The Door to Hell

The commonly told story goes like this: in 1971, Soviet geologists were drilling for natural gas when the ground beneath their rig collapsed into an underground cavern. The crater filled with methane. Fearing that the poisonous gas would spread to nearby villages, the engineers decided to burn it off. They assumed it would take a few days, maybe weeks. They lit it and waited.

That was over five decades ago. The fire never stopped. Turkmenistan sits on the sixth-largest natural gas reserves in the world, and the crater appears to be tapped into an enormous underground deposit. Hundreds of individual flames flicker across the pit, some reaching thirty or forty feet high. The ground temperature at the bottom exceeds 750 degrees Fahrenheit.

The problem is that the official story may not be true. No Soviet drilling logs have ever been found, no written records, no confirmation of when the collapse happened or who decided to light the fire. Local geologists have suggested the crater may have opened in the 1960s and burned unlit for years before someone ignited it in the 1980s. The truth is that nobody really knows.

In 2013, a Canadian explorer named George Kourounis became the first person to descend into the crater. Wearing a heat-reflective Kevlar suit, he rappelled to the bottom and collected soil samples. Scientists later found extremophile bacteria living in the scorched earth—organisms that had adapted to thrive in conditions that would kill almost anything else.

In 2022, Turkmenistan's government announced plans to extinguish the fire, citing environmental concerns and wasted natural gas. Whether they'll succeed remains unclear. The crater has outlasted the Soviet Union, several Turkmen governments, and every expectation about how long a controlled burn should last.