There are no written Soviet records, no logs, no official drilling reports, and no confirmation that they'd lit it intentionally – but there's no disputing a ~100-foot-deep (~30-m), 226-foot-wide (69-m) pit of relentless fiery fury that's been burning for around 50 years in the Karakum Desert of…

there’s no disputing a ~100-foot-deep (~30-m), 226-foot-wide (69-m) pit of relentless fiery fury that’s been burning for around 50 years in the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan

  • @jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    108•4 days ago

    In 2013, the crater’s flame intensity and temperatures were at its recorded peak. At the same time, renowned Canadian explorer, George Kourounis, became the first – and only – person to enter the crater wearing a full heat-reflective Kevlar/Nomex suit and a firefighter’s Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) to provide oxygen. He descended to the 752 °F (400 °C) crater floor and retrieved soil samples. Scientists later found extremophile bacteria living in the scorched earth samples Kourounis provided.

    Wtf that’s the craziest part of this story!

    • Rikudou_SageEnglish
      31•4 days ago

      Oh yeah, extremophiles are pretty metal. Like, some of them can survive being in space.

      • @Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11•3 days ago

        Some are literally metal. See: Chrysomallon squamiferum: a deep-sea extremophile mollusk that lives on volcanic vents in the Indian Ocean. They have a shell made of iron sulphide and aragonite. Their lower body also has an armor coat of sclerites (fancy word for “hardened body part of invertebrates”, like pieces of an exoskeleton) made of mineralized iron, giving them their colloquial name “Scaly-Foot Snail”