There are plenty of things to be afraid of in this crazy world, but the possibility of
being suddenly swallowed by a sinkhole probably doesn't even occur to most people.
Well, get ready to face a new terror, because the very ground you walk upon is going to
cause you nightmares once we've excavated the untold truth of sinkholes.
The hole story
Sinkholes are terrifying, but the process that causes them to appear is simple.
They happen when groundwater wears away at rock enough to cause a collapse.
Most sinkholes happen in areas built on limestone, or any other easily eroded type of rock.
While there are parts of pretty much every U.S. state that are susceptible to sinkholes,
they're most common in Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
There are a few types of sinkholes.
The most famous is the cover-collapse sinkhole, which can be catastrophic, while dissolution
sinkholes and cover-subsidence sinkholes form more slowly and are less dangerous.
According to EarthTech, there are some warning signs when sinkholes are forming, and they
seem to be right out of a horror movie.
Early evidence that a sinkhole is coming includes stuff like doors and windows not closing right,
creepy-crawlies suddenly showing up in your house, new cracks in floors or walls, and
inexplicably wilted foliage.
Yeesh.
Of course, humans can also cause them as well, and with way less warning.
In 2012, the town of Bayou Corne, Louisiana, had to be evacuated after a company called
Texas Brine drilled a mine in the wrong place...and sank the whole town.
And in 1980, Texaco opened a sinkhole beneath Lake Louisiana's Lake Peigneur, causing a
vortex so powerful it devoured 11 barges.
Whoops.
Swimming holes
Some of the biggest and most dangerous sinkholes in the world are underwater.
In the Paracel Islands, the Dragon Hole is so deep, the bottom of it doesn't contain
any oxygen, so there's no life at all...just eerie, still darkness.
That's better than the Blue Hole of Dahab, though, which has a submerged tunnel leading
to the Red Sea.
Dozens of divers have lost their lives after getting disoriented by the light coming through
the tunnel.
And the Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize has yielded important historical information
that may help explain the mysterious disappearance of the Mayan Empire.
Speaking of which…
Gate to the underworld
Much of ancient Mayan civilization was literally built around what they called cenotes, since
sinkholes filled with groundwater were the primary source of drinking water on the Yucatan
peninsula.
The Mayans believed these mysterious sinkholes were gateways to the afterlife, and even made
human sacrifices to them.
Yikes!
Sinkholes...in space!
When the Cassini spacecraft found lakes of liquid methane and ethane on one of Saturn's
moons, they were puzzled by the fact that the lakes seemed to drain and fill without
any rivers or precipitation to fill them.
In 2015, however, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed the lakes weren't so much lakes but
sinkholes of the very same kind we have on Earth.
Studies done by the European Space Agency took into account things like the makeup of
Titan's surface, the weird weather patterns, and the properties of liquid hydrocarbons,
and ultimately found the same weathering processes and sinkhole formations happening right here
on Earth are also happening a billion kilometers away.
It's a small universe after all.
Sinkhole tourism
If you want to take a tour of the most famous sinkholes in the world, you'll need a passport
and some frequent flier miles.
One of the best known is Xiaozhai Tiankeng, a massive sinkhole in China nearly 2,000 feet
deep that has its own unique ecosystem.
And then there's the Dead Sea, which has seen over 5,500 sinkholes appear since the 1980s,
a phenomenon that scientists believe is related to the Sea's rapid drainage.
It's so crazy, some enterprising souls even want to open a "Sinkhole Park" tourist attraction!
Closer to home, of course, the most famous sinkhole might be the one that opened beneath
the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2014.
Eight vintage Corvettes, including one worth three quarters of a million dollars, went
down into the pit, completely totaling five of them.
And in 2013, six year old Nathan Woessner made national headlines when he was swallowed
by a sinkhole while visiting Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore with his family.
Luckily, he survived, and with a really interesting story to tell when friends ask what he did
on summer vacation.
Ancient holes
It's not just Corvettes and kids you'll find at the bottom of a sinkhole.
Archaeological digs done in sinkholes around the world have found some pretty incredible
stuff.
In 2013, for instance, a team from Kingston University investigating a sinkhole in Hampshire,
England, found remains of a Neolithic society only a few miles from Stonehenge.
And The Guardian reported that archaeological finds at a sinkhole in Florida may call into
question the whole theory of how North America was populated, as artifacts found there suggest
people were living in the region 1,500 years before humanity supposedly crossed the Bering
Strait from Asia.
Hmm!
We can predict them
Efforts to more reliably predict sinkholes are well underway, with some success.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University are using satellites to study the thousands of sinkholes
at the Dead Sea, while in 2014, CBS News reported on a new NASA project trying to map sinkholes
using a plane that transmits electronic pulses to map shifts in the Earth's crust.
Not everyone is happy about it, though.
In 2013, the BBC reported that people in Florida were unhappy with a proposed Florida Geological
Survey sinkhole vulnerability map — because it could potentially lower property values
or raise insurance premiums on homes in high risk areas.
Talk about a money pit!
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