The Untold Truth Of Sinkholes

There are plenty of things to be afraid of, like your family getting a good, long look at your internet history or sitting in an Alabama jail for illegal use of confetti. If there's anything we'd like to think we can count on to be not terrifying, it's the sky above our heads and the ground beneath our feet. Unfortunately, there are plenty of things to be scared of there, too. Not only does a weird amount of freaky stuff tend to fall from the sky, but it's entirely possible the ground could open up and swallow you. It could literally happen any minute now. Not kidding.

If there's one thing you have to give the human race, it's the ability to make a big problem even worse. In August 2012, the 350 residents of Bayou Corne, Louisiana, were evacuated when a sinkhole started swallowing their town and everything around it. The entire event was catastrophic, according to Mother Jones. A year later, it covered 24 acres and was around 750 feet deep. Its location means that crude oil and explosive gases were also released, bubbling up through the bayou. Needless to say, no one's moving home anytime soon.

There was a ton of finger-pointing, but most of the fingers were pointed at Texas Brine. The company was drilling in a mine called Oxy3, and Oxy3 was what collapsed. While it has admitted at least partial fault, plenty of other companies are drilling and hollowing out these massive caverns. They're all over, usually used for storing things like toxic waste and petroleum, and they sometimes cause sinkholes. In 1980, another sinkhole opened up in Louisiana's Lake Peigneur. That one happened when Texaco punched through the walls of a salt mine drilled beneath a lake, and the sinkhole's vortex was so massive it sucked in 11 barges. Mother Jones talked to a resident who saw the whole thing unfold; she said it looked like "a little ducky in a bathtub going down the drain."

When the Cassini spacecraft found lakes on one of Saturn's moons, it seems like the stuff ancient astronaut theorists should love. Titan's surface is a chilly -292 Fahrenheit, though, and according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lakes and seas aren't filled with water at all. Instead, it's liquid methane and ethane, and even stranger, the lakes seemed to drain and fill without any rivers or precipitation to fill them. Since Titan's seasonal cycle is longer than Earth's, the mechanics of the lakes were a little hazy ... until 2015, when JPL 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.

On February 12, 2014, car enthusiasts across the globe suffered a case of collective heartbreak when a sinkhole opened beneath the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Eight cars were swallowed. By August 2015, The Guardian reported the worst of the damage had been fixed ... to the building, at least. The cars were another story. Even when they were rescued from the bottom of the pit, it wasn't pretty. The crushed pieces of metal that were salvaged even went on display for a while. Five were well beyond repair, one was restored within a year, and two others were deemed worth restoring.

The 30-foot-deep sinkhole was 60 feet wide and 45 feet long, and Atlas Obscura says the cars the earth ate included a 1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette worth about $750,000 and a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder prototype worth around $250,000. It's never been said just how much the cars were worth in total, but repairing the damage to the building alone cost a whopping $5 million. On the plus side, the museum was able sell thousands of jars of sinkhole dirt and they made an entire exhibit dedicated to the sinkhole, so hey, it wasn't a complete loss. It definitely put them on the map.

Tarek Omar is a rescue diver at the Blue Hole of Dahab, and when Spiegel asked him how many bodies he'd brought to the surface, he simply said, "I stopped counting at some point." The Guardian reported he's recovered the remains of at least 20 people, enough to earn him the nickname "the bone collector," and the cliff along the bay is lined with memorials to those who died there. What makes this place so dangerous?

Locals say it's the dead girl that lurks in the murky waters of the blue hole, unable to rest and looking for revenge on her father, who forced her to drown herself there. According to Omar, he hasn't seen this mythical soul, but he has seen what is so disorienting to divers. About 150 feet deep, past the layers of warm surface water, yellow and orange light, and finally into the blue, the sunlight returns. It's a tunnel, and it opens into the Red Sea. Most people die trying to swim (intentionally or not) through the tunnel. Such deep conditions are disorienting the same way a few drinks are disorienting, and Omar says the other big problem is divers are often completely unprepared for what they're going to face. Even the most experienced, most skilled divers have died there, too — like Irish rescue diver Stephen Keenan. He died rescuing another diver trying to free-dive (i.e., without an oxygen tank) through the arch, and that might be the very definition of insanity.

Imagine you're spending a day at the beach, just walking along enjoying the sun, the sand, and possibly a travel mug filled with something alcoholic. Suddenly, the ground opens up and swallows you. You're gone, and you'd better hope someone's up there looking for you. Terrifying, right? That's exactly what happened to Nathan Woessner on July 12, 2013 (but without the alcohol, as he was only 6).

He and his family were visiting the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore when the sinkhole swallowed him. He spent three and a half hours at the bottom of the 11-foot hole, but this has a happy ending. According to the Chicago Tribune, he made a full recovery.

It wasn't as happy an ending for the park, though, which closed while researchers tried to figure out what the heck was going on and why there were suddenly sinkholes eating children. One theory is that trees long buried beneath the dunes are rotting and causing the whole thing to shift, but others think there's more to it than that. Michigan Live reported the beach was going to reopen in 2017, except for a section prone to sinkholes. Sounds like a pretty good reason to stay home and play video games, doesn't it?

So sinkholes are equal parts fascinating and brown-trousers-time scary, but is there anything you can do to make sure your dream house isn't about to be 40 feet underground? Science says, "Maybe."

In 2014, CBS News reported on a new NASA project trying to map sinkholes. Essentially, a plane would transmit electronic pulses and use the data that returned to map shifts in the Earth's crust — one of the precursors of a sinkhole. Since the Dead Sea is already a hotbed of sinkhole activity, Scientific American says it's a great place to perfect technology. That's exactly what researchers from Tel Aviv University are doing, using satellites and aircraft equipped with radar and lasers.

But the BBC says all those efforts aren't without their naysayers ... you know, the people who apparently don't want to know if the ground beneath them might just decide to disappear. In 2013, researchers with the Florida Geological Survey assembled data into a sinkhole vulnerability map, much to the chagrin of property owners in places with a high chance of sinkholes. Those people don't necessarily want to know, especially those looking to sell.