Chemical plant, gas, and various other industries use large─scale buried pipelines to transport inflammable gases and other products. To ensure the safe design of pipeline systems and their efficient operation and maintenance, it is crucially important to evaluate the long─term reliability of piping materials and to estimate how and to what extent gas will diffuse if it leaks in the ground. Though many papers have discussed many cases of gas diffusion in both indoor and outdoor atmospheres, only a few papers have focused on the diffusion of gas leaks in the ground. This paper is the first to collectively report the extent of gas diffusion with time, the dependence of gas diffusion on its specific gravity, and other results of a series of full─scale experimental research studies that we carried out to clarify the diffusion behavior of gas leaks in the ground.