Ever wondered how a sinkhole works? This video explains it

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/23/ever-wondered-how-a-sinkhole-works-this-video-explains-it.html

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Contributed by Popkin

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mum’s old house up in pasco county, was 9 acres of deep sand, next to a limestone quarry that regularly blasted underground. that whole area is going to just disappear one day, and i am happy she is no longer there.
many, many sinkholes in that part of the state.
florida is a beautiful place. beautiful, but extremely delicate. it really can’t handle being fucked with in the ways it has been exploited and overdeveloped. couple the digging up the limestone substrate with draining the aquifer (hello, Nestlé!) and there’s your blueprint to have it all come crashing in.

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What? Lazy layabouts, the lot of them! Always sitting there in wait, but can’t be bothered to suck down Mar-a-Lago.

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Thing that always got me was how many sinkholes are nearly perfect circles. One time a geologist tried to explain that to me and it depends on two things (1) the type of sinkhole has to be something called a “cover-collapse sinkhole” and (2) the void causing event, which is usually but not always, water dissolving/transporting, has to be a pretty significant ways down below and not close to the surface. Then you get a ‘dome’ formation which due to physics (isn’t everything?) will propagate upwards as a circular cave-in. …maybe.

(image source and article)

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Leda clay makes for fun reading.

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That photo looks like an upside down cream pie. It took me a few moments to realize it was actually a hole.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

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Look, we all know that the real answer here is faeries. Sinkholes are just the mounds where the Good People have made their homes for eons, until us humans showed up and messed with the land. Everybody knows that.

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grace helbig yes GIF by This Might Get

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