Nick Seeber's blog

Hell's Gate - 35 years of burning

A story to capture the imagination: Hell's Gate, Uzbekistan.

This place in Uzbekistan is called by locals “The Door to Hell”. It is situated near the small town of Darvaz. The story of this place lasts already for 35 years. Once the geologists were drilling for gas. Then suddenly during the drilling they have found an underground cavern, it was so big that all the drilling site with all the equipment and camps got deep deep under the ground.

None dared to go down there because the cavern was filled with gas. So they ignited it that no poisonous gas could come out of the hole, and since then, it’s burning, already for 35 years without any pause. Nobody knows how many tons of excellent gas has been burned for all those years but it just seems to be infinite there.

Stories like this make me want to travel!

Finding the most inaccessible place on earth

I enjoyed this New Scientist article about finding the most inaccessible place on earth:

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.

There are obviously lots of flaws in the logic - I think I would have made the size of the city larger (say 1 million+ inhabitants) which would have made the remoteness of some places starker. But as it is, the study is fascinating...

On a separate note, I like that the modern air routes (shown as pale blue lines on the map above) aren't too dissimilar to the undersea telegraph cables shown on this map from c. 1890s:

Like the convergent evolution of sharks and dolphins, sea and air routes have clearly adapted to the constraints of the environment...