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BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala |
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Subject: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Little Hawk Date: 01 Jun 10 - 12:40 PM Here's something you don't see every day. Guatemala sinkhole It would certainly make me nervous to be living anywhere near that thing. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: pdq Date: 01 Jun 10 - 12:55 PM Some years ago a large sinkhole opened up in Florida on May fifth. I considered it my duty name the new landmark "Sinkhole De Mayo". |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Q (Frank Staplin) Date: 01 Jun 10 - 12:58 PM Much like the famous sinkholes in Yucatan. Caves in limestone are the cause there; I don't know what the subsurface is like in Guatemala. Collapse of old mine workings have caused similar sinkholes in the U.S. and elsewhere. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Royston Date: 01 Jun 10 - 01:07 PM That is mindblowing; particularly that it should be so perfectly round. Old mineworkings? I don't know. Looks like Guatemala City has form for this Story Here |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Q (Frank Staplin) Date: 01 Jun 10 - 01:26 PM Not the first in the city. One in 2007 is supposed to have been causes by sewer water dissolving the underlying rock. Some of the largest known are in Venezuela. The U. S. Geological Survey: They are common anywhere "where the rock below the surface is limestone, carbonate rock, salt beds or rocks that can be dissolved by ground water circulating through them." Caverns develop and the land above can collapse into them. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: gnu Date: 01 Jun 10 - 01:31 PM Royston... "Old mineworkings?" Sure looks like it, but "pipes" do occur in rock. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: GUEST,TIA Date: 01 Jun 10 - 01:32 PM Much of Guatemala is underlain by Karst. In there areas, there are caves that have been there for millenia. Sinkholes happen when there is a storm, or a water or sewer line break. The infiltrating water carries the overburden down into the cave system. Usually, the cavity forms at the top of rock over the cave, then eats (stopes) its way up until it breaks through at the surface. In February 2007 an slightly smaller one happend in Guatemala City when a sewer line ruptured underground. Three people died in that 300-foot hole. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Q (Frank Staplin) Date: 01 Jun 10 - 01:38 PM Thanks, TIA; karst of course develops in limestone areas. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: GUEST,TIA Date: 01 Jun 10 - 05:31 PM Limestone, dolomite, gypsum or evaporites. Anywhere that the bedrock is slightly soluble in water. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Amos Date: 01 Jun 10 - 05:58 PM The whol eof the Yucatan peninsula, just north of Guatemala, is riddled with underlying cave and tunnel systems carved by centuries of water seeping through the limestone under the jungle. These make some of the most exhilarating dive locations on Earth--huge barrel-like caverns that haven't seen daylight in thousands of years, others with thin fingers of sunlight streaming down in just one corner, with ancient trilobites from a long-departed sea embedded in the ceilings, phantasmagoric displays of stalactites and stalagmites forming cathedrals, and strange blind white fishies that live at the boundary between the fresh water from above and the salt water from below. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Q (Frank Staplin) Date: 01 Jun 10 - 10:29 PM No trilobites, Amos. They died out long before the carbonates of Yucatan were deposited. But dive me some Maya gold that the sacrificed young maidens wore when they were tossed into the sinkholes. |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Alice Date: 01 Jun 10 - 10:57 PM Yes, that new one in Guatemala city is mind blowing to see. Karst pools in the Yucatan are called cenotes. There is a famous cenote (seh-NO-tay) at Chichen Itza that I have visited. Green water in the cenote, and creepy feeling thinking of all the victims sacrificed there. click Photo |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Amos Date: 01 Jun 10 - 11:15 PM There were fossilized organisms in the cavern ceilings, when you lit them up with the dive flashlights, but perhaps I had the wrong name for them. They were spined in a way similar to trilobites but they may have been some kind of ancient fish-like things. A |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: GUEST,amergin Date: 01 Jun 10 - 11:16 PM Well, there's a huge sink hole down in Washington, DC....it is pentagon shaped.... |
Subject: RE: BS: Giant sinkhole in Guatemala From: Don Firth Date: 02 Jun 10 - 06:08 PM From The Daily Beast: Since this takes about 700 years to load, I thought I could save you time by cutting and pasting the whole article. If you have a tendency to feel slightly paranoid, maybe you'd better not read it. As to our living in a benevolent world, it's not all that reassuring. The enormous sinkhole that swallowed a building in Guatemala is all the more terrifying for being so strange. From rampaging venomous snakes to tornadoes made of fire, here are a few more examples of how Mother Nature gets creative when she's angry.Then, added to all that, we're in line with one of the poles of Wolf-Rayet 104 in the constellation Sagitarius. WR-104 is a gamma-ray burster and it could blow at any time, bathing us with a jet of gamma-rays. According to a number of astronomers, we're staring right down the barrel of the shotgun. Well . . . what can I say but—have a nice day. Don Firth P. S. Somehow, I find myself particularly fascinated, in a horrified sort of way, with the flaming tornado. |