Ah, I see this picture on my dash with no back-story:
This is “The Door to Hell” in Turkmenistan. It’s been burning for like decades. It’s a real thing on this planet at this very moment.
throw me in this
I don’t know what it says about me that I’d literally spend all day chucking stuff in there just to see what happened.
but how did it get this way, you ask?
when it was first discovered, some people thought they’d find oil there. instead, they found the gas, and all their equipment and drills and everything collapsed into the giant hole. they thought the gas was poisonous, so they set it on fire thinking to get rid of it, and that the fire would burn out soon enough and the gas would be gone.
what they didn’t know was they’d struck a natural gas field. it’s been on fire since the 70′s, iirc.