Deep in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, an artificial crater roughly 60 meters wide has burned continuously since 1971. Born from a botched Soviet exploratory drilling operation, the site known as the Door to Hell continues to challenge scientists and government officials seeking to permanently extinguish the flames.
Origins in the Karakum Desert and the Soviet Drilling Mishap
Located about 270 kilometers north of Ashgabat, the crater spans approximately 60 meters in diameter and measures 20 meters deep, though other descriptions note a depth of 30 meters. The depression resulted from the collapse of an exploratory gas well dug by Soviet engineers searching for new hydrocarbon deposits in Central Asia. The official version of the incident indicates that a drilling platform collapsed into an underground cavity filled with methane, creating a dangerous situation where invisible, toxic gas threatened local populations and livestock.
To prevent the methane from poisoning the surrounding area, scientists decided to ignite the gas, expecting the fire to consume the fuel and burn out within a few days. Instead, the subterranean blaze persisted for decades. Official archives regarding the incident remain scarce, and the village that once bordered the site was evacuated, removing many physical proofs of the original event.
Scientific Challenges of Extinguishing the Door to Hell
Efforts to put out the fire have spanned over a decade without a permanent resolution. In April 2010 already, the president of Turkmenistan had declared wanting to extinguish the blaze which compromised the exploitation of regional gas reserves. In January 2022, the former president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov again swore to extinguish the flames, arguing that the country was wasting valuable natural gas. Early 2023, Washington and Ashgabat even discussed a cooperation to colmate this type of site. Engineers evaluated multiple options, including filling the crater with sand or clay, sealing it with a heat-resistant dome, triggering controlled explosions to collapse the walls, or drilling new wells to redirect the gas.
Geological realities complicate every intervention. Étouffer le feu avec du ciment risks forcing pressurized methane to find alternative escape routes across the surface, and boucher la fissure à la source requires precisely locating the underground conduit, which no one has yet done. Furthermore, a controlled explosion—a method used by the Soviets for well fires for the last time in 1981—could provoke a catastrophe. Guillermo Rein, a fire specialist at Imperial College London, warned that « Ça peut mal se passer ». Without prior underground exploration, any attempt to extinguish the site exposes intervenants to a real risk of explosion.
Mark Ireland, a geoscientist at Newcastle University, noted the geological context of the region, observing, « Nous ne devrions pas nous étonner de son existence » given that the crater rests on the Amou-Daria basin, a geological formation saturated with methane.
Mitigation Strategies and Modern Satellite Monitoring
Paradoxically, the fact that the methane burns is not such bad news on the climatic plane. In burning, this gas transforms principally into water vapor and carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas certes, but well less powerful than methane itself. Turkmenistan shelters the worst “methane bombs” in the world, a gas 86 times more warming than CO2. Recent satellite measurements showed that the strongest methane emissions in the world emanate from a particular country of which no one speaks, and this pollution could easily be avoided.
The Turkmen government has hesitated for years, but the country has finally found a solution to reduce the flames. The government turkmène has never really renounced extinguishing its most famous crater.
The site has simultaneously evolved into a major tourist draw that Turkmènes officially call the Lueur du Karakoum
. Tourists make the trip, often after hours of track from Ashgabat, camp in yurts planted a few hundred meters from the edge, and return to observe the flames in the early morning when the grazing light accentuates the contrast between the redness of the abyss and the pale sand of the desert. No grid or protection prevents visitors from a possible collapse, the sandy soil being able to collapse at any moment. The dramatic landscape gained global visibility when explorer George Kourounis became the first and only person to descend directly into the crater in 2013. After two years of preparation, he only had 17 minutes to perform samples. Reflecting on the extreme conditions inside the depression, Kourounis confessed, « C’était bien plus effrayant que ce à quoi je m’attendais », and his images turned this isolated site into a tourist attraction for Turkmenistan, which is otherwise little open to foreign visitors.
