5 ms·

Door to Hell

132 points by rajeemcariazo 12y ago

mik3y 12y ago
Fascinating; aren't fires like these typically extinguished by starving them of oxygen, for instance with an explosive charge? Wikipedia doesn't even say if it's been attempted, and the panaorma makes the site look like it would be small enough to be feasible.. (IANA natural gas fire fighter.)
- jader201 12y ago
  > Derweze's large crater with a diameter of 70 metres (230 ft).
  - pavement 12y ago
    So, cap it with concrete. It's not quite the scale of the Hoover Dam. Recover expenses later, by selling the natural gas that would've otherwise burnt off. How many cubic meters of gas have been wasted since 1971?
    - simcop2387 12y ago
      I don't think this would work. you'd have to cap it long enough for the concrete to set. otherwise it'll bubble through and likely end up with a channel in the middle of the concrete that'll let the gas out anyway.
      - jonmrodriguez 12y ago
        Concrete sounds too expensive anyways, just cap it with a big flame-proof tarp. Wouldn't cost more than $10k or $20k I'd imagine.
- phkahler 12y ago
  Why would you want to extinguish it?
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Came here to post this but you beat me to it! I'll settle for expanding on the point some. The flow of gas doesn't stop just because you put the fire out. So now instead of combustion products being released into the atmosphere, you have natural gas. This is not an improvement. In fact, that's why they set the fire in the first place, because having unburned gas floating around is a big problem. In theory you could put out the fire and capture the gas, but that's a fairly tall order. You'd have to install the capture equipment without either being burned by the fires, poisoned by the gas, or setting off an explosion when the gas concentration hits the right amount. Then you have the pleasure of trying to sell the captured gas at low wholesale prices on the international market.
unreal37 12y ago
Interesting that it was lit on purpose by Russian petro-chemists in 1971, and has been burning ever since. The fire was originally supposed to last a couple of weeks...
- iLoch 12y ago
  I too read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.
DAddYE 12y ago
How cool will be having a bbq over there?
- Zircom 12y ago
  I imagine it'd be fairly hot actually.
bagels 12y ago
Coal mine fire burning since 1962 in Pennsylvania: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
- jacquesm 12y ago
  And one that is even older than that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire
prawn 12y ago
Similar but different - naturally occurring fires of Chimaera: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanarta%C5%9F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanarta%C5%9F Believed to be the origin of the stories of Mount Chimaera. Short hike out from Cirali in Turkey on the south coast. You can extinguish a flame temporarily but it will soon re-ignite. Picture of the area here: http://www.fazturkey.com/Files/User/Product/Orjinal/430_cirali.jpg http://www.fazturkey.com/Files/User/Product/Orjinal/430_cira...
- maaku 12y ago
  What are the stories of Mount Chimaera?
  - prawn 12y ago
    The Chimera was a fire-breathing creature from Greek mythological, part-snake, part-lion, part-goat. Thought to have origins in the burning rocks near Cirali. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chimaera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chimaera Apparently sailors used those flames as a form of navigation though they might've needed to have been a lot larger hundreds of years ago to be visible from that far out to sea. When I was there a few years ago, none of the flames would've been bigger than about 20cm. We could barely see them in the dark from down the mountain let alone some way out on the water. Absolutely recommend Turkey as a travel destination by the way, and especially the boat trips along the South coast. Awesome experience cruising along by sail, then anchoring in a sheltered bay to dive off the boat, eat, visit ruins, etc.
    - maaku 12y ago
      Interesting, thank you!
- yread 12y ago
  I've been there it's an awesome place!
chubbiguy40 12y ago
Serious question: Why isn't a power plant built over this?
- mkoryak 12y ago
  If it were built, it would probably have very low efficiency and Turkmenistan cant afford to build low efficiency power plants. In other words, I think the reason is purely bureaucratic.
  - tempestn 12y ago
    More cost-effective would almost certainly be to extinguish the fire with a bunch of concrete or something, then harvest the gas. Apparently not cost-effective enough to be viable though.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  It's in the middle of nowhere, and Turkmenistan is already awash in cheap energy. https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B015%2709.4%22N+58%C2%B026%2721.8%22E/@40.252611,58.439389,528642m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B015%2709.4%22N+58%C... One of the late Turkmenbashi's many hare-brained policies was that citizens get natural gas for free, which leads to stupid things like most people keeping a gas stove on 24/7 (because gas is free, but matches and lighters aren't!). http://www.rferl.org/content/turkmenistan-free-gas-ends/25234662.html http://www.rferl.org/content/turkmenistan-free-gas-ends/2523...
- dognotdog 12y ago
  I've been to that campfire. Turkmenistan's main non-urban tourist attraction. First, the gas seeps up through the ground, not through a single bore at the surface. So it is hard to capture. Second, the amount of gas coming out of that hole is simply not that enormous. Enormous by an individual human scale, but by and large, it doesn't have the same menacing quality as a high pressure oil well being on fire. You can walk right up to the crater's edge without protection, while the oil well fires radiate so much heat you can't even get close. I doubt it's a significant amount of gas leakage, compared to what the country already drills for. It's also in the middle of nowhere. Quite literally, it's almost exactly in the middle of the turkmen desert.
protomyth 12y ago
Would a large fuel-air detonation above it suck enough air to put it out?
- warmwaffles 12y ago
  It's better to have that burn than to be dumping into our atmosphere. Seriously, lesser of two evils, and sad that there isn't a viable solution.
  - ctdonath 12y ago
    Link states a more pressing concern: Large quantities of methane gas were released, however, creating an environmental problem and posing a potential danger to the people of the nearby villages. Fearing the further release of poisonous gases from the cavern, the scientists decided to burn it off. They thought that it would be safer to burn it than to extract it from underground through expensive methods.
- hartror 12y ago
  You need to cut off oxygen long enough for the rock to cool below the temperature at which the gas will ignite.
  - olefoo 12y ago
    Tanks full of liquid nitrogen... Cool and non-combustible. Although; you're talking a multimillion dollar project to get enough liquid nitrogen on-site and an effective distribution system to spary it into an active gas fire.
  - ars 12y ago
    Wait for a very rainy day and do it then. Store some extra water in tanks on the sides. Does it rain there much or is it arid?
    - eCa 12y ago
      It's pretty arid [1]. The rainiest month in Ashgabat (the Turkmenistan capital) is February, with 40 mm (less than two inches). [1] https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.252611,58.439389&q=loc:40.252611,58.439389&hl=en&t=m&z=15 https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.252611,58.439389&q=loc:40...
kevinwang 12y ago
Another fire that's been burning for over 5 decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
z3phyr 12y ago
On the first look it seems like a crater in Venus, Awesome.
jmnicolas 12y ago
I wonder what is the quantity of CO2 that is released annually by this crater. Must be tremendous. I'm under the impression that whatever ways to pollute less we come up with, it will be annihilated by things like this or just sheer overpopulation.
- cobbal 12y ago
  It's probably not that much, on a global scale. What's more, CO2 is a better gas to be venting to the atmosphere than methane is. [citation needed]
  - ccozan 12y ago
    Indeed, methane is at least an order of magnitude greenhouse gas as C02 : " over a 100-year period, it traps 29 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide".[0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
nl 12y ago
The Oklo[1][2][3] natural nuclear reactor is even stranger. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor [3] http://jdlc.curtin.edu.au/research/oklo/oklo.cfm http://jdlc.curtin.edu.au/research/oklo/oklo.cfm
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  You must've seen this on HN, haven't you? It was on the front page not few days ago.
  - nl 12y ago
    No, I missed it then. I would assume it's been on a few times - it's quite interesting. Not sure where I first heard about it.
syassami 12y ago
Also check out http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanar_Dag http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanar_Dag
roshansingh 12y ago
Another one in India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jharia#Coal_field_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jharia#Coal_field_fire
chrisBob 12y ago
Ha. 1971? I used to occasionally drive by one in Kirkuk Iraq that is featured in the old testament. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Gurgur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Gurgur It was the safest route between two of the bases we frequently traveled between, but the sulfur smell was horrible.
tomw1808 12y ago
While I find that very interesting, that hoax which I just found on the bottom of the wikipedia page made me quite lough tough... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax
pjc50 12y ago
Note to people complaining about the waste of gas and CO2 emission: this is a drop in the bucket. Vast quantities of gas from oilfields is flared, deliberately, continuously. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-03/gas-flaring-the-burning-issue http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-03/gas-flaring-the... "140-150 billion cubic meters of flared natural gas translates into 270-290 million tons of C02 emissions per year. Accounting for roughly 1% of global carbon emissions"
ommunist 12y ago
The actual legendary one is in Norway. Around Lofoten Point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen

132 points by rajeemcariazo 12y ago

mik3y 12y ago

Fascinating; aren't fires like these typically extinguished by starving them of oxygen, for instance with an explosive charge? Wikipedia doesn't even say if it's been attempted, and the panaorma makes the site look like it would be small enough to be feasible.. (IANA natural gas fire fighter.)

jader201 12y ago
> Derweze's large crater with a diameter of 70 metres (230 ft).
- pavement 12y ago
  So, cap it with concrete. It's not quite the scale of the Hoover Dam. Recover expenses later, by selling the natural gas that would've otherwise burnt off. How many cubic meters of gas have been wasted since 1971?
  - simcop2387 12y ago
    I don't think this would work. you'd have to cap it long enough for the concrete to set. otherwise it'll bubble through and likely end up with a channel in the middle of the concrete that'll let the gas out anyway.
    - jonmrodriguez 12y ago
      Concrete sounds too expensive anyways, just cap it with a big flame-proof tarp. Wouldn't cost more than $10k or $20k I'd imagine.
phkahler 12y ago
Why would you want to extinguish it?
- mikeash 12y ago
  Came here to post this but you beat me to it! I'll settle for expanding on the point some. The flow of gas doesn't stop just because you put the fire out. So now instead of combustion products being released into the atmosphere, you have natural gas. This is not an improvement. In fact, that's why they set the fire in the first place, because having unburned gas floating around is a big problem. In theory you could put out the fire and capture the gas, but that's a fairly tall order. You'd have to install the capture equipment without either being burned by the fires, poisoned by the gas, or setting off an explosion when the gas concentration hits the right amount. Then you have the pleasure of trying to sell the captured gas at low wholesale prices on the international market.

unreal37 12y ago

Interesting that it was lit on purpose by Russian petro-chemists in 1971, and has been burning ever since. The fire was originally supposed to last a couple of weeks...

iLoch 12y ago
I too read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.

DAddYE 12y ago

How cool will be having a bbq over there?

Zircom 12y ago
I imagine it'd be fairly hot actually.

bagels 12y ago

Coal mine fire burning since 1962 in Pennsylvania: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

jacquesm 12y ago
And one that is even older than that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Run_mine_fire

prawn 12y ago

Similar but different - naturally occurring fires of Chimaera: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanarta%C5%9F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanarta%C5%9F Believed to be the origin of the stories of Mount Chimaera. Short hike out from Cirali in Turkey on the south coast. You can extinguish a flame temporarily but it will soon re-ignite. Picture of the area here: http://www.fazturkey.com/Files/User/Product/Orjinal/430_cirali.jpg http://www.fazturkey.com/Files/User/Product/Orjinal/430_cira...

maaku 12y ago
What are the stories of Mount Chimaera?
- prawn 12y ago
  The Chimera was a fire-breathing creature from Greek mythological, part-snake, part-lion, part-goat. Thought to have origins in the burning rocks near Cirali. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chimaera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Chimaera Apparently sailors used those flames as a form of navigation though they might've needed to have been a lot larger hundreds of years ago to be visible from that far out to sea. When I was there a few years ago, none of the flames would've been bigger than about 20cm. We could barely see them in the dark from down the mountain let alone some way out on the water. Absolutely recommend Turkey as a travel destination by the way, and especially the boat trips along the South coast. Awesome experience cruising along by sail, then anchoring in a sheltered bay to dive off the boat, eat, visit ruins, etc.
  - maaku 12y ago
    Interesting, thank you!
yread 12y ago
I've been there it's an awesome place!

chubbiguy40 12y ago

Serious question: Why isn't a power plant built over this?

mkoryak 12y ago
If it were built, it would probably have very low efficiency and Turkmenistan cant afford to build low efficiency power plants. In other words, I think the reason is purely bureaucratic.
- tempestn 12y ago
  More cost-effective would almost certainly be to extinguish the fire with a bunch of concrete or something, then harvest the gas. Apparently not cost-effective enough to be viable though.
jpatokal 12y ago
It's in the middle of nowhere, and Turkmenistan is already awash in cheap energy. https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B015%2709.4%22N+58%C2%B026%2721.8%22E/@40.252611,58.439389,528642m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B015%2709.4%22N+58%C... One of the late Turkmenbashi's many hare-brained policies was that citizens get natural gas for free, which leads to stupid things like most people keeping a gas stove on 24/7 (because gas is free, but matches and lighters aren't!). http://www.rferl.org/content/turkmenistan-free-gas-ends/25234662.html http://www.rferl.org/content/turkmenistan-free-gas-ends/2523...
dognotdog 12y ago
I've been to that campfire. Turkmenistan's main non-urban tourist attraction. First, the gas seeps up through the ground, not through a single bore at the surface. So it is hard to capture. Second, the amount of gas coming out of that hole is simply not that enormous. Enormous by an individual human scale, but by and large, it doesn't have the same menacing quality as a high pressure oil well being on fire. You can walk right up to the crater's edge without protection, while the oil well fires radiate so much heat you can't even get close. I doubt it's a significant amount of gas leakage, compared to what the country already drills for. It's also in the middle of nowhere. Quite literally, it's almost exactly in the middle of the turkmen desert.

protomyth 12y ago

Would a large fuel-air detonation above it suck enough air to put it out?

warmwaffles 12y ago
It's better to have that burn than to be dumping into our atmosphere. Seriously, lesser of two evils, and sad that there isn't a viable solution.
- ctdonath 12y ago
  Link states a more pressing concern: Large quantities of methane gas were released, however, creating an environmental problem and posing a potential danger to the people of the nearby villages. Fearing the further release of poisonous gases from the cavern, the scientists decided to burn it off. They thought that it would be safer to burn it than to extract it from underground through expensive methods.
hartror 12y ago
You need to cut off oxygen long enough for the rock to cool below the temperature at which the gas will ignite.
- olefoo 12y ago
  Tanks full of liquid nitrogen... Cool and non-combustible. Although; you're talking a multimillion dollar project to get enough liquid nitrogen on-site and an effective distribution system to spary it into an active gas fire.
- ars 12y ago
  Wait for a very rainy day and do it then. Store some extra water in tanks on the sides. Does it rain there much or is it arid?
  - eCa 12y ago
    It's pretty arid [1]. The rainiest month in Ashgabat (the Turkmenistan capital) is February, with 40 mm (less than two inches). [1] https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.252611,58.439389&q=loc:40.252611,58.439389&hl=en&t=m&z=15 https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.252611,58.439389&q=loc:40...

kevinwang 12y ago

Another fire that's been burning for over 5 decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

z3phyr 12y ago

On the first look it seems like a crater in Venus, Awesome.

jmnicolas 12y ago

I wonder what is the quantity of CO2 that is released annually by this crater. Must be tremendous. I'm under the impression that whatever ways to pollute less we come up with, it will be annihilated by things like this or just sheer overpopulation.

cobbal 12y ago
It's probably not that much, on a global scale. What's more, CO2 is a better gas to be venting to the atmosphere than methane is. [citation needed]
- ccozan 12y ago
  Indeed, methane is at least an order of magnitude greenhouse gas as C02 : " over a 100-year period, it traps 29 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide".[0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

nl 12y ago

The Oklo[1][2][3] natural nuclear reactor is even stranger. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor [3] http://jdlc.curtin.edu.au/research/oklo/oklo.cfm http://jdlc.curtin.edu.au/research/oklo/oklo.cfm

huhtenberg 12y ago
You must've seen this on HN, haven't you? It was on the front page not few days ago.
- nl 12y ago
  No, I missed it then. I would assume it's been on a few times - it's quite interesting. Not sure where I first heard about it.

syassami 12y ago

Also check out http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanar_Dag http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanar_Dag

roshansingh 12y ago

Another one in India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jharia#Coal_field_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jharia#Coal_field_fire

chrisBob 12y ago

Ha. 1971? I used to occasionally drive by one in Kirkuk Iraq that is featured in the old testament. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Gurgur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Gurgur It was the safest route between two of the bases we frequently traveled between, but the sulfur smell was horrible.

tomw1808 12y ago

While I find that very interesting, that hoax which I just found on the bottom of the wikipedia page made me quite lough tough... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax

pjc50 12y ago

Note to people complaining about the waste of gas and CO2 emission: this is a drop in the bucket. Vast quantities of gas from oilfields is flared, deliberately, continuously. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-03/gas-flaring-the-burning-issue http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-03/gas-flaring-the... "140-150 billion cubic meters of flared natural gas translates into 270-290 million tons of C02 emissions per year. Accounting for roughly 1% of global carbon emissions"

ommunist 12y ago

The actual legendary one is in Norway. Around Lofoten Point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen