There are places on Earth that are a
little eerie. Places that feel like they
might be haunted or inhabited by some
elusive danger.
And then there are places that are
downright hellish.
Like when you're standing at the edge of
a gaping hole in the earth,
filled with flames licking the sky.
Foul gases choking the air.
Dotted around our planet, these hell
holes lurk like gateways into our
darkest nightmares,
offering humanity but the slightest
glimpse of what may lie beyond.
From thoring boils growing like hungry
monsters in frozen tundras to craters
filled with spiders to cauldrons burning
in deserts for decades.
Hell holes look like the layers of every
demon we've ever dreamt up. The perfect
hiding place deep below us. Home to
something sinister.
And yet, humans have this strange
tendency to look at something like that
and say, "I really want to go down there
and have a look around." I'm James
Stewart and you're watching Astrome
Earth. In this video, we plunge into the
abyss, uncovering what hell holes are,
why they exist, how they form, what
chaotic roles they play in our world,
and most intriguingly, what bizarre life
thrives in their depths?
So, what exactly is a hell hole? In
geological and exploratory terms, hell
holes refer to massive deep craters,
sink holes, or ball holes that have
earned nicknames like gates of hell,
doors to hell, or even well of hell due
to their dramatic otherworldly
appearances.
They're not a single type of formation,
but rather a catchy label for extreme
geological features that look like
portals to the underworld. Think fiery
pits, bottomless voids, or gas spewing
chasms that inspire fear, folklore, and
fascination.
They appear sporadically on our planet,
as if placed at random by a particularly
angry being from another dimension,
jealous of Earth's beauty.
But these aren't just random depressions
sunken into the Earth. They're windows
into Earth's violent history and the
ongoing changes our planet goes through
day in day out. Whilst we go about our
ordinary mortal lives, some are man-made
mishaps. Others are natural wonders
amplified by climate shifts. Cavers even
reached the bottom of one just a few
years ago in 2021, finding something
hiding deep underground no one could
have expected.
What unites them all is a sense of dread
and mystery.
These are places where the planet has
cracked open, revealing secrets we'd
rather keep buried.
As we dig deeper, you'll see why
explorers risk life and limb to peak
inside and continue to do so to this
day.
Our journey through the underworld
begins in Turk Menistan's Caracum
Desert, where a 70 m wide, 30 m deep
hole has been ablaze since 1971.
Despite desperate attempts to stop the
flames, over half a century later, this
hole is still on fire.
What's more, rumors have circulated for
decades that this particular hell hole
is filled with some of the largest
spiders in the world.
Ready to knock on the gates of hell.
The Darvaza crater certainly lives up to
its name. The word Darvaza translates
from Turkmen to the gate in English, and
you can insert any suitably hellish
adjective straight after it. It looks
like the sort of place the devil himself
might settle down to rest up after a
long hard day of tormenting humans.
A gigantic sinkhole that has been
burning methane gas for decades,
spurting out flames at a thousand° like
an eternal fire pit. 24/7,
365
days a year.
The orange glow is visible from miles
away, and the site has become one of the
country's top tourist attractions,
drawing around 10,000 visitors per year.
It has been said it was intentionally
set a light by Soviet authorities in the
70s, and the story goes they'd hoped it
would burn off in a matter of weeks.
However, nearly 50 years later and
despite Turk Menistan's former president
announcing plans to close the gates of
hell, it is very much alive and a light.
But even stranger than that is that its
true origins are still shrouded in
mystery.
Every Google search you do will tell you
things began in 1971
when Soviet geologists were hunting for
gas reserves deep in the desert
wilderness and struck gold or gas in
their case. So excited were they by
their discovery that they began to drill
and in doing so managed to collapse a
natural gas chamber roughly 70 m in
diameter and 30 m deep.
To stop the poisonous gases escaping,
they elected to burn the evidence,
hoping it would simply burn off after a
few weeks.
This part shouldn't really have come as
a major surprise. The crater is situated
on top of the Amu Da Basin, a place
jam-packed with oil and natural gas
reserves stretching across not just Turk
Manistan, but into Usbekiststan too.
Turk Manistan has the fourth largest gas
reserves in the world. Plenty to keep
the flames alive for some time. Vast
quantities of natural gases and
especially methane make their way
through the Earth's crust across the
basin and when given the chance to
escape, seize the opportunity with both
hands. Satellite data suggests the
crater pumps out anywhere between 1,000
to 3,000 kg of methane per hour, which
is not just bad news for the planet, but
life in general.
Although not toxic, natural gas and
methane displaces oxygen, making it very
difficult to breathe. Not just for us,
but for the animals that call the
Caracum Desert home.
Shortly after the gas chamber collapsed,
many animals roaming the area began to
die off. And so the gates of hell came
to be. A deadly combination of unstable
geology from soft gas fililled sediments
and human drilling that punched through
that sediment like a bad tattoo needle.
Or did it? Because Turk Menistan still
has no official record of the incident.
One of the most alluring things about
this crater is also one of the most
frustrating. There really isn't much
information out there about it, and for
very good reason. Everything related to
natural resources in the postcold war
Soviet era was regarded as top secret, a
matter of national importance during a
time of heightened global tension.
Simply put, whatever they had found,
they were not about to share it with the
world, especially not the Western world.
Ironically, some 30 years after the
alleged incident, it was a westerner
that finally provided the world with
some answers.
Explorer and adventurer George Karunis
became the first individual to descend
into hell in 2013 to study what might
lie within it for National Geographic.
George was visiting Turk Manistan for
the first time and even when he was
inside the country, he still couldn't
get verified information on what had
caused the crater to open. Indeed,
contrary to the widely documented the
Soviets set fire to it explanation, a
new theory emerged.
Karunis described speaking with two
local Turk men giologists, both of whom
said the crater was actually formed in
the 1960s and was gurgling away with gas
and mud for quite some time, only
catching fire in the 1980s.
But who or whatever had caused this
crater to appear and then start burning
would have to take a backseat for now
because it was time for George Karunis
to take the steps to hell. Imagine
the feeling being the first person to
descend into quite literally one of
planet Earth's most terrifying places.
Filled with toxic gases and flames that
would tear through flesh in seconds. And
most terrifyingly of all, filled with
the unknown. He adorned his custommade
climbing harness made out of Kevlar, a
self-contained breathing apparatus
similar to scuba gear, fireresistant
ropes, and a particularly special
heatresistant suit.
The equipment looked almost aluminum in
color designed to reflect a lot of that
radiant heat. George actually described
feeling like a baked potato inside of
it.
But he was not deterred. And so began
the most important part of his mission.
Trying to find something, anything that
might live in these depths.
As quickly and as efficiently as he
could, he set about scooping up soil
samples from the bottom of the crater,
eventually turning around to make the
ascent back to Earth.
The hellish crater did all it could to
keep him trapped inside. as he briefly
passed out from the heat on the way back
to the crater rim. Finally, after coming
around, he managed to scramble back up,
completing his most deadly of missions.
The soil samples were given to Dr.
Stefan Green, the microbiologist on the
expedition, and they showed something
even the most optimistic scientists
couldn't have dreamt up. Life. Yes,
something lives in that hell. But it
wasn't the spiders so many feared. It
was something even more unexpected. In
Darvaz's fiery depths, George Karunis
found bacteria thriving at a thousand°
amid toxic gases. Microbes that
metabolize methane. Heatloving bugs that
turn the crater into a natural
bioreactor.
Extreophiles don't just survive down
there. they thrive. We have a video
about Earth's deep biome which details
exactly how this is possible if you want
more on that by the way. So, what of the
creepy spiders that were meant to be
lurking at the bottom? Then, over the
years, local legends have whispered of
native camel spiders, some measuring up
to 15 cm in length, flocking toward the
blazing hole. The stories go that the
spiders are attracted to the flickering
light amidst the dark desert landscape,
following the insects drawn to the
light, quite literally like a moth to a
flame. The story takes a dark turn,
however, as many spiders seem to find
the allure of the bright burning light
too strong, and topple over the edge,
meeting their fiery demise inside the
crater. So, the crater may well be full
of camel spiders, but they're certainly
not alive anymore.
That's it then, right? Humans have been
to hell and return to tell the tale. One
of a spidery graveyard filled with
bacterial life that is endlessly, and
some might say needlessly, burning
methane constantly into the atmosphere.
And that'll just be the case forever and
ever. And case closed. Well, not quite
because it seems like the flames inside
the gates of hell are finally beginning
to extinguish.
Sorry to bring you back down up to earth
if you found yourself growing attached
to this strangest of places because its
end may well be in sight.
It felt almost inevitable in a more
climate conscious world and there have
been many largely empty threats from
Turkmen government officials to act on
it. But as it turns out, nature may well
have beaten them to it. Researchers from
Turkmen gas, the country's state-run gas
company, revealed the flames have
visibly weakened as recently as June the
5th, 2025.
Turkman Mangaz scientists presented new
data showing a significant decline in
the crater's methane fuel blaze at a
recent conference.
According to Arena Larva, director of
the state-owned energy company, the
flames have actually reduced threefold
in size.
She also revealed that the company had
drilled specific containment wells
around the crater to capture the methane
before it escaped into the atmosphere.
She summarized her speech by saying,
"Before, a huge glow was visible from
several kilometers away, but today only
a faint source of combustion remains.
The sense is this is welcome news
amongst the citizens and leaders of Turk
Menistan. The burning crater has long
been a topic of discussion with many
people stating the continuous burning of
precious natural gases is simultaneously
wasteful and dangerous. And so, the
Gates of Hell seems like it may have
finally met its demise. Unquestionably,
one of the most extraordinary sites on
planet Earth, a true gateway to
something otherworldly.
What will remain of the site once its
embers finally die down for the last
time? Well, no one really knows, but one
thing is for sure. Like the animals
buried inside of it, the hidden secrets
of the Darvaza crater look set to die
with it.
Whilst that journey may end there for
now, ours certainly doesn't. And we move
from the gates of hell to the equally
unsavory gate to the underworld. Because
deep in the Siberian tundra lies
something utterly diabolical.
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as we head back to the video.
This hellhole did its very best to
remain hidden on planet Earth for as
long as it possibly could. It was first
captured by a classified surveillance
satellite in the mid 1960s,
but wasn't officially recognized as a
significant geological structure until
the 1990s.
So, what was it they were hiding for
three decades? At the time, you might
say nothing substantial. But now, this
monstrosity has gone from a small,
barely insignificant gully to a massive
tadpole-shaped depression that covers
more than 800,000
square m, stretches 1 km in length, and
is 50 m deep, and keeps growing. Between
1991 and 2018, the area has increased
almost three-fold.
It can hide no longer, not least because
aside from being huge, it's also
incredibly loud. Julian Mertton, a
geologist at the University of Sussex in
England, who's visited and studied the
site as part of his research, describes
the scene during the summertime as the
frost thors once again. The sound of
water pouring over the cliffsides is
interrupted every so often by the boom
and crash of falling earth. So intense
is the noise that many Yakushian people
are said to be scared to approach the
crater. A deeply spiritual people, they
believe in the upper, middle, and
underworlds and see this deep frozen
abyss as a doorway to the latter. Does
that explain why this structure was kept
a secret for so long? Is this the
manifestation of the underworld on
planet Earth? Well, that may not be as
far-fetched as it sounds.
The Batgika crater isn't actually a
crater at all. The word crater has
connotations of something meteorological
or even extraterrestrial,
but this is neither. What it is is a
slow motion landslide, or to give it its
proper title, a retrogressive Thor
slump. It's a large one at that, the
largest in the world. A gigantic oddity
that looks more horseshoe crab than
crater. About a kilometer long and 800 m
wide and growing like a hungry monster,
exposing layers of earth frozen for tens
of thousands of years.
Astonishingly, perafrost found at the
bottom of the crater dated back at least
650,000
years. But how did it get there? Who
opened up the path to the underworld?
Well, here's the really scary part. We
did.
You see, this vast expanse was first
started off by pesky humans clearing
vast arrays of forest in the area for
mining and mineral exploration. This
meant, of course, lots of driving around
in large off-road monster trucks across
a very delicate tundra, which led to the
inevitable. Trees act like a thick, cozy
blanket, protecting land from soil
erosion. But the miners cut them down.
Without any vegetation to protect the
ground, the sun had a direct path to the
perafrost, gradually melting it away
year after year. And rather ironically,
permanently altering the thermal
equilibrium of the entire area. So yes,
the subsurface world has indeed been
exposed or made manifest if you like.
And it's a double negative. As the
exposed perafrost melts away, the soil
contained in it also suffers.
The soil begins to soften into mud and
then collapses in on itself and is swept
away in the river along with the melting
ice. And so a mega slump is formed. And
mega really is the operative word here
because this is happening fast, very
fast. According to a 2024 article in
geomorphology, between 1991 and 2018,
the crater has retreated on average 11.3
to 14.9
m per year and in some instances as much
as 30 m. The perafrost at times
throughout its history would have been
between 200 and 500 m thick, made up of
layers built up at intervals over
hundreds of thousands of years, doing
what soil does, sequestering carbon. And
as we know, it's pretty good at it, too.
Around 15% of the northern hemisphere's
soil area is under lane by perafrost.
And the northern perafrost region holds
up to 1,600
billion metric tonses of organic carbon,
twice as much as is currently in the
atmosphere. But what happens when
perafrost starts to slump away? Yep,
that carbon goes with it. As well as
losing a huge amount of mass, the
gateway to the underworld has also
released around 169 12,000 tons of
organic carbon. That's about 5,000 tons
each year. So why is it our fault?
Because we decided to get rid of all
those wonderful trees. As a result of
our changing climate, this part of the
world has been especially impacted.
The rate of Arctic warming is nearly
four times the global average. And this
small gully carved out by humans at some
point in the 60s was always set on a
collision course to become one of the
most conspicuous examples of
humaninduced global warming on planet
Earth. This slumping is more rapid than
any similar geological event in Siberia
in the last 10,000 years. In total, the
Batay crater has lost 34.6 6 million
cubic meters of material, including
ground ice and thawed soil. A man-made
scar etched onto planet Earth
permanently.
Unlike the Darvaza crater, this one
isn't showing any signs of slowing down
either. The underlying mechanisms
responsible for its growth are not going
to dissipate, fueled by an unrelenting
global rise in temperature and the
extreme Arctic amplification.
But hold on because it's not all bad.
There is a glimmer of hope, a silver
lining to opening up the underworld.
We get to see inside of it. As this
geological monstrosity continues to
self-exavate, it's revealed something
quite remarkable inside.
Unintentionally, the Batay crater has
become a 650,000-year-old
time capsule, offering an unprecedented
look into Earth's past.
By revealing some of the most ancient
perafrost on the planet, we've had a
glimpse not only into past climates, but
also some of the most perfectly
preserved remains ever found.
In 2024, weighing in at over a 100
kilos, Russian scientists found the
remains of a perfectly preserved
50,000year-old
baby woolly mammoth in the perafrost.
Heartbreakingly, Jana, as she was named,
was only one year old when she died. In
2018, scientists found the remains of an
extinct baby Lena horse with
wellpreserved skin, hair, tail, and
hooves that died 42,000
years ago.
That specimen yielded the oldest sample
of liquid blood ever found. They've also
recovered the bones of a cave lion, the
skull of a pleaene wolf, and plenty of
bones, teeth, and tusks from other large
woolly mammoths.
By peering through the curtain to the
underworld, we've had unique access to
ancient perafrost. And for all its
negatives, of which there are many, it's
presented scientists with enormous
potential when it comes to studying past
climate perafrost interactions since the
middle plea scene. At some point in the
future, the crater that isn't a crater
will likely run out of perafrost to eat
away, finally hitting the bedrock that
could halt its growth.
Until then, the underworld remains alive
and well.
So, we've dipped into the underworld and
smashed through the gates of hell. So,
it seems only right in a video about
hell holes that we actually go into one.
Welcome to the well of hell.
This has got to be good with a name like
that, right? Don't worry, it does not
disappoint. Lying in the middle of the
vast desert floor of Yemen's eastern
province of Al-Maha, there is a dark
blip on the landscape.
Close to the border with Aman appears a
giant hole poked by Satan himself into
the desert.
A strange perfectly spherical jet black
hole in contrast with these stark orange
dunes that go on for miles.
Measuring 30 m across, Yemen officials
had no idea what lurked at the bottom of
the foroding well of Bahoot, or as it's
known locally, the well of hell.
Scientists were clueless as to how long
it had been there, how it even got
there, and what it actually was.
Whispers spoke of it being a prison for
jin, supernatural beings in Arabic
mythology, banished to earth's murky
depths for their sins.
Other locals won't venture within miles
of it for fear of being struck with some
unseen curse. Some even think if you get
too close, you'll be pulled inside and
forced to spend eternity down there in
this forbidden realm.
Those that did dare to get close have
spoken of foul odor coming from below,
fueling the fans of mystery and rumor.
What's really inside this giant cavity?
Many have tried and failed to gain
answers. Amateur explorers had attempted
the climb, but no one ever reached the
bottom.
That is until September the 15th, 2021,
when a team of 10 brave explorers
attempted something no one had been able
to do before, a full descent into the
well of hell. Led by geologist Dr.
Muhammad Al-Kindi and the Aman cave
exploration team, eight members were
lowered to the bottom using a pulley
system whilst two remained at the top.
Descending 112 meters down, they
eventually hit jagged uneven ground,
covered in stallic mites, some of which
reached 9 m tall.
There, nestled amongst them was the real
treasure. However, cave pearls,
perfectly crafted, spherical calcium
deposits shaped across millennia by
water dripping into the hole in
stunning, majestic colorations.
The wonder didn't stop there, though.
They discovered water emerging from
several holes in the cave walls at
around 65 m below the surface, creating
small waterfalls supported by vibrant
green algae. They found snakes, frogs,
beetles, lizards, and even dead birds,
which had likely fallen into the well,
explaining some of the interesting
smells the locals were experiencing.
bats roosted in crevices and the low
oxygen acidic environment hosted
extremiles.
So what then is this place? Fortunately,
science has an answer.
The well of Bahoot is actually just a
pretty normal cast sinkhole, likely
millions of years old. There are
different types of sink holes with the
most common being collapse and
subsidance sink holes. Collapse sink
holes form when voids in the bedrock
below the surface expand so much that
the roof above is no longer supported
and everything above simply collapses
into the cave. Subsidance sink holes
occur when surface sediments slowly
trickle down into small gaps below the
ground until a sinkhole eventually
forms. Both rely on a special type of
landscape known as cast, characterized
by carbonate bedrock like limestone and
dolomite, which is soluble in water and
leads to caves, springs, and sinkholes.
Spending around 6 hours in the cave, the
team were able to have a pretty good
look around. What there wasn't was any
evidence of anyone or indeed anything
humanlike having ever been down there
before. The landscape of the cave was
amazingly pristine and entirely natural.
Discovering these holes, and we've shown
you every centimeter we could in this
video, did you find yourself wishing
there would be evidence of something
untoward, something amazing but scary,
something extraterrestrial or even
metaphysical in this hellish journey?
Those hell holes seem so extreme and out
of place amidst Earth's beautiful
landscape that surely something had to
put them there. Well, it turns out that
not always, but more often than not, it
was us. Apparently, humans are often the
real amazing and scary culprit when it
comes to unlocking things on Earth that
feel otherworldly or underworldly.
but for our interference and the way
we've caused our planet to change. These
secrets would have otherwise never come
to light. Which begs the question, what
other secrets might we accidentally
uncover in the future? And which ones
will continue to remain a mystery?