Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

Today I'm taking you back to the 6th of November 2013 when the first person entered the gates

of hell.

And I'm staring down this crater at this was scary, just the vastness of this thing and

the noise as well.

It doesn't sound like a like a campfire, this is pressurized gas so it sounds more like

a jet engine, like a roaring demon inside this pit and it totally makes sense that it

has this nickname as the doorway to hell because it looks like the devil himself is about

to come springing out with his pitchfork and horns and tail in the whole nine yards.

That's George Carunis, a man who's made it his mission to explore the extreme forces

of nature.

He's describing the shining of the caracorum, a flaming natural gasfield near Davaza in

Turkmenistan.

And this is an industrial accident, they were drilling for natural gas decades ago.

This was back in, well some people say it's 1971, others say it was in the late 60s

when this happened during the Soviet era and the drilling rig collapsed into this sinkhole.

They decided to light it on fire at some point or maybe accidentally caught fire, we still

don't know the details behind that and it's been literally burning for decades with

no sign of letting up.

I tried going there around 2008 or 2009, but it's extremely difficult to get permission

to go to Turkmenistan and it never happened.

Because of that initial failure, it lived rent-free in my head for quite a few years before

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