Why are huge sinkholes occurring all over the world? Breaks in the earth's crust.

From time to time, sinkholes occur, as a result of which people and cars suffer. The fault, of course, is the human factor. But it is not so rare that the earth literally leaves "from under the feet", forming large pits and faults in the earth's crust. We invite you to recall the largest destruction in recent history.

If faults and sinkholes can somehow be predicted and prevented by monitoring the condition of sidewalks in time, maintaining city communications in good condition, then it is impossible to predict huge soil destruction. No one knows where nature will prepare its "surprise" next time. As a result, unexpected large failures of the earth's surface lead to catastrophic disasters, as in the photographs that we offer you to look at.

The worst thing is that such earth faults can form anywhere. Even in the center of a large settlement. As a result, horrifying results, sometimes with victims.

A massive hole appeared in Winter Park, Florida on May 8, 1981. Pit opening: 350 feet (106 m) and 75 feet (23 m) deep. In summer, it began to fill with water and became a tourist attraction.

A 330-foot (100 m) deep hole in Guatemala formed in February 2007, destroying dozens of homes and killing three people. Nearly 1,000 residents were evacuated.

Highway destruction in La Jolla, California on October 3, 2007

100 feet deep (30.5 m) and 60 feet (18.3 m) diameter pit in Guatemala, May 2010

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after a massive storm on July 23, 2010.

Spontaneous sinkholes in Berezniki, Russia. This is the result of soil erosion due to abandoned mines under the city.

Louisiana dip

Disappeared small pond Sanica in Bosnia, November 2013

A sinkhole destroyed eight cars at the National Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, February 2014

Dips in the earth's crust

Huge masses of water, falling from the sky during heavy rains or coming from the mountains during intense snowmelt, do not linger for a long time. "Floods from heaven" pass in the same way as spring floods pass. The river valleys that have experienced the flood are coming back to life. However, it also happens that water absorbs land forever, turning it into the bottom of the sea or the bottom of a lake. The reason for this is, first of all, strong earthquakes, as a result of which failures of the earth's crust occur.

During earthquakes with a large magnitude, a colossal volume of rocks is moved: for example, the 1950 earthquake that occurred in the highlands of Tibet caused the movement of rocks with a total weight of about two billion (!) tons. The Gobi-Altai earthquake that occurred in the south of Mongolia on December 4, 1957, like the Himalayan earthquake, made significant changes in the terrain. A part of the mountain range with an area of one and a half by three and a half kilometers was moved, and the horizontal displacement, to the east, reached tens of meters, and the vertical, downward, 328 meters. If the earthquake had occurred not in a waterless mountainous and desert area, but near the coast of the sea, lake or river, this more than three hundred meters deep discharge “pit” would have been filled with water and a new deep reservoir would have formed.

Such failures, entailing a flood, happened more than once in the memory of people and, apparently, also served as a source of legends about the flood sent for sins from above. 43 minutes (the date was established with an accuracy of one minute due to the fact that more than two and a half centuries later, submarine archaeologists found a watch whose hands stopped at the time of the disaster) a city was destroyed on the island of Jamaica. Port Royal, which gained the notorious fame of "pirate Babylon", because this city was the center of piracy and the slave trade in the Caribbean. The strongest shock caused a giant wave that hit Port Royal, the northern part of it sank to the bottom - along with taverns and churches, warehouses and residential buildings, forts and squares. By the end of the day, only two hundred of the two thousand houses of "pirate Babylon" remained on the surface, the rest were at the bottom of the bay.

"God's punishment has befallen the den of debauchery," the churchmen stated. And since the Spaniards and the Portuguese suffered the most from piracy, devout Catholics, who considered the Protestants of the English and Dutch and the French Huguenots "heretics", the Catholic priests spoke most of all about the punishing "finger of God". However, less than a century later, a similar “punishment from above” fell upon the capital of Catholic Portugal, the city of Lisbon. Moreover, this happened on the day when the capital solemnly celebrated All Saints' Day ...

On November 1, 1755, huge crowds of believers went to the numerous churches of Lisbon for the first Mass. Suddenly, the ground shook under their feet. Churches, palaces, multi-storey old buildings began to collapse from powerful shocks. The streets and squares of the Portuguese capital were buried under the ruins of the collapsed twenty thousand houses. Then followed a twenty-minute pause... followed by a new, even more terrible push.

“Many of the surviving residents after the first earthquake barely managed to get to the new Kaiz-Depreda pier on the river embankment, which attracted their attention with its strength. Squat and massive, it seemed like a safe haven. But this refuge of the victims was short-lived! With the first new blows, the foundation of the pier sank, and, just as it happened over 60 years earlier in Port Royal, the entire structure, together with people distraught with horror, disappeared without a trace in the water element. No one managed to escape, - writes the American seismologist E. Roberts in the book “When the Earth Shakes”. - Almost immediately after this, another misfortune fell upon the city - a somewhat belated consequence of the first concussion: a wave formed in the ocean rushed with great force onto the coast of Portugal, and then to other parts of the Atlantic. At the mouth of the Tagus River, the water first subsided, exposing sandy deposits. And immediately a seething water wall about six meters high rushed here, sweeping away everything that came across in its path for almost one kilometer from the riverbed. The wreckage of demolished bridges, the gear of broken ships, destroyed buildings - all this was intertwined in the channel into one huge tangle.

After the Lisbon earthquake (its description can be found not only in the book of E. Roberts, as well as other scientific and popular science books, but also in the "Poem of the Lisbon catastrophe" and the story "Candide", written by the famous freethinker Voltaire), the outlines of the coasts have changed significantly Portugal. Near Lisbon, in the harbor of Colares, a new rock appeared from under the water, along the coastal strip, where waves used to walk, now residents of the Portuguese capital, who managed to rise from the ruins, began to walk. Along with the rise of land, failures also took place here: part of the coast went under water in the same way as the massive pier of Kaiz-Depreda. They went to a depth of fifty meters and were a few hundred kilometers from the coast of Portugal shallow, where even in the time of the Phoenicians hunted tuna.

“This year there was an earthquake all over the world, shortly after the death of Julius Aposta. The sea left its shores, as if the Lord our God again sent a flood to the earth, and everything turned back, to chaos, which was the beginning of all beginnings. And the sea threw the ships ashore and scattered them over the rocks. When the inhabitants of Epiddurus saw this, they were afraid of the force of the waves and were afraid that mountains of water would rush to the shore and the city would be destroyed by them. And so it happened, and they began to look at it with great fear ... ”- says an old chronicle.

The modern city of Cavtat in Yugoslavia on the Adriatic Sea is the heir to the ancient ancient city of Epidaurus. Some streets of Cavtat are, as the excavations of archaeologists found out, a continuation of the streets of ancient Epidaurus. But most of Epidaurus, as shown by the studies of submarine archaeologists, colorfully described in the book by Ted Falcon-Barker "At the Walls of Epidaurus" (its Russian translation was published by the publishing house "Thought" in 1967), is located at the bottom of the Adriatic.

Julius Apostata died in 363 AD. e. And in 365, that is, “soon after the death of Julius Aposta,” according to medieval sources, a terrible earthquake occurred in Germany, Italy and Illyria (as the Adriatic coast of present-day Yugoslavia was called at that time). As a result, almost half of Epidaurus was swallowed up by sea waters, "as if the Lord our God again sent a flood to the earth."

Apparently, a similar kind of catastrophe swallowed up the settlements that existed on the shores of the "pearl of Kyrgyzstan" Lake Issyk-Kul. Traces of these settlements were discovered by submarine archaeologists at the bottom of the lake. Perhaps the legend of the "failure" of the city of Kitezh is also associated with the catastrophic sinking of this Russian city to the bottom of Lake Svetloyar. It is possible that this is how the ancient city of Tartessus on the Iberian Peninsula died, the ruins of which have been searched in vain for a century on land.

Catastrophic subsidence of large areas of land (but, of course, incomparable in area with entire countries, and even more so with continents) occurred in the last century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a territory equal to the Kerch Peninsula sank under water at the mouth of the Indus. In 1811, as a result of an earthquake, an area of several thousand square kilometers dropped sharply to a depth of three to five meters, 500 square kilometers of land were flooded. And in the US state of Missouri, where this disaster occurred, a new lake was born - Reelfoot.

Half a century later, in 1861, in the delta of the Selenga River, the Tsagan steppe, an area of 200 square kilometers (the area of the European Principality of Liechtenstein), went under the waters of Lake Baikal. A seven-meter-deep bay formed on the lake, rightly called Proval.

The Messinian earthquake, described by Maxim Gorky in the article “An Earthquake in Calabria and Sicily”, brought not only the destruction of two cities and many villages, but also changed the shape of the Strait of Messina, which separates the Apennine Peninsula and Sicily. It happened already in our 20th century. After the Chilean earthquake in 1960, the waters of the Pacific Ocean swallowed up a strip of the coast of Chile with an area of 10 thousand square kilometers (a third of the territory of Belgium!), Submerged to a depth of two meters.

It is quite understandable that in the past such catastrophes, accompanied by tsunami waves, were perceived as "God's punishment" and a flood - remember the words of an old chronicle about the misfortune that befell Epidaurus and comparing it with the flood sent by "Our Lord God".

Eruptions and "explosion" of volcanoes

We are used to the fact that the eruption of red-hot lava is associated with the activity of volcanoes. But, as mentioned in the previous chapter, due to volcanic activity, both mud flows and large masses of water can erupt from the bowels of the Earth.

Lahars - the so-called volcanologists volcanic mud flows, a mixture of solid debris with water. The speed of these streams can reach 90 kilometers per hour, and the distance they travel reaches 160 kilometers. “When they say “dirt”, they usually imagine something interfering, unpleasant, but hardly dangerous; however, over the past few centuries, the mud flowing down the slopes has destroyed more wealth than any other volcanic event, and claimed thousands of human lives,” writes G. A. McDonald, professor of geology at the University of Hawaii, citing examples of this kind of “mud floods” .

The famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. e. buried the city of Pompeii under a thick layer of ash. Another city, Herculaneum, was flooded with mud from heavy rains that washed away thick deposits of ash. As a result, when the mud hardened, Herculaneum was firmly “concreted” under a layer deeper than the layer of ash that covered Pompeii.

Lakes often form in the craters of volcanoes that have temporarily ceased their activity. It is worth the fire-breathing mountain to wake up again - and streams of water, cold or hot, mixed with ashes, rush down, bringing destruction and death to all living things. Such "floods" more than once hit the island of Java. “Somewhat different was the catastrophic flood caused by snowmelt on the slopes of the Ruapehu volcano (in New Zealand) in December 1953,” MacDonald writes. - At the top of Ruapehu, in a large outer crater, there is an inner cone, which in turn contains a crater lake. The eruption that occurred in 1945 splashed almost all the water out of it, but at the same time built up the sides of the cone by 6–8 m, and in subsequent years, rains and melting snow made the lake level even higher than before. The space between the inner cone and the rim of the outer crater was filled with ice."

Water, having overflowed the lake, glassed through a crevice in the edge of the inner cone, punching a tunnel through the ice and pouring into the source of one of the streams that form the Vangaehu River. At the end of 1953, when the water “reached the level of the crevasse and began to flow from it, something (maybe cracking of melting ice) caused movements that led to the collapse of part of the wall of the inner cone, and the rushing water eroded this wall even more and expanded tunnel. Having escaped to the Vangaehu River, the water rushed along it in the form of a steep shaft up to 6 m high, collecting loose debris and turning into a mud stream. A dense liquid mass hit the railway bridge and took part of it with it, which led to the collapse of the Wellington-Auckland Express, in which the locomotive and several wagons were destroyed and 154 people died.

Volcanic eruptions can cause a flood not only because of the streams of mud rushing along the slopes, or because of the breakthrough of lake waters in the crater. Very many islands of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans were born by the activity of volcanoes: the Azores and Hawaiian archipelagos, Reunion and Jan Mayen, St. Helena and Easter Island. Volcanic activity can create an island (and this has happened before the eyes of man; even during the last three centuries, scientists have been able to observe the birth of new islands), but it can also destroy it. A similar catastrophe occurred in August 1883 in the Sunda Strait, which separates the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java, when the volcano Krakatau exploded, more precisely, a volcanic island nine by five kilometers in size, formed by three merged cones of volcanoes.

August 26 at 13:00. the inhabitants of the island of Java, located at a distance of 160 km from Krakatau, heard a noise like thunder. At 14 o'clock. a black cloud about 27 km high rose over Krakatoa. At 14 o'clock. 30 min. frequent explosions were heard, and the noise increased all the time. At 17 o'clock. the first tsunami occurred, which was probably caused by the collapse of the crater. Until noon on August 27, several more tsunamis arose, which were apparently explained by further collapses of the northern part of Krakatau, writes V. I. Vlodavets, the founder of Soviet volcanology. - Explosions continued all night, but the most powerful of them occurred on August 27 at 10 am. 2 minutes. Gases, vapors, debris, sand and dust rose to a height of 70-80 km and dispersed over an area of over 827,000 km2, and the sound of explosions was heard in Singapore and Australia.

Half an hour later, tsunami waves hit the nearest islands, including densely populated areas of Sumatra and Java, destroying buildings, railroad tracks, gardens, forests, crops and killing over 36 thousand people. "At 10 o'clock. 54 min. there was a second giant explosion, apparently of the same strength as the previous one, but it was not accompanied by a tsunami. The next explosion with a small tsunami was noted at 16:35. Explosions continued throughout the night from 27 to 28 August, but their strength gradually weakened. Small explosions occurred even on separate days (September 17 and 26, October 10), and only on February 20, 1884, the most recent eruption was noted, which brought so many disasters.

The explosion of the Krakatoa volcano.

1 - explosion sound propagation zone, 2 - ashfall area, 3 - Krakatoa volcano.

The sea in the vicinity of Krakatoa became shallow and became unnavigable. But on the site of the island itself, only a part of one of the three volcanic cones remained ... and a depression with a diameter of about seven kilometers, the maximum depth of which reaches 279 meters (the Dutch volcanologist B. Escher believes that at the time of strong explosions the depression reached a depth of about three kilometers, but then landslides reduced its depth). At least 18 cubic kilometers of rocks were ejected during the eruption of Krakatoa ... Now imagine how terrible the catastrophe was, which occurred about two and a half thousand years ago in the Aegean Sea, when the island-volcano Santorin “exploded”, if during this explosion , according to geologists, four times more rocks flew into the air - more than 70 cubic kilometers!

Santorini (i.e., the islands of St. Irene) is a small group of islands that make up the Cyclades archipelago, lying between Turkey and Greece. They are located in a circle near a vast volcanic crater, the depth of which reaches several hundred meters. The largest of them - Tera (or Fera) - is a semicircle, from the side of the crater sheerly breaking off with steep cliffs, and from the side of the Aegean Sea gently descending to the water. To the west of the crater, a dilapidated wall of the volcano rises, forming the island of Terasia, and to the south of it, the Aspronisi reef. “Soon it will be twenty-one centuries, as the first island came forward here, which the surprised ancients called “Saint”, and now it is called Palea Kaimeni (ancient burning one), - wrote at the end of the last century the famous geographer Eliza Reclus in the first volume of his capital universal geography "Land and people". - In the XVI century. eruptions that lasted three years, from 1570 to 1573, gave rise to the smaller island of Mikra-Kaimeni. In 1650, a new island arose with such noise that Kyoto, at a distance of 200 kilometers, mistook this phenomenon for a naval battle; the noise was heard even in the Dardanelles, at a distance of 400 kilometers. A more significant lava cone, Nea Kaimeni, advanced in 1707, and more recently, from 1866 to 1870, this island was enlarged by two new capes - Afroessa and Mount George, which more than doubled the original volume of the volcanic mass, covering a small the village and port of Vulcano and approaching the very shore of Micra Kaimeni. Within five years, there were more than five hundred thousand partial eruptions, sometimes throwing ash to a height of 1200 meters, so that even from the island of Crete, masses of ash could be discerned, which seemed black during the day and red at night.

Santorini group of islands.

Reclus, with his characteristic insight of a great geographer, suggested that “the abyss of Santorin is the result of an explosion, which, even in prehistoric times, made the entire central part of the mountain fly up in the form of ashes; at least the vast amount of enveloping tuff on the outer slopes of the island tells the geologist who studies them of just such a destruction. Tera, Terasia, Aspronisi were the remnants of a great land once inhabited by a highly cultured people; volcanic eruptions have swallowed it all up; a layer of pumice, reaching in some places up to 50 meters thick, covers the remains of the dwellings of the people, who knew gold and, in all likelihood, copper, who used obsidian tools and decorated vases with images of plants and animals.

These words were written by Reclus before Arthur Evans discovered the Minoan civilization on Crete, the forerunner of classical antiquity, and almost a century before archeological research on Santorini, as well as at the bottom of the waters surrounding it, convincingly showed that Elise Reclus was right !

In 1939, a young Greek archaeologist, Spyridon Marinatos, put forward a bold hypothesis. Scientists all over the world have not yet decided why the great maritime power that existed on the island of Crete several thousand years ago died: whether from internal strife, whether from the invasion of strangers, whether from a declining economy. Marinatos, on the other hand, suggested that the cause of the death of Crete is a catastrophe generated by the explosion of the Santorini volcano. For it not only destroyed this once densely populated island: volcanic ash fell on the fields of Crete, tsunami waves hit its shores. People, villages, crops, ships perished. The great maritime power began to wither, and, completely weakened, it was easily conquered by the Achaean Greeks in the 12th century BC. e.

Indeed, when, after the Second World War, surveys were carried out at the bottom of the Aegean Sea, it turned out that its vast expanses were covered with deposits of volcanic ash dating back to the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. - the time of the death of the Cretan state and the time of the explosion of Santorin. In 1967, Marinatos, starting excavations on the island of Santorini, under a thick layer of lava and ash discovered a large city, a contemporary of the cities of Minoan Crete. About thirty thousand people lived in the city. The walls of the Santorini Palace were covered with wonderful frescoes. The technique and style of their execution resembled the frescoes of the palace of King Minos on Crete (the discovery of the wonderful civilization of Crete began with the excavations of this palace, from which its name came - "Minoan").

Then came the turn of the island of Crete. Is it possible to find traces of the catastrophe in his land? During the excavation of one of the palaces, archaeologists found pieces of pumice, as well as caked pieces of other volcanic rocks mixed with sulfur. There are no powerful volcanoes on the island of Crete. This means that the palace was destroyed by the explosion of Santorin, located more than a hundred kilometers to the east. It is possible that this explosion also destroyed other buildings of Crete, not to mention the ships that were the main pillar of the rule of the Minoan power. And, of course, destructive waves and ashes devastated the arable land and vineyards of the Cretans.

The catastrophe in Santorini was supposed to be reflected in the legends, traditions, myths of the peoples inhabiting the Eastern Mediterranean, because it was supposed to affect Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, and other islands of the Aegean archipelago ... Did the Santorini tragedy form the basis legends of Atlantis?

More than a hundred years ago, in 1872, the Frenchman Louis Figier suggested that Santorini was a fragment of Atlantis. At the beginning of our century, comparisons were made between the Cretan civilization and the culture of the Atlanteans, as Plato described it in his Dialogues. The fact that Atlantis is, in fact, the “Aegean”, islands in the Aegean Sea, both existing and sunken, was written in 1928 by the president of the Geographical Society, academician L. S. Berg. The explosion of the Santorin volcano is associated with the Platonic Atlantis by the Greek geologist A. G. Galanopoulos, the Soviet geologist I. A. Rezanov, a number of American oceanologists, as well as other scientists - archaeologists, historians, geologists, oceanologists. According to them, three and a half thousand years ago (a thousand years before the birth of Plato) there was a catastrophe on Santorini, the legends about which were artistically “processed” by Plato, who composed the history of a great power that existed on the island “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” and was destroyed “in one disastrous night." In fact, the explosion of the volcano did not destroy Platonic Atlantis, but the very real Santorin, the consequence of this explosion was the death of a great power and an ancient civilization on the island of Crete.

Has the Earth's crust become more unstable? Giant funnels are forming all over the planet, writes investmentwatchblog.com. Many of them are so huge and open so suddenly that they actually "swallow" cars, houses, and even people. So why is this happening? Is the Earth's crust becoming unreliable? Could it be the expansion of the Earth?

Is there something else to blame for this phenomenon? It seems that these stories of a giant new glitch in the news appear almost every day now, and scientists, always at a loss, they do not provide an explanation. Could human activity be responsible for this?

Yes, sinkholes in the US definitely seem to be on the rise, but we're also seeing huge sinkholes spring up around the world - and very often in rural areas. There just does not work any pattern that would seem to indicate that human activity is the main factor. Hopefully, scientists will still be able to find out everything that causes this phenomenon, because the process is like an epidemic, and the situation is constantly getting worse.

For example, a giant sinkhole that was 60 feet wide suddenly opened up and threatened to swallow the entire resort near Disney World on Sunday...

This incident was so shocking that it made headlines across the country. Resort guests were absolutely stunned when the walls of the building began to crumble and fall underground...

And without a doubt, Florida seems to be especially vulnerable to giant sinkholes. In Winter Park, Florida, a massive sinkhole recently opened very unexpectedly and swallowed an entire pool...

Insurance regulators and geo-technicians spent a lot of time at the big sinkhole Wednesday morning when it opened in the backyard of Winter Park.

The hole, 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep, swallowed up the pool when it opened late Monday night. No harm done.

Orange County inspectors have declared a two-story house building at 2300 Roxbury Drive and a utility shed "unsafe" for use.

But these kinds of sinkholes don't just form in Florida, but other places where geologists tell us they "should" form.

For example, a giant sinkhole that recently appeared in Kansas is considered such an anomaly that it actually serves to attract tourists...

The failure in Kansas is located in the outback, in the countryside, but similar ones appear right in the center of large cities. A huge sinkhole that recently appeared in the heart of Montreal, Canada was so big that it was able to swallow an entire excavator...

And some cities may actually be "eaten alive" by giant craters. For example, more than 40 large sinkholes plague the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania...

And of course we find this phenomenon also on the west coast. Indeed, one gigantic sinkhole threatens an entire cantoned division near San Francisco, California...

Personally, I am convinced that something very strange is going on. I can't exactly explain why this is happening, but it seems clear that the size and frequency of the dips are increasing.

| |

Dips in the earth's crust