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Located in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert, Darvaza Crater is a huge man-made pit where methane gas has been burning for decades.
Soviet authorities were said to have set fire to Darvaza, also known as the “Gates of Hell,” in the hope that the fire would be extinguished within a few weeks. Yet almost 50 years later, the crater is still burning and its true origins are still shrouded in mystery, the BBC reports.
In 2013, the explorer George Kourounis organized an expedition to study the crater. But it was difficult for him to find information about the huge well.
“What puzzles me is that there is little information about Darvaza. When I was in Turkmenistan, I met two geologists and it was difficult for me to find out what had happened there. You can find out on the Internet that the well appeared in 1971 and was almost immediately burned by Soviet geologists. The Turkmen geologists told me something else: the crater formed in the late 1960s and released gas and mud. It only caught fire in the 1980s, “says Kourounis.
“It’s shrouded in mystery and it’s proof of the way the Soviets acted, because nobody was interested in talking too much about it. At that time, he only reports the successes, not the failures. If the locals did something wrong, they didn’t report it. It was far away, in the desert, the impact was minimal, ”says historian Jeronim Perovic.
“I did everything I could to get official data or any kind of written mention, but I didn’t find anything,” says Kourounis.
In addition, everything related to natural resources was considered secret and many documents are still classified, adds Perovic.
It is not known for sure if the fire was caused intentionally.
“One theory is that the Soviets did something common in the field of natural gas extraction: sometimes the gas catches fire for financial and security reasons,” says Kourounis.
“An uncontrolled accumulation of methane gas is dangerous. If you set it on fire, it does not accumulate in one place. Otherwise, large explosions would have occurred at intervals,” says Stefan Green, a microbiologist who participated in the Kourounis expedition.
The resource was not a problem for the Soviets, who produced hundreds of millions of cubic meters of gas a year, and the exploitation of the Darvaza crater would have meant large investments in infrastructure, says Perovic. He added that arson is still practiced in several countries.
The Turkmen authorities have considered extinguishing the crater, but have changed their minds and are now using it to promote tourism.
Editing: Monica Bonea
