8Darvaza Gas Crater, Turkmenistan

Known as the “Gates of Hell”, the flaming inferno formed in the Seventies when Soviet geologists drilled into a cave for oil, causing its natural gas field to collapse. They set it alight to burn off the toxic gas. Decades later and it’s still blazing away beneath the barren landscape of the remote Karakum Desert.

The strange spectacle is at its most striking at night, when the flames lick out of the pit and light up the dark desert sky. Tour groups can camp nearby the blazing chasm, around which a fence was erected in 2018 to stop tourists getting too close to the extraordinary but dangerous sight.

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