remarks made earlier this month, he said that the crater - one far from any permanent human population - was a health and safety hazard and an environmental risk. Although its dimensions - 70 metres across and 30 metres deep - aren’t that impressive, the perpetual conflagration within certain is: Methane-fuelled fires have been burning down there for perhaps half a century, like the world’s most overzealous barbecue pit. Within the Central Asian nation’s expansive Karakum Desert, somewhere just north of its centre, lies Darvaza Crater, more commonly known as the Gateway to Hell.
Their mission is to douse the fire or at least find a way to negate the negative impacts on the environment.OK, who put “Turkmenistan is going to attempt to extinguish the eternal fires of the Gateway of Hell” on their 2022 bingo card? Anyone? No? Right then. Lastly, in January of 2022, an official commission was created to find a permanent solution to exterminate the fiery gateway. To prove the rumors of his death incorrect, of course. Apparently not in a rush, in 2019 he appeared on state television doing doughnuts in a car. In addition to the Christian nightmare, there are also two other somewhat related tourist attractions in the area, the creatively titled Water Crater and the Mud Crater.īack in 2010, the former President of the country, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, ordered the crater needs to be closed. Having a giant gaping pit of burning hellfire in your desert might not be to every country’s delight, but since the surrounding area is a somewhat popular camping destination, this only added fuel to the fire of mystique in the area.
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