Attempts to extinguish a 20-year-old fire in a 3-meter-wide and 50-meter-deep pit in Turkmenistan

Ashgabat, January 14, 2022, Friday

The site has come under renewed scrutiny in Turkmenistan for ordering a fire to be extinguished at a place known as the Gateway to Hell. The Gateway Tool is a huge pit that has been on fire for the last 40 years and is still not extinguished. The Karakum Desert covers an area of ​​4.5 million sq km and 60% of the country, to the north of which is a huge crater called Gate Crater. A fire is raging in a pit 3 meters wide and 20 meters deep.

The pit naturally emits methane gas which keeps the fireball burning continuously. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has ordered that work be done on fire control measures for environmental and health reasons. However, this is not the first time that even in 2010, the government has urged experts to develop firefighting techniques. When Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union, Russian gas was discovered in the desert in 191 when Russian explorers discovered natural gas.

Meanwhile, landslides turned into huge pits. The fire was started by geologists to prevent the release of methane gas from the pit. He believed that in a short time, methane gas would be lost and the fire would be extinguished automatically. The Soviet Union did not have a shortage of gas at the time, so it did not have the infrastructure to move natural gas elsewhere. It would be better to burn methane gas than to spread it in the air and harm the environment. Methane is considered many times more dangerous than carbon.

At the time, even countries such as Iran, Iraq, and the United States preferred to burn methane instead of allowing it to be released into the atmosphere. However, the mystery as a gateway tool remains intact as this is not a documented fact. Since the burning pit is in a desolate place in the middle of the desert area, there is no fear of loss of life and property so people have also remained aloof from this problem. The crater has also been a source of tourism revenue for Turkmenistan for decades as fires have not been extinguished, but the government now wants to reap more benefits from the precious gas reserves that cannot be found without extinguishing the fire.