Photos: U.S. in serious talks to close Turkmenistan’s “Gates of Hell”

Officials from the two nations hope to extinguish a natural gas blaze geologists first ignited in the Karakum Desert in 1971, Bloomberg first reported

As part of diplomatic efforts to fight climate change, American officials are negotiating a deal to help Turkmenistan curb its methane emissions, Bloomberg first reported Wednesday.

The possible agreement could see the U.S. lending financial support to help the central Asian nation plug its planet-warming leaks, which include a burning 230-foot wide chasm in the Karakum Desert known as the “Gates of Hell,” which Soviet geologists first ignited in 1971 following a cavern’s folding beneath a rig drilling as part of natural resource exploration.

At the time, the scientists decided to burn off the gases rising into the atmosphere, expecting the fire would extinguish within a few days. Now 52 years later, the gas-fed flames are still burning in and around the 100-foot deep pit located near Darvaza, a town about 160 miles north of Ashgabat, the nation’s capital city.

Turkmenistan is the fourth-largest emitter of methane from the oil and gas sector worldwide, according to written testimony submitted by the U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Resources to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia and Counterterrorism last March.

Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the father of Turkmenistan’s current president Serdar Berdimuhamedow and the nation’s former leader, reportedly ordered the nation to put out the fire at one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions in January 2022.