THE GATES OF HELL

[Aslan]

In the hot, expansive Karakum desert in Turkmenistan, near the 350 person village of Derweze, is a hole 328 feet wide that has been on fire, continuously, for 38 years. Known as the Darvaza Gas Crater or the "Gates of Hells" by locals, the crater can be seen glowing for miles around.

The hole is the outcome not of nature but of an industrial accident. In 1971 a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. Having punctured a pocket of gas, poisonous fumes began leaking from the hole at an alarming rate. To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, the Soviets set the hole alight. The crater hasn't stopped burning since.

Though little information is available about the fate of the Soviet drilling rig, presumably it is still down there somewhere, on the other side of the "Gates of Hell."
The Gates of Hell located in Kyzylgar, Turkmenistan | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations

 

[Aslan]

In 2001, in Azerbaijan, something unexpected happened. The ground began to move in an unusual way...

"It looked as though an animal was trying to get out of the ground...There was a big explosion, and a huge flame started coming from the hillside... The flame was unbelievably big, about three hundred meters high. It was surrounded by dense, black smoke, and lots of mud was being thrown into the air", recounted a local. Visible from 15 kilometers away, three days later the flames were still burning.

What had taken place was an eruption, not one of magma, but of mud. Known as "mud volcanoes", they form in places where pockets of underground gas have found a weak spot in the earth where they can force their way to the surface. Because they are not caused by magma, the mud volcanoes, rather than being hot, can be very cold indeed, often just above freezing. Over a thousand mud volcanoes are known to exist in the world, and some 400 of those are in the coastal area of Azerbaijan.

While mud volcanoes (also known as "sedimentary volcanoes") never grow to the size of a normal volcano, topping out at around 10 km in diameter and 700 meters in height, (among the largest mud volcanoes in the world are Boyuk Khanizadagh and Turaghai, both in Azerbaijan) they do occasionally get the chance to show off, as happened in 2001

Every 20 years or so, one of these mud/gas volcanoes will ignite deep below the surface and create a massive explosion. While generally not dangerous to people, as they are far outside of most city centers, it is believed that six shepherds and over 2000 sheep were killed by a mud volcano in Bozdagh, Azerbaijan.

There is a silver lining to having a country covered in mud volcanoes. Mud volcanoes are closely associated with hydrocarbon and petrochemical stores underground, hence the gas trying to escape to the surface. A few of these gas leaks are constantly on fire, shooting small perpetual flames into the air and some believe that these perpetual flames are strongly connected to the appearance of the Zoroastrian religion in Azerbaijan some 2000 years ago

Mud Volcanoes of Azerbaijan located in Baku, Azerbaijan | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations

 

[JonAsad]

Lovely, finaly some thing informative

Coordinates to look it up on Google Earth.

40°10'5.91"N 58°24'38.89"E

 

[Aslan]

3,800 square-miles of salt flat spread out across Bolivia's remote southwest. Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, an endless sheet of hexagonal tiles (created by the crystalline nature of the salt), dotted with pyramids of salt. Despite the desert dryness, freezing night temperatures, and fierce desert sun, this landscape is not devoid of life. Pink flamingos, ancient cacti, and rare hummingbirds all live in the Salar de Uyuni.

During the wet season, the salt desert is transformed into a enormous salt lake, albeit one that is only six to twenty inches deep, traversable by both boat and truck. During this time, the shallow salt lake perfectly mirrors the sky, creating bizarre illusions of infinity. In the middle of this seemingly infinite salty lake is a hotel built entirely out of—naturally—salt.

Created from salt bricks held together with salt mortar, the hotel and everything inside it, including the chairs and tables, is made from salt. While the Hotel Playa Blanca has no electricity and little in the way of amenities, and its water must be trucked in, it does offer even more important and certainly rarer qualities: utter silence, an all-encompassing austere beauty, and an astonishing view of the night sky.

Also worth traveling to are the nearby Laguna Colorado and Laguna Verde. Laguna Colorado is a red-hued lake filled with thousands of pink flamingos, while Laguna Verde is a blue-green salt lake found at the foot of the volcano Licancabur. Its shifting aqua color is caused by copper sediments and microorganisms living within the lake.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivian Salt Flat located in Phaspani, Bolivia | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations

 

[Aslan]

This five-story, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. When geologists first discovered the frozen waterfall in 1911, they thought the red color came from algae, but its true nature turned out to be much more spectacular.

Roughly two million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist in a place with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life can exist in the most extreme conditions on Earth. Though tempting to make the connection, it does not prove, however, that life could exist on other planets with similar environments and similar bodies of frozen water—notably Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa—as such life would have to arise from a completely different chain of events.

Even if it doesn't confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life, Antarctica's Blood Falls is a wonder to behold both visually and scientifically.

Blood Falls located in Taylor Glacier, Antarctica | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations