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Big Holes are in the News. And I am not talking about Courtney Love ,   although Lisa Lampanelli is. I mean the Darwaza Crater in Turkmenistan , which I visited in the Spring of 2013.  Darwaza Crater Now National Geographic has sponsored a Descent Into the Crater . The stunt is going to be shown on National Geographic Channel tonight (if you live on the East Coast of the U.S.A) at 10 p.m. EDT.  On top of this comes news that a Huge Crater Has Opened Up in Siberia . According to the Siberian Times , a scientific team from Russia's Center for the Study of the Arctic and the Cyrosphere Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been sent to investigate the crater and is expected to arrive on Wednesday. Helicopters spotted the astronomic hole over the gas-rich Yamal peninsula, but its depth is unknown. There are a number of claims as to how the crater appeared, but nothing is known for sure, and probably won't be known for a little while. Speculated causes ...

One of my main objectives while in Turkmenistan was visiting the ruins of Urgench , which had been trashed by the sons of Chingis Khan back in 1221. Urgench is 290 miles north of the capital of Ashgabat . It is possible to drive from the capital to Urgench in one day, but most tourists like myself prefer to drive to the Darwaza Crater, 150 miles north of Ashagabat, spend the night there, and then continue on to Urgench the next day. The Darwaza Crater is widely touted as the Portal to Hell. Indeed, the word darwaza reportedly means “portal” in the Turkmani language. The portal is not, however, a natural phenomenon. It was created in 1971 when geologists accidentally drilled into a huge underground cavern filled with natural gas. The cavern collapsed, leaving a crater about 230 feet in diameter. To keep from poisoning the local environment the geologists set fire to the huge amounts of natural gas seeping from the crater. They apparently thought the gas would burn off in a few days or...