Turkmenistan's Door to Hell Has Been Burning for 54 Years

About 260 kilometres north of Ashgabat, in the open Karakum Desert, there is a circular pit roughly 65 metres across and 30 metres deep that has been on fire continuously since the early 1970s. From the lip you can feel the heat from a hundred metres back. At night, the flames light the surrounding sand for kilometres in every direction. Locals have called it Gate of Hell, Door to Hell, and Garagum-yalkym — the flame of the Karakum.

The origin story, repeated on every tour bus, is that in 1971 a Soviet drilling rig hit a pocket of natural gas, the chamber's roof collapsed, and the engineers — alarmed by the escaping methane — set it alight to prevent it spreading toxic gas across nearby villages. They expected the fuel to burn off in a few weeks. Half a century later, it has not. Turkmen and Soviet records that would settle the date are either classified or missing, and some geologists now suspect the collapse happened in the 1960s and the ignition came later in the 1980s. The popular dating is widely repeated and weakly sourced.

In 2013 the Canadian explorer George Kourounis, on a National Geographic expedition, suited up in a heat-reflective Kevlar harness and was lowered to the crater floor. He found extremophile bacteria living in the soil at the bottom — organisms that thrived nowhere else on the surface, even at the temperatures inside the pit. The samples have been studied as proxies for life that might exist in similar environments off Earth.

Turkmenistan's government has wanted the crater closed for years. President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow ordered it extinguished in 2010 and again in 2022. By 2025, after a campaign of methane-capturing wells around the perimeter, the fire had reportedly shrunk threefold and the steady inferno had broken up into pockets. The country's most famous tourist attraction is finally going out, slowly.