In the name of the climate, the United States would help Turkmenistan plug a methane crater that has been burning for fifty years.
It is a burning chasm 70 meters wide, in the Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan. It's nicknamed "The Gates of Hell" because it continuously spits fire, fueled by methane gas that has been leaking since the 1970s.
Undocumented, the site remains mysterious. The most plausible theory is a ground implosion, after Soviet gas seekers searched for a deposit to exploit; Turkmenistan is full of them. To control the huge methane leak, the largest in the world, Russian officials decided to set it on fire. Bad idea. It has been burning for half a century...
The crater has become an attraction the world can no longer tolerate. This greenhouse gas bomb would be responsible for a good part of the 4,4 million tons of methane that Turkmenistan released into the atmosphere in 2022. The former Turkmen president, Gurbanguly Berdymoukhammedov, tried to butcher it, in vain, for years. Serdar, his son and current president, may succeed.
https://www.ouest-france.fr/environneme ... 8b00c238fa
