The Door to Hell

In the middle of the Karakum Desert, roughly 260 kilometers north of Turkmenistan's capital Ashgabat, there is a hole in the ground that has been on fire for longer than most of the people who visit it have been alive. It is about 70 meters across and 30 meters deep — large enough to swallow a football pitch — and at night its light is visible for miles across the flat, sand-colored terrain. Turkmen locals call it the Gates of Hell. Tour operators call it the Door to Hell. Geologists call it, more prosaically, the Darvaza gas crater, after the nearest settlement.

What almost nobody can call it, with full confidence, is explained.

A Hole With No Paper Trail

The standard account, repeated across guidebooks and news reports for decades, goes like this: in 1971, Soviet geologists drilling for natural gas in the area hit an underground cavern, and the ground beneath their rig collapsed into it. Fearing that the escaping methane would poison the surrounding area — or simply hoping to burn off the gas quickly — engineers are said to have set the crater alight, expecting the fuel to exhaust itself within a few weeks.

It did not. Fifty-four years later, it was still burning.

The trouble is that this story rests almost entirely on oral tradition. As multiple outlets that have investigated the crater's history note, there is no surviving government, industry, or scientific record — Soviet or Turkmen — that documents the drilling accident, names the company involved, or dates the fire's ignition with certainty. Some local geologists offer a different timeline, suggesting the collapse actually happened in the 1960s and that the crater was not deliberately ignited until years later. Turkmenistan's government, which discourages research into the Soviet-era energy sector, has never released a definitive account. What is left is a story that everyone tells the same way, sourced to no document anyone can produce.

This is, in its own way, as interesting as the fire itself: a fifty-year-old industrial event, in a country the size of Spain, that has essentially become folklore.

Why It Keeps Burning

Whatever set it off, the mechanism that sustains the fire is well understood. The Karakum Desert sits atop one of the largest natural gas reserves on Earth, and Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth-largest proven gas reserves overall. Around Darvaza, methane continues to migrate upward through fractures and porous rock beneath the crater floor. When it reaches the surface and meets atmospheric oxygen, it ignites — not as a single flame but as hundreds of individual jets and pockets of fire scattered across the crater's floor and walls, some no bigger than a candle, others roaring loud enough to be compared to a jet engine. Ground temperatures near the rim can exceed 50°C (122°F).

In 2013, Canadian explorer George Kourounis became the first person known to have descended into the crater itself, rappelling to the floor in a heat-resistant suit to collect soil samples as part of a search for microbial life that might survive in such an extreme, oxygen-poor, high-temperature environment — the kind of chemistry that interests astrobiologists modeling conditions on other planets. He described the experience as being inside a "coliseum of fire."

A Government That Wants It Out

Turkmenistan's leadership has, at various points, treated the crater less as a wonder than as a waste. In 2010, then-president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered officials to find a way to close or control it, reportedly after visiting the site and objecting to the volume of marketable gas burning off into the atmosphere unused. He later put it plainly: "We are losing valuable natural resources, for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people." In January 2022, his successor, President Serdar Berdymukhamedov, renewed the call to extinguish the fire, citing both the lost gas revenue and its effects on the health of nearby residents and on the local environment — the crater is a significant, continuous source of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide over a short time horizon.

For over a decade, those orders went largely unfulfilled. The crater kept burning through repeated announcements that it would soon be capped.

Then, in 2025, a Change

That changed, apparently, this year. In June 2025, Irina Luryeva, director of Turkmenistan's state energy company Turkmengaz, told an international hydrocarbon conference in Ashgabat that the crater's fires had measurably diminished — by her account, "nearly threefold." Independent infrared monitoring cited in subsequent reporting suggested heat intensity at the site had fallen by more than 75 percent over roughly three years, and by August 2025 visitors were reportedly finding only a few scattered pockets of small flame rather than the crater-wide inferno of earlier decades. Engineers have drilled additional wells around the perimeter, apparently to intercept and capture gas before it can reach the crater and burn.

Measurements of methane still escaping the site vary — reported figures put emissions somewhere in the range of 1,300 to nearly 2,000 kilograms per hour in recent monitoring — a reminder that a dimmer fire is not the same as a sealed one.

Whether the Door to Hell closes for good remains an open question, fittingly, for a place whose entire history has been a matter of incomplete records and secondhand accounts. What is certain is that a fire lit, by best guess, in 1971, to solve what was supposed to be a temporary problem, outlasted the government that started it, the country that ordered it, and most predictions about how long it could last.