Darvarza Crater: The Door to HellIn a desolate part of Northern Turkmenistan lies a 69m (225ft) wide

Darvarza Crater: The Door to HellIn a desolate part of Northern Turkmenistan lies a 69m (225ft) wide crater that has been on fire for the last 40 years. Surprisingly, this feature has nothing to do with volcanism but is a result of some poor planning by a group of soviet scientists during the 1970s.No-one knows for sure exactly what happened but the commonly accepted theory is that it started when a group of scientists began drilling in the area. In 1971 the ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, producing the crater we see today. The rig crew soon realised that noxious gases had begun pouring out of the well and tried to come up with a way to stem the flow.Their best idea was to set fire to the gases, effectively burning them off so that work could continue as planned. However, it appears they vastly underestimated the amount of gas as since the 1970s the crater has been alight and shows no sign of running out of fuel.Locals have suggested that the ground did not collapse all at once and that the crater slowly formed over a period of 20 years from the 1960s to the 1980s. Unfortunately public records don’t hold any mention of when the carter formed or how it was set alight, so there is no hard and fast evidence of what really happened.Rather astonishingly a member of a National Geographic team recently climbed into the crater to conduct a series of experiments. The aim was to see if any organisms could survive in the superheated methane rich environment at the base of the crater as this would have implications when looking for life on other planets. Amazingly a sparse population of bacteria were found that did not exist outside of the crater rim suggesting that they were adapted solely for such harsh conditions.While setting fire to a massive ball of gas may not have been the greatest move in human history, the crater is now providing amazing insights into how life may have adapted on other planets as well as just looking really, really cool.- WatsonReference: http://bit.ly/1mUuJKZVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkWq1xJqUQ4&ab_channel=Fearless%26FarImage Credit: http://bit.ly/1PeGdVN -- source link

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