The Door to Hell
IF you head far enough into the barren expanse of the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan, you’ll come across what appears to be a giant pit of flames, aptly nicknamed ‘The Door to Hell’. In 1971, engineers (or Soviet scientists, depending on whose version of this story you believe) were drilling in a natural gas field near the village of Darvaza when a section of it collapsed into a cavern. Fearing that the escaping gas might be noxious, they set it alight in an effort to burn it off. What they probably didn’t realise is that Turkmenistan has the sixth-largest natural gas reserve in the world – hence the fire is still burning.
‘When you first set eyes on the crater, it’s like something out of a science-fiction film,’ explorer George Kourounis told National Geographic. In 2013, he descended into what he describes as ‘a colosseum of fire’, wearing a custom-made heat-reflective suit with a breathing apparatus, to collect soil samples. ‘You’ve got this vast, sprawling desert with almost nothing there, and then there’s this gaping, burning pit… The heat is scorching. The shimmer from the distortion of it warping the air around it is just amazing to watch, and when you’re downwind, you get this blast of heat that is so intense you can’t even look straight into the wind. You have to shield your face with your hand just standing at the crater’s edge.’
Five decades on, the fire at the Darvaza gas crater is showing no sign of dimming. (Are you humming The Bangles’ song yet? ‘An eeeternal flaaame…’)