Turkmenistan president wants to extinguish fire at the Gates of Hell. We asked an expert about possible scenarios

51 years on fire.

Darvaza's "Gates of Hell", which is now a major tourist attraction in Turkmenistan, is going to burn forever! Let's use gas instead of burning! It seems that the president is finally burning with the desire to extinguish the fire.

The question is whether there is such a method. Let's dig a little deeper and think about it.

What is the Gate of Hell?

The Gates of Hell is a burning hole just north of the center of the Karakum Desert, which occupies 85% of the land. The official name is Darvaza Crater (Darvaza means "gate, entrance"). It is called "The Gate of Hell" because it resembles hellfire.

With a diameter of 70m and a depth of 30m, it is by no means large, but this is the only one that has been burning for more than half a century. Despite being in the middle of the desert, it has become a popular tourist attraction.

President's Fire Extinguishing Order

Right now, the number of spectators has stopped due to the coronavirus, so there's no point in keeping the fire going. During a televised government meeting this month, President Gurbangur Berdimuhamedov said, "It's bad for the health and the environment. There are also safety risks." I ordered a fire extinguisher (although this is the second time since I ordered it in 2010).

Ask a person who has been there how the valley bottom looks

When I asked George Kourounis, the only recorded human to land on the valley floor in 2013, about the site, he said, "Fuchi. When I looked into it, the hot air hit my cheek relentlessly.It felt like the devil was beckoning me.I was 100% convinced that it was called hell."

Wrapped in a thermal insulation suit (often used in volcano exploration), he slipped down with a Kevlar-blend harness as shown in the video above, and it took 17 minutes. did not.

Even though I thought that there was no living thing in such a place, I collected the soil and had it examined by an expert. This is how I look back.

"As we dug holes to collect soil samples, more and more flames rose up from the edges of the holes," Kourounis said.

The source of the heat is natural gas, which is about 500m underground

The gates of hell tend to be the focus of attention, but in order to understand the mechanism by which the fire does not go out, it is necessary to take a closer look at the whole thing. I have.

There are two bubbling craters near the Gates of Hell. One is filled with water and the other is a muddy swamp that is weakly flammable. When I asked Dr. Mark Tingay, an authority on petroleum geomechanics and an associate professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, there was "crude oil and natural gas" formed during the Jurassic period beneath the vast basin of the Amu Darya basin, to which this area belongs. It sleeps in abundance, and it springs up to the surface like blood." Because of the inexhaustible amount of methane gas in the ground, fires are constantly burning like this in Central Asia from Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan.

In the case of Darvaza Crater, the gas is about 500 meters underground. It has a hollow in the middle like a cauldron, so the flames don't get blown out by the strong winds of the desert.

There are various theories as to what caused the fire

Who started the fire in the first place...but during the Cold War, data on natural resources in the East was top secret, and the details are shrouded in mystery. increase. Even if there were photographs and testimony left as records, I don't think Turkmenistan, a dictatorship of the former Soviet Union, has the authority to make them public.

One common theory is that in the 1960s or 1970s, during a drilling survey by a Soviet expert, a collapse accident occurred and methane poison gas leaked into the air. There are several variations of this story ("The ex-Soviet petrochemical students started the fire", "The shepherd got angry at the frequent occurrence of gas poisoning in the sheep"). I set fire to the tire and rolled it in”), the credibility remains questionable. "If you repeat it over and over again, the myth becomes fact" (Dr.) may be the truth.

The relationship between the President and the Gates of Hell

The Gates of Hell is a negative legacy, but it is also a tourist resource, and the president is unable to measure the distance. The last fire extinguishing order ended up with no results, and when rumors spread that the president was dead in 2019, he shot footage of the election car gliding around the Gates of Hell and making a spectacular donut turn. Because I'm appealing to the opponents that I'm still alive. I wonder how serious he is this time, but Mr. Kourounis said, "I feel like I'm serious this time."

However, there are no people living in the area, so it seems a bit of an exaggeration to say that there is a safety risk (there used to be a village, but it was closed in 2004 by order of the former president). ).

It seems that there are not many problems in terms of environment. The greenhouse effect of methane is said to be 25 to 80 times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. less than methane). In any case, "the impact on the carbon budget is insignificant" compared to the domestic heavy industry emissions, Tingay said.

When I asked Guillermo Rein, professor of engineering at Imperial College London, who specializes in fire extinguishing, he agreed, "No one is being harmed."

Why delete?

Then, why do we put out fires? It may be that they are ashamed of the world's attention,” Kourounis said.

It's easy to just put it out...

But if a fire breaks out at the end of the dig, something like Sisyphus in Greece (who received the punishment of carrying a rock to the top of a mountain forever) can put it out. It doesn't feel like it, but the fire at the gates of hell is basically the same as any other fire. Professor Ed Galea, who leads the Fire Safety Research Group at the University of Greenwich, said:

In the case of Hell's Gate, the fuel is methane, which is abundant underground and cannot be removed, but it may be possible to sprinkle a large amount of foam on the fire like a fire extinguisher and suffocate it, and the metal One way is to cover it with a canopy.

One more thing is to fill it with dirt and sand. "If you fill the entire crater with dirt, the fire will probably go out," Tingay said. There is a proviso that says, ``You can't stop gas leaks with that method, can you?''

Conversely, if you can stop the gas leak, extinguishing the fire itself is not smart enough. Damping the flow of underground gas is a twist, and if you lose the exit at the gate of hell, you can think of it blowing out from an unexpected place many kilometers away. That's the difficulty.

Past Accidents

There have been many incidents of natural gas burning during drilling in the past. Each time, a borehole (vertical hole) was dug at the site and the bomb was dropped, or dynamite was exploded on the ground to create an oxygen-deficient state and cover it with earth and sand to extinguish the fire. "I wouldn't recommend it because it's pretty crude, but it worked for me," Tingay said. If Darvaza were to do that, he said, "it would have to be a powerful explosion to completely close the faults and fissures."

Underground nuclear bombs were used in Uzbekistan...

How many explosions are needed? The 1963 gas field fire in Uzbekistan serves as a hint. A large-scale gas leak ignited and burned for nearly three years. In 1966, the Soviet Union finally ran out of boiling water, and carried out a drastic treatment that crushed the pipe with an underground nuclear explosion. "The fire was extinguished by a nuclear bomb," Tingay said.

The impact of the explosion not only changed the layout of the maze-like underground gas meridians, but also rocks liquefied and hardened into a glass-like state, blocking the passage of gas in an instant and causing fire. It has disappeared.

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union conducted peaceful nuclear explosion tests (the Soviet Union carried out ``nuclear explosions for the national economy'' a total of 239 times between 1965 and 1988), It was a time when you could make a hole in the ground in an instant, extract resources, and speed up construction. ).

Because radioactivity does not disappear even if it is postponed, both plans for the peaceful use of nuclear explosions ended in failure. I don't think nuclear weapons will be brought out to the gates of hell now.

If the Turkmenistan government were to bring it out, it would be a gigantic conventional weapon, and it's likely that they'd "hopefully leave the gas to the heavens and stop the gas flow" (Professor Rein). (However, when the Deepwater Horizon drilling facility exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and oil spilled, nuclear experts from both the United States and the Soviet Union recommended dropping nuclear bombs as a safe and efficient way to block underground veins. I'm doing it, so it's not a story that doesn't happen at all).

Either approach is taken, Kourounis read, "it will be an expensive and difficult task to extinguish the fire." Because it takes too much cost and effort, it is possible to quit midway, but if the president is ready to force it, the firefighters will have no choice but to go all-in. Gate of hell. It's not a fire that can be extinguished by running away, and if there is even one leak, it is possible that another fire will rise from there.

"If you don't have the resources to do it perfectly, it's best not to mess with it," says Professor Rein. Tingay also said, "You either do it right or you don't do it at all."

I wish the power plant could do it.