Darvaza Gas Crater | Hacker News Reader

Darvaza Gas Crater

en.wikipedia.org

109 pointsthunderbong24 comments

I was lucky enough to visit in 2018. It is a truly surreal place. I've been a few places, and Darvaza is still one of the most memorable. Since travel in Turkmenistan is quite restricted, I hired a driver to travel from Ashgabat to Darvaza to Konye-Urgench, with an overnight at the crater (and another overnight in Dashoguz, after visiting Konye-Urgench).

The heat of the crater. The size of it. The light it puts out into an otherwise perfectly dark surrounding. The remoteness. The bareness of it all. To be there as the sun sets, and as the stars come out, and until the crater is the only source of light.. absolutely amazing.

Of course, sometimes the destination is only part of what is memorable. The drive out was an obstacle course of avoiding potholes at high speed. Once there, healthy amounts of vodka were enjoyed with my driver. Hours of talk, despite minimal shared language. And sleeping involved a rather tiny tent (perfectly serviceable for a night of camping).

It's hard to convey how surreal the place is.

A few photos from my visit:

Pitch black night, illuminated by the crater: https://imgur.com/a/3sgz6oB

Crater at twilight: https://imgur.com/p7BZfYA

Milky Way at night from near my tent, facing away from the crater, and with the moon rising: https://imgur.com/4mq71D5

I was hoping you would post photos, thank you.

It’s too bad that artificial light is shining in the third picture. It would be so much better with just the crater and the Milky Way.

This is when I wish HN had the ability to inline images. Great shots and sounds like an epic adventure.

How loud is it?

It's definitely got some noise to it. Not super loud, but definitely not quiet.

At least it is burning. Two gas fields in Turkmenistan are reported to be leaking “mind boggling” quantities of unburnt methane - more CO2e than the entire annual emissions of the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/09/mind-boggling-...

Yeah, that was posted 24 hours ago [1] so this is probably the result of someone researching the topic. Really cool image on the wiki, so dramatic.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35871108

I camped close to the crater. One photo on Wikipedia shows some tents.

The view at night is definitely better than the one when the sun is up in the sky so it's worth getting there late in the afternoon and spend one night. There is some smell of burnt gas downwind but not much. It's not even so hot, but you don't want to risk standing directly on the rim, as with any cliff.

The view at night is sureal, but what you don’t get from the photos is the sound - reminds of a plane jet engine.

I'll never forget how I learned about this crater: When the leader of Turkmenistan defied rumors of his death by driving around and doing donuts next to it.

https://www.newsweek.com/video-turkmenistan-leader-summer-va...

A similar phenomenon, much smaller but easier to reach, is Mount Chimaera in Turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chimaera

"The Chimera is depicted as a three-formed beast; a lion in front, a python in its hinder parts, goatlike in the middle. Certain writers on natural history say it isn't an animal, but a mountain in Cilicia, which in some places feeds lions and goats, in some burns, in some is full of snakes. Bellerophon made this habitable, whence he is said to have "killed Chimaera".

This reminds me of two other natural energy sources, both different:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine

> Another nearby gas crater is fenced off, and smells of natural gas

I thought they added smelly stuff (mercaptan) to natural gas, precisely because methane doesn't smell.

It’s probably mixed with other compounds, it’s not pure. I imagine it would smell like rotten eggs.

Probably, and likely also subtler scents of various hydrocarbons (somewhat like gasoline)

Even Hell has to follow regs.

Most regulations _come_ from hell!

> In 2013, George Kourounis became the first person to set foot at the bottom of the crater;[5] he was gathering soil samples for the Extreme Microbiome Project.

The exploration part of this article is fascinating. At my previous job we looked in soil for drug producing fungi and I would have loved to have worked on a sample from there.

BTW: "Darvaza" in many languages of that region (like Urdu, Hindi, etc. among others) means "door".

I've visited this crater. There were a surprising amount of gas tanker lorries driving around nearby. A friend suggested that maybe they keep topping it up to keep it burning to attract tourists!

(Not that Turkmenistan gets - or indeed allows - an awful lot of tourists).

I grew up near the impressively named Flaming Geyser State Park. As a kid, I was excited to see what would surely be a terrifying jet of fire. But no, it was a mere few inches tall, hardly visible in daylight. Alas, it was apparently depleted in 2016. Sign my petition to rename it The Park That Formerly Contained a Natural Bunsen Burner Called Flaming Geyser

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_Geyser_State_Park

Here's someone else's video footage of it. It's pretty spectacular to view the video instead of just pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkWq1xJqUQ4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com