Is Turkmenistan finally closing the “gates of hell”?
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. There is this huge, burning, fiery pit, and it's in a country you might never have heard of that's said to be one of the least visited on Earth, Turkmenistan. Now, this pit has been on fire for more than 50 years. Some people call it the gates to hell.

But all that could be about to change. It could be extinguished for good. So in this episode, you're going to find out why it's on fire in the first place and what it will take to put it out. I'm Hannah Gelbart and this is What In The World from the BBC World Service. To find out more about the gateway to hell, I'm here with Alex Rose from the What In The World team. Hello, Hannah. Hello. So show me what it looks like. So it's 70 metres wide, 30 metres deep and it's in the...

Karakum Desert, which is a vast part of Turkmenistan, it makes about 70% of Turkmenistan. It really is massive. And this pit just burns and burns and burns and has been going for about 50 years now. It looks very spectacular, especially at night where it's kind of the only light source for kind of miles around, really. Is it

like a natural crater and how on earth did it get to be full of flames in the first place? Well, one of the very interesting things about it is we don't actually know how exactly it formed. We think that it started in 1971 when this, because Turkmenistan used to be part of the Soviet Union. And we think that they were basically drilling for oil there. They thought there was some oil underneath. While they were doing that, they hit a pocket of natural gas that collapsed everything in and then it started leaking methane up into the air.

So someone, some bright spark thought, well, we'll just burn it off. How much gas can there be under this thing? So they set it on fire and it has been burning ever since. They thought it would just burn off straight away. But it's tapped into this huge reservoir of gas underneath the desert. That sounds like it could be quite dangerous. Yeah. And you've actually spoken to someone who has been down into the pit. The only person who's been there. One person. This is why men.

live a lot less longer than women because yeah, one man in 2013 decided he was going to go into this thing where temperatures, you know, go into the hundreds of degrees. My name is George Karunas and I am Explorer in Residence with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Being at the bottom of the Darvaza Gates of Hell crater was probably about as close to visiting another planet as you can here on Earth.

I was leading an expedition for National Geographic to go to the bottom and gather samples of the soil to see if there's any bacteria living in this hot, methane-rich environment. And when I finally arrived in the country and we drove out into the desert and I walked up to the edge, my very first thought was,

This is impossible. I'll never be able to do this. It's too hot. It's too dangerous. What was I thinking? But what I did was we camped beside the crater for a week and we spent every day studying the crater and we measured how the heat is circulating in the crater. And we learned that the hot air rises up along the edges and cooler air drops down in the center.

I'm not going to say it wasn't scary when I stepped off the edge and put all my weight on that rope over a giant pit of burning gas because, yeah, it was very scary. I was able to descend down in the very center of the crater, touch down at the very bottom, and then the clock was ticking. I only had 17 minutes. And looking around, it was the most...

terrifying and beautiful place I think I've ever set foot. And I've been in a lot of strange places like inside erupting volcanoes in the eye of hurricanes. And this place was special because it felt like this coliseum of fire. And I knew that every step that I took was a place where no human had really set foot before.

So, Alex, not many people like George get to go down into this pit, but it is the biggest tourist attraction in Turkmenistan. So why are they trying to put it out? Well, when we say it's the biggest tourist attraction in Turkmenistan, that is we've got to sort of scale that for size. We're not talking the Eiffel Tower here. Very few people go to Turkmenistan. And yeah, most of them end up at this pit because there's not loads to see and it's not really set up for tourism in the country. We'll talk a little bit more about Turkmenistan in a bit.

But essentially, there's been a mixed relationship between the government and this pit because for a while, it was obviously quite the national embarrassment, this kind of flammable pit about 250 kilometers from the capital just burning endlessly.

And for a while, you know, they didn't want to talk about it too much. Then they thought, maybe we'll make a virtue of it. People kind of want to see it. We'll turn it into a tourist attraction. They renamed it officially. So, you know, the gates of hell, not great for tourists. So they called it the shining of Karakum after the desert, basically. But then climate change is a big problem, big issue. Countries want to be seen to be doing something about it. And

Turns out burning gas just into the air is not the greatest look in the world. Interestingly, though, so it's methane coming out of this gas. If they hadn't burnt it, it would actually be more harmful for the environment because methane is worse than carbon dioxide. They think something like it's burning a million cubic feet worth of gas a day. And in terms of, you know, that's bad for the environment. And it's basically just

setting money on fire. You could be harvesting this gas properly and selling it to places that need it instead of just literally torching it. So they decided in 2022 that they wanted to do something about it and seal it off. So the then president at the time went on state TV to say, right, we're going to switch this thing off essentially. And the idea was to make a

sort of tap into the reservoir further up the chain. So essentially you can, you know, harvest the gas, sell it, because this costs millions and millions of pounds worth of gas going into the air, burned off all the time. Go further up the line, tap into it, sell it, that sort of thing. They decided to do this in 2022. First with kind of mixed success. It didn't look like anything was sort of happening. But in the last year, satellite imagery has now started to show that

There's 50% less flames coming from this thing. It's not as visible at night from space, which suggests that it is starting to work and that maybe in the future it will go out forever. I don't know much about Turkmenistan, where this...

big fiery pit is based. What can you tell me about the country and who's in charge of it? Well, that's the thing about Turkmenistan. I think if you went up to people in the street and asked them, what do you know about Turkmenistan? They would struggle to tell you almost anything about it, let alone find it on a map. But luckily here at the BBC, we have people whose job is to look into these very countries. Do we have a Turkman expert?

I've been speaking to Alistair Coleman. He works at BBC Monitoring, a part of the BBC that monitors different parts of the world. It's one of those Central Asian countries which people tend to group together as the stands and...

huge, huge gas deposits. But it's the fourth largest gas deposits in the world. They should be absolutely rolling in money, but they're not. Since they became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, there's been a series of autocratic rulers. And it also has a very poor human rights record. It's only ever had three leaders since 1991. The first was a chap called Shapamarat Niyazov, who called himself Turkmen Bashy.

which means the father of the Turkmens. And he became really well known for his despotic rule. He did things like changing the days of the week. He closed all the hospitals outside the capital and he built a giant golden statue of himself, which

rotated to always face the sun. What is it with dictators and building giant statues of themselves? Oh, they love it, don't they? It was a very strange time for Turkmenistan and unfortunately the poor people who lived there did suffer. You mentioned two others. They're a kind of father and son combo, aren't they? After Turkmenbashi died, a former dentist called Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov

became president. So yeah, giant statue of himself, golden, riding on a horse. Day one, big gold statue. Big gold statue, decree that citizens should only drive white cars. Only drive white cars in the whole country. People had to like repaint their cars. Right.

So eventually he stood down and his son took over. You know, often these sort of autocratic leaders like to keep it in the family, don't they? But he's not quite as charismatic as perhaps his father was. Well, no. All the press photos you get of him, because it's a personality cult, he's on the front page of the state newspapers every single day.

He just looks like he's sat very bored behind his desk. In reality, his father is still in charge. The other thing that maybe you might have heard about Turkmenistan is its carpets. Oh, yes. They have massive, massive cotton harvest every year. And so one of the great exports from Turkmenistan is hand-woven carpets. It's the only country in the world to have a carpet on its flag. They carpet outdoors for big things when the president turns up.

It's quite odd in a way because we don't hear that much about Turkmenistan, whereas, you know, other more sort of outlandish dictatorships, essentially, so like North Korea, get loads of attention. Why not Turkmenistan, do you think? Well, Turkmenistan is a bit different in that they don't actually provide a threat to the outside world. They try to be neutral in all things, which basically is they're trying to attract outside investment. Alistair, thank you very much. Thank you.

So the president wants to put this fire out. Why has it taken so long? I think just because, one, it's very difficult. Think about like a sort of gas hob at home. You know, you've got that, you turn that on, you light it on fire. Unless you cut off the gas, it will just keep burning. And it's easy to turn off your oven. It's not so easy to turn off the gas supply in Turkmenistan. As Alistair said in his part...

Turkmenistan is a huge reservoir of natural gas. And this seems to have just been the wrong time at the wrong place. And also, you know, due to the kind of political circumstances of Turkmenistan, it's a bit cut off from the rest of the world. You know, the GDP isn't very high. It's quite a poor country. You know, there's not been the kind of will to do something about it. And they couldn't really quite make their minds up about what they wanted to do about it for a long time. Alex, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much.

And thank you for listening. That is it for today's episode. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. You can find all of our episodes wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Just search for BBC What In The World. And if you're not already, please do hit subscribe so that a brand new episode will drop into your feed every single weekday. I'm Hannah Gelbart and we'll be back with another episode soon. Maybe by then the flames will truly be out. Thank you so much for joining us. Bye.

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