Some people call it the Gates of Hell. Others, the Door to Hell. Whatever name you give to Turkmenistan’s Darvaza gas crater, it’s quite the sight to see. As Irish blogger Johnny Ward wrote to Matthew Wilson of Insider:
There's only two really famous things to see in Turkmenistan. One is the capital Ashgabat, which is cool but weird, and then obviously there's the Gates of Hell.
We don’t know for sure how the Gates of Hell came to be. One origin story is that Soviet-era oil drillers’ rig collapsed into a natural gas pocket in 1971; expecting poisonous gases the drilling team tried to burn the methane off, figuring this would take at most a few weeks, but they gravely miscalculated and the Gates are still burning. Another story is that the crater collapsed in the 1960s but was not set on fire until the 1980s. There appear to be no Soviet or Turkmen records to corroborate either story. Presumably that’s just the way the perpetrators wanted it.
The ancients gave names like “Gates of Hell” to geogenic emission of poisonous gases. For example, the ancient Italians worshipped Mefitis, the goddess of foul-smelling gases of the earth — there was a temple to her on the Esquiline Hill in ancient Rome — and in the area of southern Italy where she was most popular we can still find the Mefite D’Ansanto, a CO₂ degassing site about 50 miles east of Mount Vesuvius that is so prolific that no vegetation grows within an area of about five acres.
One person who’s not amused by Turkmenistan’s second-biggest tourist attraction is the country’s authoritarian president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. He ordered the Gates closed in 2010; however, this was not accomplished. Now he is at it again. Turkmenistan state media reports that following a cabinet meeting on Friday, he ordered the Turkmenistan government to find a way to put the fire out for good this time.
It’s not clear that his government has the capability to follow his orders. In yesterday’s “Turkmenistan Mulls End Of ‘Gates Of Hell’ Gas Flare”, RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service reported:
Berdymukhammedov has ruled his country with an iron fist, tolerating little dissent while isolating it from the outside world amid an economic crisis that has plunged many citizens into poverty. Shortages of basic goods and food are common…. Turkmenistan’s aging state-controlled energy sector is one of the world’s worst emitters of the greenhouse gas methane, the main component of natural gas.
Although not as long-lived as CO₂, methane is more powerful as a greenhouse gas, and about a quarter of today’s global heating is due to methane from human actions. Although much of the Gates of Hell’s methane emissions burn via the chemical reaction CH₄ + 2 O₂ → CO₂ + 2 H₂O, and thereby generate less-powerful but longer lasting CO₂, there are no reliable measurements of how much unburnt and greenhouse-potent methane escapes into the atmosphere from the crater. If Turkmenistan could cap the Gates of Hell and stop the methane leak, that would help slow global warming — and though admittedly they’ll want to sell the methane to other people who will burn it, at least this could release the methane more slowly than what’s happening now.
Only one person has been to the bottom of the Gates of Hell. In 2013, adventurer George Kourounis donned a heat suit and air tank to brave the poisonous gases and the temperatures ranging up to 700°F (though no smoke, as the Gates of Hell burn without smoking) and descend into the crater. Kouronis described his view from the crater’s center as:
a coliseum of fire—just everywhere you look it's thousands of these small fires. The sound was like that of a jet engine, this roaring, high-pressure, gas-burning sound.
Despite falling unconscious at one point, Kourounis came back up with soil samples that when analyzed were found to contain microbes that survive, and perhaps even thrive, at the bottom of the Gates of Hell.