TO HELL AND BACK

The Darvaza crater in Turkmenistan is known as the Gates of Hell. I stood on its edge - and lived to tell the tale

- Tim Johnson

CIRCLING THE GLOBE as a travel writer, visiting almost 150 countries over about 20 years, I have seen a lot of remarkable things. I’ve stood in the basket of a hot-air balloon and watched herds of elephants crossing the Serengeti. I have travelled by helicopter in Antarctica to see humpback whales feeding in the frigid waters. I’ve been awestruck by the Taj Mahal in India, Machu Picchu in Peru and the Pyramids of Giza. I have even felt the last rays of a sunset fading over Cambodia’s Angkor Wat as I sat atop a temple.

But I have never, ever seen or experienced anything like the Gates of Hell, its flames dazzling from the bottom of the crater 30 metres below, lighting up the Karakum Desert with burning methane. My visit nearly a decade ago was an unforgettable experience.

That place is on my mind these days because it has been in the news recently. Darvaza, Turkmenistan’s famous flaming gas crater, is finally about to be extinguished, its polluting abyss plugged, hopefully forever. The country’s new president, Serdar Berdimuhamedov, announced that the United States is going to help his country do it for the good of the whole world.

The crater is in one of Turkmenistan’s two main gas fields, both of which are huge contributors to climate change. (Satellite data gathered on behalf of The Guardian shows that methane leaks from those fields caused more global heating in 2022 than all the carbon emissions of the United Kingdom.)

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, methane is responsible for more than 25 per cent of the global warming we are experiencing today; it traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide (CO2), making it 80 times more potent than CO2, and for longer—20 years after it is released.