Darvaza, the 'Door to Hell'
Gas set alight 'for a few weeks' is still burning
The usual story is that in 1971 the ground collapsed under a Soviet drilling rig in the Karakum, opening a crater leaking methane. Geologists set it alight, expecting it to burn out in weeks, but the crater, about 70 metres wide, has been burning for decades.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 24 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 23 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 22 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 9 years later
- 1981 AIDS first described — 10 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 18 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 3 years earlier
- 1974 Carnation Revolution — 3 years later
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 18 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 18 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 14 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 10 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 14 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 18 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 20 years later
Middle East
- 1958 14 July Revolution in Iraq — 13 years earlier
- 1960 Founding of OPEC — 11 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 7 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 8 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 9 years later
Africa
- 1960 Year of Africa — 11 years earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 8 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 4 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 4 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 3 years later
Americas
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 9 years earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 2 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 1 year earlier
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 2 years later
- 1983 ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 12 years later
Oceania
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 17 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 12 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 21 years later
Alive at the time
- Pablo Picasso (aged 90)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 82)
- Mao Zedong (aged 78)
- Georgy Zhukov (aged 75)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 53)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 41)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 87)
- Haile Selassie (aged 79)
- Nikita Khrushchev (aged 77)
- Golda Meir (aged 73)