Darvaza Gas Crater: The Door to Hell, Fifty Years On

Somewhere in the Karakum Desert, about 260 kilometers north of Ashgabat, the earth is on fire. It has been on fire for more than fifty years. The Darvaza gas crater - roughly 69 meters across and 30 meters deep - burns around the clock, fed by the natural gas beneath the desert. For decades its glow was visible from kilometers away, a soft orange haze hovering above flat desert that otherwise offers nothing but darkness in every direction. Since 2025 the fire has been much smaller, for reasons explained below - but it is still burning.

You will smell it before you see it. A faint sulfurous edge sharpens as you approach on foot across cracked, sandy ground. Then you hear it - a low, steady roar, like a furnace door left open. And then you are standing at the rim, looking down into a pit filled with hundreds of small fires dancing across collapsed earth and rock. The heat pushes against your face. This is not a campfire. This is a geological event that has outlasted the Soviet Union.

Darvaza at a glance

Where: about 260 km north of Ashgabat, roughly four hours by road; the last stretch is off-road.

Still burning? Yes, though far less fiercely since 2025 than in most photographs.

Where you sleep: a yurt camp or a tent near the crater - there is no hotel.

Best months: April-May and September-October.

Permit: none for the crater itself; it just has to be part of your tour itinerary.

Is the Darvaza Gas Crater Still Burning in 2026?

Yes, but not the way it burned for most of its history. In June 2025 Turkmengaz, the state gas company, said the burning at Darvaza had dropped almost threefold after old gas wells around the crater were reopened to draw the gas away from it, and satellite monitoring of the site has recorded a similar decline. Reports from the second half of 2025 describe the fire concentrated in pockets of flame rather than spread across the whole floor of the pit.

In December 2025 Turkmengaz announced plans for a further well to stop the uncontrolled release of gas altogether. No date has been given. For a traveller that means two things: the crater is worth seeing now rather than some day, and the photographs you know - most of them taken in the 2010s - show a bigger fire than the one you will find. After dark, the flames that remain are still what people cross the desert for.

How a Drilling Accident Became a Fifty-Year Fire

In 1971, Soviet geologists were prospecting for natural gas in the Karakum near the village of Darvaza. They set up a drilling rig over what they believed was a substantial gas deposit. The ground beneath the rig was not as stable as it appeared. The surface collapsed, swallowing the equipment and opening a massive sinkhole.

The collapse released large quantities of methane - a serious hazard for the environment and the small communities nearby. The geologists reportedly made a practical decision: set the gas on fire, expecting it to burn off within weeks. That was over five decades ago.

The details remain somewhat murky. Soviet-era records from remote Turkmen drilling operations were not kept with the care of a modern geological survey. Some accounts place the collapse in 1971, others in the early 1960s. The broad facts are consistent: a gas prospecting operation, a ground collapse, a decision to ignite, and flames that never stopped. The volume of natural gas feeding the crater was far greater than anyone anticipated.

What makes the Darvaza incident unusual is not that a gas deposit was ignited - controlled flaring is standard practice in the petroleum industry worldwide. What makes it unusual is the scale of the miscalculation. The engineers expected days or weeks of burning. They got decades. The gas field beneath the crater is part of one of the largest natural gas reserves in Central Asia, and the Darvaza vent taps into it through fractures that the original collapse opened wide.

The Geology Beneath the Flames

The Karakum Desert sits atop the Amu Darya Basin, one of the most gas-rich geological formations in Central Asia. Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth-largest proven natural gas reserves, and much of that gas lies beneath the Karakum's sand and clay.

The Darvaza crater formed in a layer of soft sedimentary rock - limestone, mudstone, and evaporite deposits laid down millions of years ago when this region lay beneath a shallow sea. These sediments are porous and mechanically weak, which is why the ground collapsed so readily under the weight of the drilling rig. The cavity that opened was not a new void - it was likely a pre-existing karst dissolution chamber, a natural underground space carved by water moving through soluble rock over geological time. The drilling operation simply punched through the thin ceiling.

Gas reaches the surface through a network of fractures in the rock. Some of these fractures existed before 1971; others were created or widened by the collapse itself. The result is not a single gas vent but hundreds of small ones scattered across the crater floor, each feeding its own flame. This is why the fire does not burn as a single column but as a shifting field of individual jets - blue at the base where combustion is hottest, orange and yellow at the tips where it cools.

For almost fifty years the rate of gas release did not visibly diminish, which told geologists something important: the reservoir feeding the crater is either very large, under significant pressure, or both. What finally changed the picture was engineering rather than exhaustion. Wells drilled and reopened around the crater now take gas out of the same formation before it can reach the pit, and the fire has shrunk accordingly. The crater itself has never been formally studied, and little about the reservoir beneath it has been published.

What the Door to Hell Looks and Feels Like

Photographs do not prepare you for standing at the edge of the Darvaza gas crater. They capture the orange glow, the rough circular shape, the dark desert around it. What they cannot convey is the physicality of the experience.

What follows is the crater at full strength, as most visitors knew it until the mid-2020s; the fire you will see today is smaller.

The heat is the first thing. Even on a cold Karakum night - and between October and March, temperatures can drop below freezing - the air within ten meters of the rim is warm. At five meters, it is hot. At the very edge, it is nearly unbearable on exposed skin. The flames are not a single bonfire but hundreds of individual jets and flickers, some small and blue at their base, others tall and orange, rising from cracks and vents across the crater floor. The pattern shifts constantly. New flames appear; others die back. The effect is less like looking at a fire and more like looking into something alive.

The sound is a sustained, breathy roar. It fluctuates with the wind. On still nights it settles into a low hum. When gusts sweep the desert, the flames lean and surge, and the sound rises to something closer to a distant jet engine.

And the smell - natural gas is odorless, but the combustion byproducts and trace sulfur compounds give the air a distinctive sharpness. Not overpowering at the rim, but always present. A reminder that this is not a managed attraction but an active geological phenomenon.

How "The Door to Hell" Got Its Name

The name Derweze in Turkmen means "gate," and the crater has been called the "Door to Hell" or "Gates of Hell" by locals for decades - a description that feels accurate rather than dramatic when you stand above it at two in the morning. The nickname gained international traction after George Kourounis, a Canadian explorer, descended into the crater in 2013 as part of a National Geographic expedition - the first documented person to reach the bottom. He collected soil samples from the crater floor and found bacteria thriving in the extreme heat, a finding with implications for the study of extremophile life.

But the name had circulated among travelers and Turkmen communities long before Kourounis made his descent. What the expedition did was attach high-definition footage to a place most people had only seen in grainy photographs. Within a few years, the Darvaza gas crater became one of the most recognized images associated with Turkmenistan - a country that otherwise receives little international media coverage.

A Night at the Rim

The crater is worth seeing in daylight - a wide, smoking pit in otherwise featureless desert. But after dark, it becomes something else entirely.

Visitors sleep a short walk from the rim, in yurt camps or in tents pitched on hard-packed sand and gravel. Facilities are few: a low metal railing, put up in 2018, runs around the edge, and everything else - food, water, light - comes with the camp or with you.

After sunset, the scene shifts. The crater becomes the only light source in a hundred-kilometer radius. The glow paints the underside of passing clouds a dull amber. Above, the Milky Way stretches across the sky in the kind of clarity that only deep desert without light pollution can produce. The temperature drops - you add layers - and the roar of the crater becomes background noise, almost meditative in its constancy.

There is a particular quality to the small hours at Darvaza. You wake at two or three in the morning, unzip the tent, and the glow is still there, seeping through the fabric. You walk to the rim and stand there, alone with the fire and the stars and the low rumble of burning gas. The flames have shifted since you last looked. The pattern is never the same twice. This is the part that stays with people - not the spectacle of arrival, but the quiet accumulation of hours spent beside something ancient and indifferent and beautiful.

Fifty Years of Fire and What They Mean

The Darvaza gas crater raises questions that no one has satisfactorily answered. How much gas has been lost to uncontrolled burning since 1971? Conservative estimates suggest billions of cubic meters - a significant economic loss for a country whose economy depends heavily on natural gas exports. In 2010, then-President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov visited the site and called for measures to limit its impact on the development of nearby gas fields. In January 2022 he ordered the government to find a way to put it out, citing the lost gas, the environment and the health of people living nearby. The effect became visible in 2025, when Turkmengaz reported the fire nearly three times smaller after wells were reopened to draw the gas away. As of 2026 the crater still burns, at a fraction of its old strength.

From an environmental perspective, the crater is a continuous point source of carbon dioxide and other combustion gases. In the global context of greenhouse emissions, it is a footnote - a single crater cannot compete with industrial-scale fossil fuel use. But it is a vivid, literal illustration of the concept: fossil carbon, stored underground for millions of years, released into the atmosphere by human activity. The fire at Darvaza is, in miniature, the story of the entire fossil fuel era.

Scientifically, the crater is an untapped research site. The extremophile bacteria Kourounis found on the crater floor suggest that life can persist in conditions far harsher than most biologists assumed. The gas dynamics - how the flow held steady for so long, what the subsurface fracture network looks like, how the pit is changing now that the gas is being drawn off - are questions that a properly funded geological survey could answer. None has been published. The crater burns, largely unstudied, in the middle of the desert.

And then there is the cultural dimension. The Darvaza gas crater is, alongside the white marble buildings of Ashgabat and the Akhal-Teke horse, one of the few images of Turkmenistan that the outside world recognizes. It has become a symbol of the country almost by accident - an unintended monument to Soviet-era resource extraction, now repurposed as the closest thing Turkmenistan has to an internationally famous natural attraction.

How to Get to Darvaza

Darvaza lies about 260 km north of Ashgabat, off the highway to Dashoguz. The drive takes roughly four hours, usually with a stop at two smaller craters on the way - one filled with water, one with bubbling mud. The final stretch leaves the tarmac and crosses sand, so the crater is reached by 4x4.

From the north - the Shavat border near Khiva in Uzbekistan, or Kunya-Urgench - the drive from Dashoguz is about 290 km and can take up to six hours, as the road is broken in places. That is why so many overland routes between Uzbekistan and Ashgabat spend their night at the crater.

A Turkmen tourist visa is issued for a guided trip, so in practice you arrive with your operator's driver and guide rather than by bus or taxi. The crater needs no separate permit; it simply has to be part of your tour itinerary. More on this in our guide to visa and entry rules.

Where to Stay at Darvaza

There is no hotel at the crater. The night is spent in one of the yurt camps near the crater or in tents set up by your operator, usually a few hundred metres from the rim - close enough to walk back to the edge at any hour. Dinner is typically a barbecue in the open air and breakfast is served at camp. Facilities are basic, so bring a head torch. The nearest hotels are in Ashgabat and Dashoguz, four to six hours away, which is why almost everyone stays the night rather than driving there and back.

How Much Does a Darvaza Trip Cost?

There is no ticket to buy: a visit to Darvaza is a guided trip, and the price covers the 4x4 and driver, the guide, the camp and meals. What moves it most is the size of the group, since the vehicle and guide are shared, and the number of days. As a guide to scale, our multi-day tours with a night at the crater currently start from USD 540 per person for three days; the tours listed below show today's prices. The e-Visa fee (from USD 40) is paid separately - see Turkmenistan e-Visa.

Best Time to Visit Darvaza

The most comfortable months are April, May, September and October: warm days, cool nights and a camp you can actually sleep in. From June to August the Karakum becomes a furnace, with days above 45°C, which makes the drive and the camp hard going. Winter visits work if you come prepared for nights below freezing, and the cold desert air makes the fire feel all the stranger. Whatever the season, arrive before sunset: the crater is worth seeing by daylight, and the flames show best after dark.

What to Bring and How to Stay Safe

Pack warm layers even in spring and autumn, closed shoes for the sand and gravel, a head torch and sun protection for the day. At the rim, treat the edge with respect: the ground is crumbly and the heat close to the flames is intense. Stay behind the railing, keep children close and never try to climb down.

See all our tours to Darvaza

An Accident That Became a Landmark

The Darvaza gas crater was never supposed to exist. It was a mistake - a miscalculation by Soviet engineers who thought they were solving a small problem and accidentally created something permanent. Fifty years later, the fire they lit as a temporary fix has become one of the most recognizable geological sites in Central Asia.

There is something clarifying about standing at the edge of an event that was never meant to happen and has no planned end. The crater does not care about the engineers who created it, the government officials who want it closed, or the travelers who come to photograph it. It burns because the gas flows and the gas flows because the earth is fractured and the fractures connect to reserves laid down before humans existed. It will stop when the gas runs out or when the wells around it finally draw all of it away. Until then, it burns.

That indifference is part of what makes the Darvaza gas crater extraordinary. It is not a monument built for anyone. It is not preserved for any purpose. It is simply a consequence - of geology, of accident, of time - and it happens to be one of the most arresting sights on the surface of the Earth.