The blazing "Gates of Hell" inferno, also known as the Darvaza gas crater, has been lighting up the Turkmenistan desert of Karakum for more than 50 years, but few people know what it is.
Going In
The only person to have entered the fiery pit's center, Canadian-born scientific explorer George Kourounis, told AccuWeather that the Gates of Hell "is one of the most interesting places on Earth."
He remarked that it nearly resembles a volcano in the middle of the desert.
But now, it could already be too late. The long-standing blazing spectacle, which has grown to be a favorite attraction for the few visitors who dare to travel to that isolated region of the Central Asian nation, could be extinguished forever.
According to a report by The Associated Press, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the president of Turkmenistan, said he feels the enormous molten hole is "negatively" hurting the health of the local population and the environment and wants it extinguished. The president has instructed his officials to investigate ways to put out the flames once and for all safely. The president is known to be fascinated by the sight and was even spotted in 2019 racing around the pit on public TV.
Infamous Crater
The crater, 230 feet wide and 100 feet deep, was created in 1971 when a drilling rig fell into a sinkhole and began to spew methane while prospectors looked for natural gas. It eventually caught fire; however, Kourounis claimed that no one is certain if the blaze was purposely started, and it has been burning for 50 years.
According to one theory, geologists allegedly set one of the three sizable sinkholes formed from the accident on fire to burn up the methane released and prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere. Local experts, however, think that the crater may have developed in some way in the 1960s before being lighted two decades later.
According to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alan Reppert, the weather would not have been able to put out the flames naturally.
Reppert said that the crater is subterranean and sufficiently large that the weather's effects would be negligible.
In the Turkmenistan Desert, according to Reppert, temperatures regularly go into the triple digits, and it seldom rains. Even when it does rain in the desert, it hasn't been able to douse the raging crater. The uncommon rain, according to Kournounis, falls in the surrounding region rather than in the crater itself because of the crater's intense heat. The intense heat causes any rain directly falling into the crater to evaporate.
One of a Kind
In 2013, Kourounis was the expedition leader on a National Geographic mission to collect soil samples at the bottom.
He rapidly discovered, along with the other expedition team members, that the crater behaves like a convection oven, with colder air sinking to the bottom in the center and heating up there due to the fire, causing the hotter air to ascend around the edges. Kourounis claimed that standing even on edge at the top felt like being dry roasted.
The crater has produced what Kourounis described as a "unique ecology that is not present in any other site on Earth" despite the adverse weather conditions.
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