Explorer George Kourounis finds himself growing increasingly anxious as he prepares to enter a fiery sinkhole known as the “Doorway to Hell.”
George Kourounis is a renowned global explorer and storm chaser who specializes in documenting extreme forces of nature including: tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, deserts, caves, avalanches and more. He is an Explorer In Residence for The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Chairman of the Explorers Club Canadian Chapter, and has received several awards and medals for his efforts. He frequently finds himself driving into the eye of fierce storms, or descending ropes into actively erupting volcanic craters, often while hosting television programs including “Angry Planet” and others. He has given four TEDx talks, and has addressed the United Nations Environmental Emergencies Forum. George’s expeditions have taken him to 65 countries on all seven continents to such far-flung places as: Madagascar, Turkmenistan, Vanuatu, Greenland, North Korea, Myanmar, and Antarctica.
This story originally aired on Oct. 26, 2018, in an episode titled “Fear”.
Story Transcript
Yes, I am an explorer. I've got the world’s craziest job description. Basically, it’s my job to go to the most hellish places on earth specifically.
Imagine this. I travel the world documenting the most extreme places, so rappelling down inside active volcanoes and standing in the eye of hurricanes and tracking down and chasing the most massive tornadoes on earth, that’s my day job. It has taken me from North Korea to Antarctica, from Timbuktu to Siberia. It’s just every corner of the planet.
Now, as an explorer, the most iconic brand for me to associate myself with is National Geographic, of course. Years ago, I pitched an idea to Nat Geo and they're probably still regretting that they said yes to this. I wanted to go to the country of Turkmenistan.
Show of hands. Who’s been to Turkmenistan? Really? No one? North Korea gets three times the number of visitors every year.
It’s in Central Asia just north of Iran and Afghanistan, so you know it’s in a good neighborhood. It’s such a strange country that the former leader decided to outlaw men having long hair or beards. He made it illegal for news reporters to wear makeup stating that Turkmen women were already beautiful enough.
He also renamed all of the months and the days of the week after his family members and his favorite books. The normal stuff a crazy dictator would do. He also erected a giant gold statue that always turned to face the sun, so basically makes North Korea seem normal.
Now, my plan wasn’t just to go there and visit like some tourist. No. I had a mission. Years ago, Turkmenistan was drilling for natural gas out in the desert and the drilling rig collapsed into a sink hole. That was about 100-feet deep and 230-feet across and it started leaking methane gas. If that happened here in the West, we would send in some kind of special response team. They would deal with the environmental outcome of this. They would cap the well. Not in Turkmenistan. They did things a little differently there.
They lit it on fire thinking it would burn off in a couple of days. That was in 1971 and it’s still burning to this day. It’s called Darvaza. You may have seen pictures of it on the internet. It means ‘doorway’. The locals refer to it as the Doorway to Hell. So when people tell me to go to hell, I can say, “Yeah, I've been there. Done that.”
But it totally looks like a doorway to hell. It’s this circular, burning mass in the desert that’s totally you expect Satan himself to jump out of this thing with his pitchfork and his horns. And imagine if Mother Nature went to Taco Bell and ate too much. That’s kind of what it smells like.
The plan was, because there's a reason here. There's an actual purpose so bear with me for a second. Why go here?
Well, NASA has telescopes and they have discovered planets outside of our solar system. Some of these planets have a hot methane-rich environment. So if I could go to this Doorway to Hell and find anything living at the bottom of this crater, anything at all, even if it’s a tiny microbe, bacteria, it could give us clues as to where we could broaden our look for life in the universe.
So my pitch to National Geographic basically was looking for alien life here on earth. Cool. They loved it. So I got a science grant from them, I had a TV crew that was following me around.
By the way, the TV show was called Die Trying. Wait a minute - I was kind of upset with the executive producer - I’m the guy that’s trying. I did not tell my mom the name of the show until the day before it aired.
The idea was to go there and try to document this crater and then go to the bottom, gather samples and see if we could find anything living down there.
I had a team. I had three rope-rigging guys who were part of the team and their job was to get me down inside the crater and out safely. I had a microbiologist from the University of Illinois and he would tell me where to go at the bottom of this flaming crater. And he would take the samples back to his lab and he would do a DNA analysis and sequence all of it to try and basically tell us what we found. So we had a really good plan.
Of course, I've done a lot of expeditions to a lot of places like volcanoes so there were some similarities between what I've done before and what I was doing here. I've already rappelled down inside volcanoes in places like Congo, Vanuatu, Guatemala, but this was just different enough. It scared the crap out of me, to be honest with you. It was fucking scary.
So we arrive in Turkmenistan. We get up to the edge of the crater and it is hotter than I imagined. It was bigger than I imagined. It was more intimidating than I ever imagined. It was one of the scariest things I had ever witnessed in my life. When you stand on the edge and you smell that acrid, smoky smell and you look down and you think that your job is to go down inside this crater and right now you're basically past the point of no return. There are too many people counting on you to do this.
I suppose I could have canceled out at the last minute but I had almost two years’ worth of planning and preparation and the work of hundreds of people behind me at this point so I was like, “Okay, we’re going to do this!” Sometimes you have to be afraid and go through it anyway.
We spent the better part of about a week camped out beside the crater and we did things like taking temperature measurements, we tested out the ropes, we did all the stuff we had to do to try and figure out how we’re going to conduct the science to find these samples inside the crater and try to do it safely.
I tell you, it was the best campsite at night. Our fire pit was the best in the world. The one thing I forgot to bring was a long stick with marshmallows. Seriously, it was on my list of things to bring and I completely forgot.
So the plan was, and we actually did have a plan, stretch fire-resistant ropes across the entire span of the crater. Then I would go out to the center on pulleys wearing a special heat-protective suit, self-contained air, the whole works. Then I would descend down into the middle of the crater.
And my climbing harness is made out of Kevlar which is the same material that they make bullet-proof vests out of because a regular climbing harness would have completely melted from the extreme heat.
Then I would touch down at the bottom, gather up all my soil samples, take a few temperature readings and then get the hell out of there. That was the plan. Doing it, oh, so intimidating.
When it came time to take all of my weight onto that rope, that one big step, sort of like Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, was frightening. You’re putting all of your trust in your teammates, in your equipment, in this harebrained idea that a whole bunch of people have said yes to that no one has ever done before, and you are the human guinea pig. As I brought myself out to the center of that rope, I felt like a piece of laundry being hung out on the line to dry in the heat.
And as I started to descend down, I could see my teammates get smaller and smaller and smaller as I basically descended down into what was essentially an oven. But setting foot at the bottom was something I'll never forget.
I'll probably never get the chance to go to Mars, hopefully, but probably not, but this has got to be the closest parallel that you can experience here on earth. The glow of the crater, the fire, the smell, the heat, all of it was absolutely like being on another planet. Imagine being transported to an alien world where you find yourself standing in a coliseum of fire. That’s what it was like.
Of course, time was limited. I had just over 15 minutes worth of air in my tanks to do everything I needed to do and then GTFO so I had to get busy.
So I’m digging in the ground gathering these soil samples and as I’m digging, fire is jumping out of the hole that I’m digging. This is crazy. All caught on video. GoPro cam, amazing.
So I gather up my samples from various spots around the crater and I've got a few minutes left. So I decide to walk over to the biggest flame, about 15-feet high. It doesn’t sound like a campfire. It sounds like a jet engine roaring. And the heat is so intense I can feel it on my face and my body through my protective heat-resistant clothing. I'd measured the ground temperature at 400 degrees Celsius. That’s more than hot enough to bake cookies, like burn cookies.
At that point, that’s when my first alarm went off. On my harness I got a special gas monitor and it tells me if I experience deadly levels of carbon monoxide, methane gas, or levels of oxygen get too low. Once it started beeping it made me really happy that I had a self-contained air system. If something were to go wrong with that, I would be inhaling superheated gas.
If the ropes had burned, I would have plummeted to my death and the fall would have killed me, let alone the heat. If I twisted my ankle at the bottom, I probably would have had to fill out a change-of-address form to Doorway to Hell, Darvaza, Turkmenistan. But I took those last few minutes to just savor the experience of standing in a spot and seeing a view that I know that no human had ever seen before.
That’s when my second alarm went off. This was my low-oxygen alarm. This one was far more urgent. The pressure in my tank was getting dangerously low and my team still had to pull me up and out of the crater so I think it was time to retreat. What do you think?
So I gave the signal to the crew. They started to take up the slack in the rope and pull me up. As my feet lifted off the ground, I could feel myself starting to get light-headed. I don't know if it was the adrenalin or the heat or a combination of the two. Then as they started to pull me horizontally towards the extraction point, I felt like I was going to pass out. At this point, there was nothing I could do. I had no control over my own extraction so I just let go and just relaxed.
And it was peaceful, surprisingly peaceful. But there's no better feeling in the world than having your teammates grab you by the harness and haul your ass out of that crater. It was awesome standing on the edge. There were so many hugs and high-fives all around.
So did we find what we were looking for? Bottom line, yes! There were several species of bacteria that we found at the bottom of that crater that were not found in the surrounding soil. It was a major discovery. We don’t know how they got there or why they're there but there they are. Some of them were similar to the kind that you might find in deep sea volcanic vents or hot springs, like Yellowstone, or in underground coal fires. Some of them, we believe, were even consuming the methane gas as food, so this was a major discovery. But none of them were found in the existing DNA database. So we found new life. Amazing.
Of course this raises more questions than answers. Why are they there? How did they get there? How did they evolve in what is basically the most harsh environment on planet earth? We don’t have all the answers, but the cool thing is we can now take this information and hand it off to future generations so that they can use this information to try and target where to look for life on other planets.
Now, I don't know if I’m going to be alive long enough to see that discovery be made but two cool things did happen. Just today, and I’m not even kidding, just today I got word from the folks at Guinness. They are acknowledging this feat with a Guinness World Record.
Another cool thing, twelve people have stood on the surface of the moon but only one has been to the Doorway to Hell.