In the middle of Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert, there is a hole in the ground that has been on fire for more than half a century.
It’s roughly 230 feet wide and about 98 feet deep — a burning pit of natural gas vents, glowing orange against the sand. At night, for decades, the glow could be seen from miles away. People call it the “Door to Hell,” the “Gateway to Hell,” or, in the official rebrand, the “Shining of Karakum.”
The strangest part? It was never supposed to last. It was supposed to burn out in days.
It started with a drilling accident
The popular account goes like this: in 1971, Soviet scientists were drilling in the desert north of Ashgabat when they punched into an underground pocket of natural gas. The ground gave way, the drilling rig collapsed into the cavern, and methane began pouring out.
That was dangerous. Methane is flammable, and in the wrong conditions it can poison people and livestock. So the geologists made what sounded like the practical choice: light it, burn the gas off, and let the problem solve itself in a few days or weeks. (phys.org)
The exact paperwork is fuzzier than the legend — some Turkmen gas scientists have dated the exploratory work to the early 1960s — but the ending is not in dispute. The fire did not go out. It stayed lit through the collapse of the Soviet Union, through independence, and into the era of satellite methane monitoring.
Why didn’t it burn out?
Because it wasn’t a little pocket of gas. It was connected to a much larger natural gas system underground.
Turkmenistan sits on some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves — often ranked fourth globally — and the Karakum Desert covers about 80 percent of the country. The crater kept feeding on gas migrating up through the rock, vent by vent, year after year. (energy-daily / AFP)
In other words, the engineers thought they were lighting a puddle. They had actually lit a slow leak from a reservoir.
That accident became the country’s most famous landmark, which is awkward, because Turkmenistan is one of the hardest countries in the world for tourists to visit. The burning crater became the postcard anyway: desert camps, off-road drivers, and travelers standing at the fence while fire flickered across the crater floor.
Now the Door to Hell is… closing?
For years, Turkmen leaders flipped between treating the crater as an embarrassment, a resource leak, and a tourist attraction. In 2018 the crater was officially renamed the “Shining of Karakum.” In 2022, then-president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered officials to finally extinguish it, citing environmental damage, health concerns, and the value of the gas being wasted. (phys.org)
This time, the effort seems to be working — not by smothering the crater, but by starving it. Turkmengaz, the state gas company, has drilled and reopened wells around the site to capture gas before it reaches the pit. In June 2025, Turkmengaz director Irina Luryeva said the fire’s reduction was “nearly threefold,” and that the once far-visible glow is now mainly visible up close. (Times of Central Asia)
Visitors in 2025 described something almost anticlimactic: a charred cauldron with scattered small fires where the old photos show a roaring inferno. (energy-daily / AFP)
Nobody is declaring it fully out yet. But the trend is clear: less gas reaching the crater means fewer flames, less heat, and a much smaller methane plume. (Interesting Engineering)
The takeaway
The Door to Hell is a perfect accident: a safety measure that outlived the country that ordered it. Light the gas so it doesn’t poison anyone, wait a few days, move on. Instead, the match stayed lit for more than 50 years and turned into a national symbol, a tourist magnet, and an environmental problem all at once.
Now humans are finally doing the less dramatic thing that works — not fighting the fire at the surface, but cutting off its fuel underground. The desert hole that looked eternal may end not with a bang, but by quietly running out of gas.
Huh, interesting.