Swallowed Up By The Ground: Sinkholes!

Reminds one of the old song..

'There's a sinkhole on a corner of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania'..
 
We have a recurring sink hole. Outside Eddie's Sweet Shop.

On one side of the road there is a stream that is passed across the road via a culvert. And every year or so the road begins to sink. Soon it reaches a state where it is a danger to traffic. So the council appear, dig up the road and 'fix it'.
But the following year it is back.

The question is, why don't they just close the road, lay in a proper concrete pipe all the way across and fix the problem once and for all ?

One day it will collapse under a vehicle and injure someone.
 
hunck said:
Another one? Get more t-shirts printed..
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The last one was in Sheringham up the road.

I fear we won't have the time for t-shirts this time hunk. Tell Ogred I've always loved him .. or however he spells it ..
 
A colleague was telling me today that there are fields in Cheshire (a mainly flat county) which seem to be sinking in the middle. Where the ground was level it now has a dip like a saucer.

The area has old salt mines which were worked by flooding with water. Perhaps this is causing sinkholes. I'm fascinated.
 
A big storm bringing lots of rain opens up a sinkhole in Melbourne, Australia.

sinkhole.jpg


Huge sinkhole opens up in Melbourne following powerful storm
Residents in Melbourne's north-west woke today to find a gaping hole had opened up in their neighbourhood following a powerful storm overnight.
Volunteers from the State Emergency Service's Essendon unit were called to section off the four-metre-deep sinkhole, which formed next to a footpath in Keilor East.
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https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/aust...ing-powerful-storm/ar-BBZ05Dw?ocid=spartandhp
 
This happened about a mile from were I sit, the sink holes, subsidence what ever
you want to call it still happens to a lesser extent the salt mines are now closed but
a company is now hell bent on hollowing out the salt to store gas in the area, they
have been doing tests and managed to blow out a old salt well flooding fields
and a road killing everything including roadside hedges, how they expect to keep
gas down there when they cant get the brine water to sty put is a bit of a mystery.
Here is a news paper write up from the nineteen hundreds, many of the holes are
now filled with beautiful clear blue water.

https://www.lep.co.uk/retro/dangers-beneath-lancashire-s-fields-1-9486784
 
Another one, this time in Queensland after a weekend of torrential rain.

qld.jpg


Giant hole opens up on Sunshine Coast after wet weekend
A giant hole has been left in a Sunshine Coast road after the weekend's torrential rain caused a landslip.
Police were called to Tingira Crescent at Sunrise Beach on Sunday morning after one lane of the road collapsed down an embankment.

Authorities have since discovered a blocked stormwater pipe backed up when it could not cope with the volume of water. It overflowed down the embankment and caused a landslip.
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https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/aust...-after-wet-weekend/ar-BBZ8fcY?ocid=spartandhp
 
Rapid proliferation of sinkholes is occurring in areas where the permafrost is melting ...
Arctic sinkholes open in a flash after permafrost melt

Some permafrost zones thaw faster than expected and are reshaping the Arctic landscape.

... Arctic permafrost can thaw so quickly that it triggers landslides, drowns forests and opens gaping sinkholes. This rapid melt, described in a new study, can dramatically reshape the Arctic landscape in just a few months.

Fast-melting permafrost is also more widespread than once thought. About 20% of the Arctic's permafrost — a blend of frozen sand, soil and rocks — also has a high volume of ground ice, making it vulnerable to rapid thawing. When the ice that binds the rocky material melts away, it leaves behind a marshy, eroded land surface known as thermokarst.

Previous climate models overlooked this kind of surface in estimating Arctic permafrost loss, researchers reported. That oversight likely skewed predictions of how much sequestered carbon could be released by melting permafrost, and new estimates suggest that permafrost could pump twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as scientists formerly estimated, the study found. ...

Frozen water takes up more space than liquid water, so when ice-rich permafrost thaws rapidly — "due to climate change or wildfire or other disturbance" — it transforms a formerly frozen Arctic ecosystem into a flooded, "soupy mess," prone to floods and soil collapse, said lead study author Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"This can happen very quickly, causing relatively dry and solid ecosystems (such as forests) to turn into lakes in the matter of months to years," and the effects can extend into the soil to a depth of several meters, Turetsky told Live Science in an email. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/arctic-permafrost-rapid-thaw.html
 
Jim said:
Can you image just parking your vehicle and upon finishing come out to see this? Wonder if the fellows insurance covers any of this. Either way bummer.
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Yeah, it'd put a downer on the day all right. According to the report, a man was seen scrabbling in the front seat, half in water, looking for something in the glove compartment or floor.
 
An entire housing development in South Dakota is threatened by ground collapse into an old gypsum mine beneath the residents' properties.
12 Blackhawk families displaced after sinkhole exposes abandoned gypsum mine

Albert Reitz was mowing his lawn after work on Monday when he felt it.

“I felt suction behind me and a little bit of movement under my feet. I looked behind me and I was only a foot away from” a sinkhole, he said Friday as movers were packing his home in Blackhawk.

“I didn’t even hear it go down, it just went down,” said the 56-year-old. I was “scared as hell.”

The sinkhole collapse at 5:30 p.m. that day broke water and sewer lines that further ate away at the earth, widening the hole in the Hideaway Hills subdivision to 40 by 50 feet.

“It was going into a bottomless pit,” said 40-year-old John Trudo, who realized something was wrong when his sink faucet didn't work and then heard Reitz banging on his door.

Trudo’s wife, Erika, called 911 and first responders evacuated six families that evening after a second, smaller sinkhole was discovered across the street.

The evacuations continued when cavers explored the sinkhole Wednesday and Thursday and found it opened into an abandoned gypsum mine that’s at least 600 feet long and filled with holes from drilling and mining equipment.

“I really never imagined that when we went back down there it would be that big,” said Adam Weaver, a member of Paha Sapa Grotto, a local caving group. ...

... (T)he gypsum mine was owned by the Dakota Plaster Company.

The Journal and other local papers reported as early as 1910 on the opening of the Dakota Plaster Plant in Blackhawk, archives show. And mindat.org, a nonprofit mining information organization, places the old mine on East Daisy Drive exactly where the sinkhole is.

It’s unclear when the mine closed.

Weaver, who explored the cave for four hours Thursday, said the mine ranges from just 25 to 30 feet below ground.

That’s “part of the problem,” he said.

The sinkholes are developing because ground and surface water has been eating away at the gypsum, which is “incredibly water soluble,” said Weaver, a GIS analyst for Rapid City and former hydrologist for the U.S. Forest Service.

“Building on top of gypsum is a bad idea,” especially when it’s already hollowed out from a mine, he said. ...
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FULL STORY (With Photos):
https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/l...cle_c48e901e-9ba9-546c-a1ac-c6d66af9e6b8.html
 
Shady said:
I saw that pic a long time ago and it has always stuck with me, it looks like someone has built a big pipe, it looks so manmade
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It's actually more aptly called a "piping feature" as it is not a true sinkhole in the geologic sense. It was entirely man-made. The only reason it occurred here was not because it was a pre-existing rock void that collapsed (a true sinkhole) but washing way of the material that was loose to begin with. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/6/100603-science-guatemala-sinkhole-2010-humans-caused/
 
skinny said:
Here's an interesting explanation.

Not a sinkhole.
Not a sinkhole.
Instead, Bonis prefers the term "piping feature" -- a decidedly less sexy label for the 100-foot deep, 66-foot side circular chasm. But it's an important distinction, he maintains, because "sinkholes" refer to areas where bedrock is solid but has been eaten away by groundwater, forming a geological Swiss cheese whose contours are nearly impossible to predict.

The situation beneath the country's capital is far different, and more dangerous. The lion's share of the city is built on pumice fill -- ash flows made up of loose, gravel-like particles deposited during ancient volcanic eruptions. In places, the debris is piled over 600 feet thick, filling up what would otherwise be a v-shaped valley of faulted bedrock.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/dont-ca ... khole.html


Here's a good cross-section picture of the type of layering - not the current hole, I think
guatemala-sink-hole-2.jpg
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This is a sink hole that appeared over the weekend.
From the shock-horror local news reports I was expecting something gigantic but it's disappointingly puny!

You can see Techy ahead, wishing I'd stop the silly hole-photography and get with the bike ride.


Sink hole.jpg
 
escargot said:
This is a sink hole that appeared over the weekend.
From the shock-horror local news reports I was expecting something gigantic but it's disappointingly puny!

You can see Techy ahead, wishing I'd stop the silly hole-photography and get with the bike ride.


View attachment 28099
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Oh noes! The whole city is going down the sinkhole... o_O
 
Sharon Hill said:
Turkey's major agricultural area is plagued by sinkholes due to drought and improper irrigation.
Many pics:
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/photo-sinkholes-in-central-turkey-raise-fears-among-locals-137244
View attachment 28100
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Damn you, Teresa May!


escargot said:
This is a sink hole that appeared over the weekend.
From the shock-horror local news reports I was expecting something gigantic but it's disappointingly puny!

You can see Techy ahead, wishing I'd stop the silly hole-photography and get with the bike ride.


View attachment 28099
Click to expand...
Give it time, it'll soon reach Cromer...
 
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