The crystal-clear waters of Shark Bay are home to the world's largest plant: a seagrass meadow spanning 77 square miles (200 square kilometers) and stretching 112 miles (180 kilometers) from end to end. The shoots that make up the massive meadow all originate from one stem, which researchers estimate is at least 4,500 years old.

Researchers analyzed the genetic makeup of the seagrass at Shark Bay for the first time in 2022. They discovered that almost all the Poseidon's ribbon weed (Posidonia australis) — which grows in a network of meadows inside the bay — was genetically identical, indicating that the weeds belonged to one plant. Unlike other types of seagrass, which reproduce sexually, this meadow appeared to be continually cloning itself through an underground stem called a rhizome.

Related: 2 plants randomly mated up to 1 million years ago to give rise to one of the world's most popular drinks

On the sandy seafloor, the self-cloning seagrass meadow forms clumps of grass that look like separate organisms, but underground, the shoots are connected to form "the largest clone in any environment on Earth," the researchers wrote in the study. 

This means the Shark Bay seagrass dwarfs the previous record-holder: The second-largest clone on record is a 9-mile-long (15 km) meadow of Posidonia oceanica seagrass in the western Mediterranean Sea. 

The meadow at Shark Bay is expanding through a process known as "horizontal rhizome extension," in which the plant grows stems that extend horizontally beneath the seafloor. These stems then grow vertical stems that develop shoots and leaves, which break through the sand to form seagrass. Based on the size and age of the meadow, researchers estimate it is expanding by around 6 to 14 inches (15 to 36 centimeters) per year — which is fairly quick compared with other self-cloning seagrass meadows, according to the study.

The meadow has remained relatively undisturbed for millennia, which has enabled it to reach colossal proportions. The clone could continue its creeping expansion for as long as it is left untouched, making it practically immortal, Elizabeth Sinclair, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, previously told Live Science. 

The monster storm is currently sowing devastation across the Caribbean.

Despite appearing at the usually subdued beginning of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season — a period running from June to November — the freak hurricane exploded from a tropical depression into a Category 5 storm between Friday (June 30) and Monday (July 1) as it traveled west. 

With winds topping out at 165 mph (265 km/h), Beryl has already caused widespread damage and killed several people across Carriacou (an island in Grenada), St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The storm, which has since slowed to a Category 4, is expected to next make landfall in Jamaica and then the Cayman Islands.

"In half an hour, Carriacou was flattened," Dickon Mitchell, the prime minister of Grenada, said at a news conference on Monday (July 1). "There is really nothing that could prepare you to see this level of destruction. It is almost Armageddon-like. Almost total damage or destruction of all buildings, whether they be public buildings, homes or private facilities. Complete devastation and destruction of agriculture, complete and total destruction of the natural environment. There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou."

Related: We may need a new 'Category 6' hurricane level for winds over 192 mph, study suggests

Scientists have been shocked at the storm's ferocity and how quickly it developed so early in the hurricane season. Brain McNoldy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami, noted on June 30 that the previous record for a Category 4 hurricane in the same region as Beryl was set on Aug. 7, 1899, and the previous earliest date that a storm intensified at the same rate was on Sept. 1.

"It's hard to communicate how unbelievable this is," McNoldy wrote in a blog post. "With La Niña on the way and the ocean temperatures already looking like the second week of September, this is precisely the type of outlier event that people have been talking about for months heading into this season. When you have an unprecedented favorable environment, you're bound to see unprecedented tropical cyclone activity."

Hurricanes grow from a thin layer of ocean water that evaporates due to winds and rises to form storm clouds. The warmer the ocean is, the more energy the system gets, pushing the formation process into overdrive and enabling violent storms to rapidly take shape. This is why the most powerful storms in the Atlantic usually occur between August and September, when sea temperatures peak for the year.

Scientists previously discovered that climate change has made extremely active Atlantic hurricane seasons much more likely than they were in the 1980s. 

Since March 2023, average sea surface temperatures around the world have hit record-shattering highs — providing storms like Beryl with more energy in order to grow.

Another factor in the storm's record-breaking advance is the end of the El Niño weather pattern in April, according to the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. El Niño is a climate cycle where waters in the tropical eastern Pacific grow warmer than usual, affecting global weather patterns.

During El Niño, winds in the Atlantic are typically stronger and more stable than usual, limiting hurricane formation. But its end has removed the handbrake on Atlantic storm development.

Beryl could just be the start of a tumultuous hurricane season. As El Niño is set to be replaced by La Niña, it could make for an unusually stormy summer. That's because La Niña weakens trade winds and in turn lessens vertical wind shear, which is what breaks up incipient storms.

These factors led scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to make their highest-ever May forecast for an Atlantic hurricane season, predicting 17 to 25 named storms. According to the forecast, 13 of these storms will be hurricanes, with winds of 74 mph (119 km/h) or higher; and four to seven will be major hurricanes, with winds of 111 mph (179 km/h) or higher.

This moss, named Syntrichia caninervis, lives in harsh environments across the planet, from the Mojave Desert to Antarctica. Now, a new study finds that it could survive in even nastier conditions. When subjected to a week in an environment like the surface of Mars, the researchers found that the hardy moss could bounce back. 

Its survival abilities may even outdo those of tardigrades, microscopic "water bears" that can live in the vacuum of space. The moss is better at handling heat — and can survive even higher doses of radiation — than tardigrades, the researchers said after subjecting the little moss to multiple ought-to-be-fatal indignities. 

"Our study shows that the environmental resilience of S. caninervis is superior to some of [the] highly stress-tolerant microorganisms and tardigrades," study researchers Daoyuan Zhang, Yuanming Zhang and Tingyun Kuang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), wrote in a statement. The researchers published their findings July 1 in the journal The Innovation. 

The team collected the moss from the Gurbantünggüt Desert in northern China. They first subjected samples of the moss to near-complete air-drying. Though the dried moss shriveled and turned black, it returned to full springy greenness within 20 seconds of rehydration. After 99% dehydration followed by rehydration, the moss returned to full photosynthetic capacity within two minutes, the scientists found. 

The moss also showed remarkable resilience against cold: After 30 days of immersion in liquid nitrogen at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 degrees Celsius), the moss could recover and grow new branches. It could also survive for at least five years at minus 112 F (minus 80 C). While the moss rebounded fastest if it was dehydrated before freezing, it could also survive these conditions if frozen without being dried first. 

Finally, the researchers zapped the moss with massive amounts of gamma radiation. They found that the moss could survive up to 4,000 gray of ionizing radiation without much trouble. For comparison, 4 gray is considered a fatal dose of ionizing radiation for humans. (A dose of ionizing radiation is considered fatal when it kills half of those exposed to it.) For S. caninervis, the fatal dose is 5,000 gray. Even the hardy tardigrade tops out at 4,200 gray, the authors wrote. 

The moss can also handle hits from multiple stressors at once. The researchers put samples in the CAS Planetary Atmospheres Simulation Facility, which mimics the atmosphere of Mars in surface pressure, temperature, gas makeup and radiation. After seven days in this environment — mostly carbon dioxide, with temperature swings ranging from minus 76 F (minus 60 C) to 68 F (20 C) and hazardous levels of radiation — the moss still bounced back, recovering and growing new branches after 15 days back in Earth-like conditions. 

The findings suggest that the moss could be used in attempts to terraform Mars by introducing plants that can survive its harsh environment and create a more Earth-like surface and atmosphere, the researchers wrote.

In 2018, an unnamed astronaut on board the International Space Station (ISS) snapped this striking shot of a section of the Green River winding through a steep canyon in Utah. Shadows from the canyon walls give the scene a striking 3D effect when viewed from above.

The Green River is a 730-mile-long (1,175 kilometers) tributary of the Colorado River that runs through Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. The waterway gets its name from the high concentrations of sediments suspended in its deep waters, which give it a green hue. 

The section of the river in the photo is located around 25 miles (40 km) north of Canyonlands National Park. This part of the river runs along the bottom of a steep canyon, known as Labyrinth Canyon, which zigzags for around 70 miles (110 km). The canyon walls are around 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep, on average, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

A standout feature in this image is Bowknot Bend (top left), a 7.5-mile-long (12 km) loop where the river doubles back on itself. At the point where the river runs side by side, the canyon wall has partially crumbled due to erosion on each side, creating a low barrier known as a saddle.  

At some point in the next few hundred or thousand years, the saddle will be completely washed away by the river, which will create an oxbow lake — an isolated, crescent-shaped lake that is no longer part of the river, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. When this happens, the new lake could eventually dry out completely if water evaporates from it quicker than rain fills it up. 

Related: 12 amazing images of Earth from space 

Labyrinth Canyon is part of the Colorado Plateau — a roughly 130,000-square-mile (337,000 square km) area of raised, mostly desert land that spans across the borders of five states. Around 6 million years ago, the plateau started rising due to tectonic activity caused by swelling in Earth's mantle. So far, it has risen by several thousand feet, according to the National Park Service.

During this period of continental uplift, the Green River has cut through the surrounding rock, carving out the canyon it now sits in. A similar process caused the Colorado River to carve out the Grand Canyon, which is located around 205 miles (330 km) southwest of Labyrinth Canyon on the other side of the Colorado Plateau.

The carving process also created many caves and alcoves that are embedded in the base of Labyrinth Canyon's steep walls, which can be explored by tourists who kayak along the river, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. However, these are not the area's only hidden secrets.

The canyon is also home to several abandoned uranium mines that were built into its walls in the 1940s to extract the radioactive ore from ancient rocks exposed by the river, according to the Utah Geological Survey. One of those sites, the Aileen Mine, lurks somewhere in the shadows in this image, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The Argyle mine held the biggest cache of pink diamonds ever discovered on Earth. Unlike blue and yellow diamonds, which are tinted by impurities like nitrogen and boron, pink diamonds get their color through geological processes that distort their crystalline structure. Pink diamonds are extremely rare and can fetch more than $2 million per carat (1 carat is equal to 0.2 grams, or 0.007 ounces), according to the International Gem Society.

The Argyle mine closed in 2020 due to a dwindling supply of diamonds and unfavorable economic conditions, including a rise in operational costs. The mine sits on the shores of Lake Argyle in a remote region of northeast Western Australia, 340 miles (550 kilometers) southeast of Darwin. Mining operations there lasted 37 years and yielded more than 865 million carats (191 tons, or 172 metric tons) of rough diamonds — including white, blue, violet, pink and red diamonds, according to Rio Tinto, the company that owned and operated the mine.

Related: Fountains of diamonds that erupt from Earth's center are revealing the lost history of supercontinents 

The Argyle rock formation is an unusual spot for diamonds, because it sits on the edge of a continent rather than in the middle, where the precious stones typically emerge. In addition, diamonds are usually found in kimberlite rock formations, but the Argyle formation features a type of volcanic rock called olivine lamproite.

Researchers dated the rocks at Argyle shortly after the site was discovered in 1979. Initial results pinned their age somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2 billion years old, but last year, a new study revealed the rocks are 1.3 billion years old. This puts the Argyle formation's origins right at the start of the breakup of the supercontinent Nuna, revealing clues about how the diamonds formed — and why so many of them are pink.

Pink diamonds are born out of specific heat and pressure conditions that arise when tectonic plates collide. The sheer force of these collisions can bend the crystal lattice of pre-existing diamonds in a way that colors them different shades of pink — although too much force can turn them brown, Hugo Olierook, a senior research fellow at Curtin University in Australia and lead author of the 2023 study, previously told Live Science. 

The supercontinent Nuna formed when two sections of Earth's crust crashed into each other around 1.8 billion years ago. The region in which they are thought to have smashed together overlaps with the present-day Argyle formation, suggesting the collision gave rise to Argyle's pink diamonds. At that point in time, however, the diamonds would have been buried deep within the crust.

But 500 million years later, when Nuna began to break apart as the tectonic plates moved away from one another, the rocks carrying the diamonds rose to Earth's surface. Those rocks also contained an abundance of brown diamonds, which Rio Tinto mined and sold in huge numbers.

Argyle is an exceptional spot, and while it's possible there might be another such cache of diamonds somewhere, finding it will "take a lot of luck," Olierook said.

The geological history of this ocean could help researchers understand Wilson cycles, or the process by which supercontinents break apart and come together. These are slow, broad-scale processes that progress by less than an inch per year, said study co-author Daniel Pastor-Galán, a geoscientist at the National Spanish Research Council in Madrid. 

"It's telling us about processes in the earth that are not very easy to understand and that are also not very easy to see," Pastor-Galán told Live Science. 

Geoscientists can fairly accurately reconstruct the breakup of the last supercontinent, Pangea, 250 million years ago. But prior to that, it's difficult to model exactly how the mantle and the crust interacted. 

In a new study, researchers were intrigued by volcanic rocks in northwestern Mongolia from the Devonian period (419 million to 359 million years ago). 

The Devonian was the "Age of the Fishes," when fish dominated the oceans and plants began to spread on land. At the time, there were two major continents, Laurentia and Gondwana, as well as a long stretch of microcontinents that would eventually become what is now Asia. These microcontinents gradually bumped up against each other and merged in a process called accretion. 

The researchers began doing fieldwork in northwest Mongolia where rocks from these continent-building collisions are exposed on the surface, in 2019, studying the ages and chemistry of the ancient rock layers. They found that between about 410 million and 415 million years ago, an ocean called the Mongol-Okhotsk Ocean opened up in the region. The chemistry of the volcanic rocks that accompanied this rift revealed the presence of a mantle plume — a stream of particularly hot, buoyant mantle rock.

Related: Columbia, Rodinia and Pangaea — A history of Earth's supercontinents

"Mantle plumes are usually involved in the first stage of the Wilson cycle: breakup of continents and opening of ocean, such as the Atlantic Ocean," study lead author Mingshuai Zhu, a professor of geology and geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Live Science. 

In many cases, this happens right in the middle of a solid chunk of continent, tearing it apart. In this case, though, the geology is particularly complex, because the plume was tearing apart crust that had previously come together through accretion. Weak spots between the accreted microcontinents, combined with the plume, probably helped the ocean to form, Zhu said. The researchers published their findings May 16 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

The ocean closed in the same spot that it opened, which is a common pattern in ocean life-cycles, Pastor-Galán said, but researchers only looked at a snapshot of the ocean's opening in this study. 

"A good thing is that a hotspot is relatively stable so they keep on, for many millions of years, in the same place," Pastor-Galán said. As continents in the crust move over the mantle hotspot, the hotspot leaves behind volcanic rocks and a tell-tale chemistry; this helps researchers track plate motion over millennia, he said. 

Asia is no longer accreting new microcontinents, Pastor-Galán said, but the formation of the Mongol-Okhotsk Ocean was probably similar to what is seen today at the Red Sea, where the crust is spreading by about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per year. The Red Sea is part of a larger continental rift that could create a brand-new ocean in eastern Africa over tens of millions of years, though geologists don't yet know whether other continental forces will prevent that ocean from fully opening, according to Eos magazine. 

Zhu and his colleagues now plan to use their data to make computer models to better describe the complicated tectonics of the ancient Devonian ocean. 

This 2017 satellite photo shows the abstract beauty of one of the world's most terrifyingly hostile environments.

The Tanezrouft Basin is a large region of the Sahara mainly located in southern Algeria and northern Mali. The area receives less than 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) of rain a year on average, making it "hyperarid." Temperatures can reach over 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) during summer, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The basin is almost completely devoid of life apart from some Tuareg nomads who occasionally make the treacherous journey through the region on a caravan route that dates back more than 1,500 years. But this can be a deadly trip due to the region's lack of visible landmarks, which can cause even the most experienced travelers to get lost. As a result, the basin is colloquially known as the "Land of Terror."

Thousands of years of sandstorms have eroded sediment and sand from parts of the basin, which has revealed ancient concentric folds in the region's undulating sandstone bedrock that date to the Paleozoic era (541 million to 252 million years ago). Flashes of green are pitted around these folded rocks, which are salt flats often located in steep canyons.

When viewed from space, "the exposed geologic features create an arresting work of abstract art," NASA representatives wrote.

Related: 12 amazing images of Earth from space 

The dramatic landscape also reveals that Tanezrouft Basin hasn't always been so hostile to life.

Some of the salt flats in this real-color image lay in canyons up to 1,600 feet (490 meters) deep. The scale of these steep gullies and the shape of their smoothed sides are signs that they were carved out by flowing water, potentially from intermittent flooding over millions of years, P. Kyle House, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, told NASA's Earth Observatory. 

This suggests the region could have once been a more luscious environment potentially capable of supporting a diverse ecosystem.

Today, the salt flats and their canyons either lie within or intersect with the exposed sandstone folds, creating the shapes seen in this image. "These patterns are striking and reminiscent of landscapes formed on folded strata in, for example, the Red Desert of southern Wyoming and even parts of the heavily forested Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern United States," House said.

Though Lucy has solved some evolutionary riddles, her appearance remains an ancestral secret.

Popular renderings dress her in thick, reddish-brown fur, with her face, hands, feet and breasts peeking out of denser thickets.

This hairy picture of Lucy, it turns out, might be wrong.

Technological advancements in genetic analysis suggest that Lucy may have been naked, or at least much more thinly veiled.

According to the coevolutionary tale of humans and their lice, our immediate ancestors lost most of their body fur 3 to 4 million years ago and did not don clothing until 83,000 to 170,000 years ago.

That means that for over 2.5 million years, early humans and their ancestors were simply naked.

As a philosopher, I'm interested in how modern culture influences representations of the past. And the way Lucy has been depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums may reveal more about us than it says about her.

From nudity to shame

The loss of body hair in early humans was likely influenced by a combination of factors, including thermoregulation, delayed physiological development, attracting sexual partners and warding off parasites. Environmental, social and cultural factors may have encouraged the eventual adoption of clothing.

Both areas of research – of when and why hominins shed their body hair and when and why they eventually got dressed – emphasize the sheer size of the brain, which takes years to nurture and requires a disproportionate amount of energy to sustain relative to other parts of the body.

Because human babies require a long period of care before they can survive on their own, evolutionary interdisciplinary researchers have theorized that early humans adopted the strategy of pair bonding – a man and a woman partnering after forming a strong affinity for one another. By working together, the two can more easily manage years of parental care.

Pair bonding, however, comes with risks.

Because humans are social and live in large groups, they are bound to be tempted to break the pact of monogamy, which would make it harder to raise children.

Some mechanism was needed to secure the social-sexual pact. That mechanism was likely shame.

RELATED: Did Human Ancestor 'Lucy' Have a Midwife?

In the documentary "What's the Problem with Nudity?" evolutionary anthropologist Daniel M.T. Fessler explains the evolution of shame: "The human body is a supreme sexual advertisement… Nudity is a threat to the basic social contract, because it is an invitation to defection… Shame encourages us to stay faithful to our partners and share the responsibility of bringing up our children."

Boundaries between body and world

Humans, aptly described as "naked apes," are unique for their lack of fur and systematic adoption of clothing. Only by banning nudity did “nakedness” become a reality.

As human civilization developed, measures must have been put in place to enforce the social contract – punitive penalties, laws, social dictates – especially with respect to women.

That's how shame's relationship to human nudity was born. To be naked is to break social norms and regulations. Therefore, you're prone to feeling ashamed.

What counts as naked in one context, however, may not in another.

Bare ankles in Victorian England, for example, excited scandal. Today, bare tops on a French Mediterranean beach are ordinary.

When it comes to nudity, art doesn't necessarily imitate life.

In his critique of the European oil painting tradition, art critic John Berger distinguishes between nakedness – "being oneself" without clothes – and "the nude," an art form that transforms the naked body of a woman into a pleasurable spectacle for men.

Feminist critics such as Ruth Barcan complicated Berger's distinction between nakedness and the nude, insisting that nakedness is already shaped by idealized representations.

In "Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy," Barcan demonstrates how nakedness is not a neutral state but is laden with meaning and expectations. She describes "feeling naked" as "the heightened perception of temperature and air movement, the loss of the familiar boundary between body and world, as well as the effects of the actual gaze of others" or "the internalized gaze of an imagined other."

Nakedness can elicit a spectrum of feelings – from eroticism and intimacy to vulnerability, fear and shame. But there is no such thing as nakedness outside of social norms and cultural practices.

Lucy's veils

Regardless of her fur's density, then, Lucy was not naked.

But just as the nude is a kind of dress, Lucy, since her discovery, has been presented in ways that reflect historical assumptions about motherhood and the nuclear family. For example, Lucy is depicted alone with a male companion or with a male companion and children. Her facial expressions are warm and content or protective, reflecting idealized images of motherhood.

The modern quest to visualize our distant ancestors has been critiqued as a sort of "erotic fantasy science," in which scientists attempt to fill in the blanks of the past based on their own assumptions about women, men and their relationships to one another.

In their 2021 article "Visual Depictions of Our Evolutionary Past," an interdisciplinary team of researchers tried a different approach. They detail their own reconstruction of the Lucy fossil, bringing into relief their methods, the relationship between art and science, and decisions made to supplement gaps in scientific knowledge.

Their process is contrasted with other hominin reconstructions, which often lack strong empirical justifications and perpetuate misogynistic and racialized misconceptions about human evolution. Historically, illustrations of the stages of human evolution have tended to culminate in a white European male. And many reconstructions of female hominins exaggerate features offensively associated with Black women.

One of the co-authors of "Visual Depictions," sculptor Gabriel Vinas, offers a visual elucidation of Lucy's reconstruction in "Santa Lucia" – a marble sculpture of Lucy as a nude figure draped in translucent cloth, representing the artist's own uncertainties and Lucy's mysterious appearance.

The veiled Lucy speaks to the complex relationships among nudity, covering, sex and shame. But it also casts Lucy as a veiled virgin, a figure revered for sexual "purity."

And yet I can't help but imagine Lucy beyond the cloth, a Lucy neither in the sky with diamonds nor frozen in maternal idealization – a Lucy going "Apeshit" over the veils thrown over her, a Lucy who might find herself compelled to wear a Guerrilla Girls mask, if anything at all.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Now Eliott Flaum and Manu Prakash of Stanford University seem to have solved the mystery. As they report in the journal Science, the cell membrane and internal structure of the single-celled organism are folded like origami and can be easily pulled apart and folded together again. This means that the forces on the membrane and the energy costs are very low, write the two researchers. L. olor stretches its neck around 20,000 times over the course of its life without incident.

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The tiny single-celled organism’s unusual hunting technique brings with it a whole series of potential problems. Normally it takes a lot of energy to deform a cell membrane so drastically—and at the speed with which L. olor stretches its neck, the organism would not be able to produce enough new membrane material. And while the neck has to be extremely flexible to allow for the rapid movement, it also has to be stiff and stable at the same time so that it doesn’t simply snap over at the first opportunity. L. olor solves all of these problems by folding the membrane of its neck into several layers.

The membrane’s fold lines have a complicated curved geometry that enable it to unfold into a cylinder. Beneath the folded membrane lies a network of spirally wound tubes that are folded together with the membrane and in turn help in the orderly folding and unfolding. The principle is similar to so-called Yoshimura origami, in which a cylinder consists of a grid of folded rhombuses and can be stretched out and folded up. One question still remains unanswered, however: When micrometer-sized objects move toward each other in the water, a repulsive force is created, so the protruding neck should cause the prey to drift away. Why that doesn’t happen is unclear—not all of the mysteries surrounding L. olor have been solved yet.

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

The "Gates of Hell," also known as the Darvaza gas crater after a nearby village, is a methane- and fire-filled crater in Turkmenistan's desert.

There are several different accounts of when and how the Gates of Hell formed, but the most widely circulated story is that the crater opened in 1971 after a Soviet gas drilling rig accidentally hit a natural gas reservoir. (Turkmenistan was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991.) 

Related: Hot Tub of Despair: The deadly ocean pool that traps and pickles creatures that fall in

The puncture caused the ground around the rig to collapse, taking the drilling infrastructure down with it and creating a giant leak from the reservoir. As soon as the ground opened, methane gas and other noxious fumes began wafting from the crater, which is roughly 230 feet (70 meters) in diameter and 100 feet (30 m) deep. This prompted geologists to come up with a bold plan to avert a potential environmental disaster — people in neighboring villages becoming poisoned by the raw gases, for example.

Shortly after the crater opened, Soviet scientists set its walls alight, thinking the fire would burn off the methane within a few weeks before dying down. But instead, the fire kept burning.

Fifty-three years later — and despite Turkmenistan's president announcing plans to close the Gates of Hell — the Darvaza gas crater is still a raging blaze. The crater sits atop the Amu-Darya Basin, a highly productive oil and natural gas province that stretches across Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Huge amounts of natural gas — predominantly methane — seep through Earth's crust across the basin, so "we shouldn't be surprised [the Darvaza crater] exists," Mark Ireland, a senior lecturer in energy geoscience at Newcastle University in the U.K., told National Geographic. 

The crater is likely connected to stores of flammable methane gas that provide seemingly unlimited fuel for the fire.

The charred remains of the drilling rig are thought to be somewhere inside the crater.

The fiery glow is visible from miles away, according to Atlas Obscura, and the site has become one of the country's top tourist attractions, drawing around 10,000 visitors per year. The crater also gained internet fame in 2019, when Turkmenistan's president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov released a video of himself driving a rally car and performing donuts on the edge of the crater.