In the middle of Turkmenistan’s vast Karakum Desert, a wide pit in the ground glows with hundreds of flames that have burned without pause for more than half a century. By night the crater throws an orange light across the surrounding sand, and travelers who make the long journey to see it often camp nearby to watch it flicker until dawn. Locals and visitors alike know it by an unofficial name: the Door to Hell.
The Darvaza gas crater is a collapsed natural gas field, roughly 60 to 70 meters across and about 30 meters deep, that ignited decades ago and has never gone out. It has become the country’s most famous landmark and a rare draw for tourism in one of the world’s most isolated nations, even as its future has grown uncertain in recent years.
How a desert became a permanent bonfire
The crater’s exact origin is murky, in part because the relevant records are missing, classified, or otherwise inaccessible. The most widely repeated account holds that Soviet engineers drilling in the area in 1971 punctured an underground gas cavern, whose roof then collapsed and formed the crater. To keep poisonous gases from spreading, the engineers are said to have set the escaping gas alight, expecting it to burn off within days.
That expectation proved badly wrong. The volume of gas feeding the crater was far greater than anticipated, and the fire has continued ever since. Some local geologists offer a different timeline, suggesting the collapse occurred in the 1960s and the ignition came only in the 1980s, and the uncertainty is preserved in the historical record of the Darvaza gas crater.
The geology beneath the flames
The crater sits atop one of the world’s largest concentrations of natural gas. Turkmenistan holds enormous reserves, and the surrounding Karakum Desert is riddled with gas-bearing formations. The fire persists because the collapsed cavern continues to be fed from below, releasing methane and other hydrocarbons that burn as they reach the open air.
A nearby second crater, sometimes overlooked by visitors, is fenced off and gives off a distinct odor rather than flames, a reminder that the burning pit is one feature of a wider field of escaping gas. The choice to ignite the original crater rather than let it vent was intended to convert dangerous, invisible fumes into a controlled burn, though the decades of continuous fire show how badly the volume of gas was misjudged.
The scale of that release is significant. Measurements by an atmospheric monitoring organization found the crater emitting an average of roughly 1,300 kilograms of methane per hour between 2022 and 2025, with one 2025 reading approaching 2,000 kilograms per hour. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and Turkmenistan ranks among the world’s largest methane emitters, which has made the burning crater a subject of environmental concern as well as fascination.
An attempt to descend to the bottom
For decades no one had set foot inside the crater, but in 2013 the Canadian explorer George Kourounis became the first to do so, descending to gather soil samples for a project studying microbial life in extreme environments. The expedition was sponsored by National Geographic and filmed for television.
Kourounis made the descent in a custom heat-resistant suit and Kevlar harness, lowered on ropes into the searing pit. The goal was scientific: to learn whether any organisms could survive in such conditions, a question with implications for the search for life in hostile environments elsewhere. The venture underscored how little direct study the crater had received despite its fame.
Plans to put out the fire
Turkmen leaders have long viewed the crater with ambivalence, prizing its fame while lamenting the waste of gas and the harm to the environment and to local communities. In 2010 the president called for measures to limit its impact on nearby gas development, and in 2022 the government announced plans to extinguish it entirely, establishing a commission to find the best method.
Those efforts appear to be having an effect. Authorities have reported drilling wells around the crater to capture methane, and by 2025 they said the fire had been reduced substantially. Independent infrared analysis has likewise found the flames diminishing, with the heat output declining sharply over recent years. The Door to Hell, in other words, may finally be closing, though it has burned far longer than anyone who first lit it ever imagined.
A landmark in one of the world’s most closed countries
Reaching the crater is no small undertaking. Turkmenistan requires visas for all foreign visitors, tightly controls travel, and the site lies about a four-hour drive from the capital, Ashgabat, down a rough desert track with little signage. Yurts set up near the rim offer shelter for those who make the trip, and the region was declared a nature reserve in 2013.
For a nation that rarely appears in travel itineraries, the burning crater has served as an unlikely icon, at once a symbol of the country’s gas wealth and a reminder of an industrial accident that spiraled beyond human control. Whether it endures as a flaming spectacle or is eventually snuffed out, it has already earned a lasting place among the planet’s strangest man-made landmarks.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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