Turkmenistan’s Darvaza gas crater, a fiery pit in the Karakum Desert that has drawn tourists and scientists for decades, may not have been burning as long as the popular story claims. The crater, roughly 70 meters across and 20 meters deep, was reportedly created during a 1971 Soviet drilling accident and set alight to prevent methane from spreading. In early 2022, Turkmenistan’s government ordered the fire extinguished, citing environmental damage and lost gas revenue. But new satellite research is tightening the timeline of when the flames actually started, raising hard questions about how much methane has escaped and who bears responsibility for stopping it.
Why the Darvaza crater’s origin story matters for methane policy
The standard account holds that Soviet geologists accidentally punched through a natural gas cavern in 1971, collapsing the ground and creating the pit. Engineers then lit the escaping gas, expecting it to burn off in a few weeks. More than five decades later, the fire persists. That narrative has shaped how governments and climate researchers think about the crater’s total emissions: if the fire has burned continuously since 1971, the methane already released is a sunk cost, and extinguishing it now would prevent only future losses.
A peer-reviewed study in Geophysical Research Letters challenges that framing. Using Landsat-era and other remote-sensing data, the researchers conducted a satellite-based assessment of the crater’s methane emissions and constrained the ignition window more precisely than any previous effort. If the fire started later than 1971, a significant share of the crater’s total methane output would fall within the period after 2000, when international climate agreements began targeting fossil-fuel leakage more aggressively. That distinction matters because it would mean recent diplomatic and domestic closure efforts carry greater weight in determining how much future warming the crater contributes.
Turkmenistan sits atop some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, and methane leakage from its energy infrastructure has drawn scrutiny from foreign governments and international climate monitors. The Darvaza crater is a single, visible source, but it represents a broader pattern of uncontrolled emissions across Central Asia’s gas fields. Closing it would be both a practical reduction in atmospheric methane and a diplomatic signal about Turkmenistan’s willingness to address the problem.
Satellite data and the 2022 government order to close the crater
No surviving Soviet drilling logs or eyewitness records have been publicly released to confirm the exact date the crater formed or when it was ignited. The 1971 date circulates widely but rests on oral accounts rather than documented evidence. The satellite analysis described in the Geophysical Research Letters paper fills part of that gap by examining decades of thermal and spectral imagery to identify when the crater first appeared as a heat source in the remote-sensing record. By comparing the crater’s evolving glow and gas plume to surrounding background conditions, the researchers anchor their findings in observable, repeatable measurements rather than anecdote.
On the political side, Turkmenistan’s leadership announced plans in January 2022 to extinguish the Darvaza fire, framing the decision around both safety for nearby residents and the economic waste of burning gas that could otherwise be captured and sold. Officials also cited environmental concerns, acknowledging that the crater’s constant combustion undermines efforts to present the country as a responsible energy exporter. No official statement has detailed the technical method or timeline for actually putting the fire out, and as of the most recent available reporting, the crater continues to burn.
The Turkmenistan government’s tourism portal lists the Darvaza crater with concrete dimensions and treats it as a notable feature of the Karakum landscape. That dual framing, as both an environmental liability and a tourist attraction, captures the tension at the center of any closure plan. Extinguishing the fire eliminates a source of greenhouse gas but also removes one of the country’s few internationally recognized points of interest for visitors, including foreign journalists and adventure travelers who have helped keep the site in the global spotlight.
The satellite work suggests that Darvaza’s heat signature strengthens and stabilizes only after a certain point in the historical record, implying that either the fire was lit later than commonly claimed or that earlier, weaker emissions were below the detection threshold of older instruments. Either way, the study underscores that the precise start date is not just a curiosity for historians. It shapes how regulators and climate negotiators tally Turkmenistan’s contribution to global methane totals and how they judge the impact of any future remediation.
Gaps in the Darvaza record and what to watch next
Several questions remain open. No pre-2010s ground-based methane flux measurements exist for the crater itself. All quantitative emissions estimates rely on satellite-derived data, which improved dramatically in resolution and frequency only in recent years. That means the total volume of methane the crater has released over its lifetime is an estimate built on extrapolation from a relatively short window of direct observation.
The absence of primary Soviet-era documentation also means the 1971 date cannot be confirmed or ruled out with certainty. The satellite ignition-window analysis narrows the range but does not pinpoint a single year. If future archival research or additional remote-sensing analysis shifts the ignition date forward by even a decade, the policy implications change: a fire burning since the 1980s or 1990s would have released less total methane before international climate frameworks took effect, making the decision to extinguish it now a more consequential intervention in percentage terms.
For Turkmen authorities, the practical question is how far they are willing to go to turn high-level pledges into on-the-ground engineering. Extinguishing the crater would likely require either starving it of fuel, capping the venting gas with heavy equipment, or attempting to flood or backfill the pit. Each option carries safety risks, costs, and uncertainties about whether gas might simply migrate and emerge elsewhere in the desert. Those operational unknowns help explain why the crater has persisted despite periodic promises to address it.
Internationally, Darvaza functions as a vivid symbol of methane waste at a time when many governments are tightening rules on flaring and leakage. The more clearly researchers can define the crater’s emission history, the easier it becomes to benchmark Turkmenistan’s performance against other gas-producing states and to fold Darvaza into broader negotiations over energy-sector reforms. Satellite monitoring, which underpins the new ignition estimates, will also be central to verifying any eventual decline in emissions if closure efforts move ahead.
The story of Darvaza is therefore likely to evolve on two timelines. In the near term, scientists will keep refining their understanding of when the fire began and how much methane it releases, using increasingly sensitive orbital instruments. Over the longer term, the crater’s fate will hinge on political will and financial priorities in Ashgabat, as well as on sustained outside attention from media outlets and subscribers who support in-depth international reporting, including through platforms such as Guardian Weekly. Whether the “Gateway to Hell” is finally closed, or continues to burn as a monument to past decisions, will offer a telling measure of how quickly methane policy can move from rhetoric to reality in one of the world’s most gas-rich states.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
