In the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan there is a crater about seventy metres across that has been on fire for as long as most people can remember, and nobody can say for certain when it was lit. The usual story is that Soviet drillers broke into a pocket of gas in 1971, the ground fell in under the rig, and someone set the gas alight so it would burn off in a few days. Some Turkmen geologists say the collapse came in the 1960s and the fire not until the 1980s. The records that would settle it are missing, classified, or simply not where anyone has looked. It is being put out now, and not with water. The state gas company has drilled new wells around it to draw the gas away and sell it, and in 2025 it said the flames were about a third of what they had been two years before. So the fire with no reliable first day may yet get a last one, and it will be written down, because by then the gas will be worth counting.