DARVAZA   -  Rarely does an industrial accident develop into a major tourist attraction. But when a Soviet exploratory team drilled for natural gas in Turkmenistan more than 50 years ago, they are said to have set off a chain reaction that created the Darvaza Gas Crater – a giant, fiery hole that eventually became the country’s most sought-after sight. Also called the “Gates of Hell” and the “Shining of Karakum,” the phenomenon is caused by methane-fueled flames escaping from scores of vents along the crater floor and walls. Standing around the rim, you can feel intense heat emanating from the hole. It’s especially dramatic at night, fiery tongues blazing beneath a starry sky. Flanked by dunes and rocky outcrops in a remote part of the Karakum Desert, the crater is the top stop on almost every tour of the Central Asian nation. When travelers first started flocking to Darvaza, there were no visitor services or amenities, and you had to bring everything you needed for an overnight stay. Nowadays there are three permanent camps with overnight accommodation in yurts or tents, as well as meals and motorized transportation to the crater rim for those who don’t want to walk. The crater is roughly 230 feet (70 meters) wide and 100 feet (30 meters) deep, with vertical walls that drop sharply into a rocky debris field scattered across the bottom. A safety fence was added in 2018 to keep visitors from venturing too close to the blazing sinkhole. “It’s a collapsed gas cave, which sounds about as interesting as an old gas oven,” says author Ged Gillmore, who wrote about the crater in “Stans By Me: A Whirlwind Tour Through Central Asia.”  “But there’s this eeriness about it, and I actually found it quite creepy.”  However, the crater may not be around much longer, at least not in its fiery form. On several occasions, the Turkmenistan government has mentioned the possibility of somehow sealing the crater. Meanwhile, those who have been visiting Darvaza for years say the flames are much smaller than they once were.

“I would say it’s only burning at around 40% of the level I first witnessed there in 2009,” says Dylan Lupine, whose UK-based Lupine Travel was one of the pioneers in bringing tourists to Turkmenistan.  “A much larger area of the crater had flames burning in it back then. There are less now, and they are not as high as they were.” Standing on the edge of the crater, a local guide who wished to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak with the media, confirms the flames have been getting lower and lower over the last seven years and his 40 or so visits to Darvaza. “Before there were more flames than now, probably because the gas pocket is wearing out,” he says. But that doesn’t diminish the allure of a hybrid manmade/natural wonder that’s especially amazing when a sandstorm blows in and obscures everything but flickering fire reaching up from the darkened pit below. No one is quite sure when the gas crater opened, apparently because the Soviet-era reports are missing, incomplete or still confidential. “There’s a lot of controversy, a lot of disagreement over how it started,” says George Kourounis, a Canadian adventurer and television presenter who’s the only known person to have explored inside the gas crater.

“I don’t even know what to believe. There’s so many stories and mythology with this place. It’s crazy.”

According to Kourounis, the most common theory is that the crater formed in 1971 and was lit on fire shortly thereafter. “But while I was in Turkmenistan, we had two old school geologists from the government come out to the crater with us, and what they told me was that the crater actually formed at some point in the 1960s and was bubbling away with mud and gas for quite some time and didn’t get ignited until the 1980s.”