The Darvaza gas crater is a giant pit in the ground, measuring around 230 feet (70 m) across and 99 feet (30 m) deep, as Atlas Obscura reports. The walls of the crater are alight, burning off methane escaping at high pressure from the surrounding dirt. At night, the pit glows with an eerie light out of the desert darkness.
Around the crater, the air is warmed by the crater’s gas burn. According to The Independent, the temperature inside the crater reaches 1,000 C (1,830 F), and the silence of desert life is blotted out by the slow roar of burning gas.
No one knows exactly what started the football-field-sized fiery crater or when it started to burn. Records from the area don’t exist, and most history is from hearsay. Rumor has it that in the old days of the Soviet Union, when Turkmenistan was one of the Soviet socialist republics, a team of geologists prospecting for fossil fuel made an error. Science Alert says that they miscalculated the strength of the ground, and their drilling rig crashed spectacularly through the surface. A giant gas pocket had weakened the overlying surface and couldn’t bear the rig’s weight.
Once this happened, the crater formed as the sinkhole swallowed the Soviet equipment. Along with the sinkhole and various other craters, the disturbance also released methane pockets as the surface fractured. Under high pressure and with an easier escape route, the gas rushed from the hole and into the surrounding desert. Because methane displaces oxygen, it quickly made the surrounding desert uninhabitable and killed off local wildlife.
It also posed quite a danger — Smithsonian Magazine notes that only around 5% concentration in the air is explosive. The authorities at the time made the decision to burn it off, expecting the flare to die down in a few weeks.
That was 1971, and the Darvaza gas crater has supposedly been burning ever since — although some locals will tell you that the crater was present a decade or two earlier, collapsing just like other natural phenomena, and has only been alight since the 1980s.
Picture Credit : Google
