The Door to Hell

The commonly repeated origin story holds that Soviet geologists, drilling for natural gas in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert around 1971, struck an underground cavern and the drilling rig collapsed into it, opening a crater roughly 70 metres wide and 20 to 30 metres deep. Concerned about methane gas endangering the small nearby village of Derweze (from which the crater takes its name — darvaza means "gate" in Turkmen), geologists reportedly ignited the escaping gas, expecting it to burn off within a few weeks.

More than five decades later, it was still burning — a discrepancy between the tidy origin story and the fire's genuinely surprising longevity that some researchers now treat with appropriate scepticism, since no definitive Soviet-era documentation of the exact incident, date, or original rationale has ever been publicly produced. What's certain is the crater's existence, its early-1970s dating, and the sheer scale of gas reserves beneath it — confirmed by a 2013 National Geographic-led expedition, whose findings suggested the crater could theoretically burn for centuries if left entirely undisturbed.

The crater has occupied a genuinely strange position in Turkmen national life. In 2019, then-President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov drove rally-car doughnuts around the crater's rim in a televised broadcast, specifically staged to quash persistent public rumours that he had died. Turkmenistan's government has oscillated for over a decade between promoting the site — branded at various points the "Shining of Karakum" or "Lights of Karakum" — as the country's single most visited tourist attraction, and condemning it as an embarrassing, wasteful Soviet-era mishap actively harming the environment and squandering saleable natural gas.

Where most entries in this collection remain genuinely unresolved, the Door to Hell offers something unusual — an active, documented, ongoing resolution. As of this writing, the crater burns at a fraction of its historic intensity, and Turkmenistan's government maintains it intends to extinguish the fire entirely, framing the decision around methane's outsized contribution to greenhouse warming (methane traps heat far more effectively than CO₂ over short timeframes) alongside the straightforward economic logic of selling gas rather than burning it. Whether or not the fire is ever fully extinguished, the "Door to Hell" as most visitors have known it — a permanent, seemingly eternal blaze — is already, quietly, becoming history rather than an ongoing phenomenon.