The recent discovery of a third hole in Siberia has puzzled many scientists, excited conspiracy theorists, and ordinary people made me look at the stability of the earth under our feet in a new way. The surface of the Earth is riddled with holes: some under water, some on the ground, and some generally look like doors to the other world.
Just recently, three strange holes were found in Siberia. The first, 50-100 meters in diameter, was discovered at the bottom of the lake. The second hole, a few kilometers from the first, was only 15 meters wide. The third hole, accidentally found by the reindeer herders, turned out to be an almost perfect cone-shaped hole about 4 meters wide and 60-100 meters deep.
The ring of debris and dirt around each hole indicates that the massive holes were made by forces that came from within the Earth and burst forth. Of course, interesting theories were born. Some believe that the appearance of the holes is associated with gas development in this region, but the holes are so far from the gas pipelines that scientists have rejected the idea. Other theories include stray missiles, pranksters and, of course, extraterrestrial invasion.
The real reason may be more mundane, but no less strange. One working theory about the holes is that they are a kind of reverse funnel. In this case, the holes were caused by underground destruction caused by melting permafrost. They then filled with natural gas, and when the pressure became too great, dirt and debris burst into the air instead of falling underground.
According to local residents, the holes are far from new, and scientists, in principle, admit this possibility, looking at the vegetation around them - they could have been there for several years. The second hole discovered is lovingly referred to as the "end of the world" and was allegedly observed by local residents back in September 2013. Witness accounts vary: some say they saw something falling from the sky, others say there was an explosion on the ground.
Kola superdeep well
Not all holes in earth's crust formed for natural or unknown reasons. From 1970 to 1994, Russian geologists dug the biggest hole on Earth imaginable in the name of science. The result was the Kola superdeep well, which eventually reached a depth of 12 kilometers.
Along the way, scientists discovered a number of interesting things. Digging a tunnel through stone is like digging through history. Scientists have found the remains of life that existed on the surface two billion years ago. At an impressive depth of 6,700 meters, biologists discovered tiny plankton fossils. Although it was expected that on the way down the most different types stone, it is incredible how fragile organic matter has been preserved under enormous pressure for thousands of years.
Drilling through untouched rock proved difficult. Stone samples pulled out from an area of high pressure and temperature became deformed after being exposed to the outside. The pressure and temperature also rose much higher than expected. By the time it reached 10,000 meters, the temperature had soared to 180 degrees Celsius.
Unfortunately, drilling stopped when it became impossible to combat the heat. The hole is still there, near the town of Zapolyarny, but covered with a metal cover.
The German continental deep drilling program and the pulse of the Earth
In 1994, drilling in the German ultra-deep well, originally conceived as one of the most ambitious geophysical projects. The goal of the project is to give opportunity for scientists study effects such as the effects of pressure on rocks, the presence of anomalies in the earth's crust, the structure of the crust and how it was subjected to heat and pressure. The $350 million project left Windischeschenbach with a hole 9,100 meters deep and a temperature of 265 degrees Celsius.
Among the various scientific experiments there was one unusual one: the Dutch artist Lotte Geeven wanted to know what the planet sounds like. Although scientists told her that the planet was silent, Geeven insisted on her own. She lowered the geophone into the hole to record ultrasonic waves beyond the hearing capabilities of the human ear. After converting the data on the computer into frequencies that can be heard, Lotte heard the sounds of the Earth. It was like the sound of a thunderstorm in the distance, like a terrifying heartbeat.
Dead Sea sinkholes
No one knows exactly how many holes have appeared around the Dead Sea, but it is believed that about 2,500 have appeared since 1970, and about 1,000 in the last 15 years alone. Like the holes in Siberia, these holes are signs of environmental change.
The Dead Sea is fed by the Jordan River, and every year less and less water flows into it. The sea itself is now three times smaller than it was in the 1960s, and the drainage of the reservoir has caused sinkholes, along with the demise of the resorts and hotels that once flourished along the shores. When salt water the sea seeps through the earth, it meets fresh water. When this fresh water penetrates the soil with high salt content, most of the salt dissolves. The earth weakens and begins to collapse.
The Dead Sea has always been in a state of change. It once connected with the Sea of Galilee, but this connection dried up about 18 thousand years ago. Nowadays, change is more often driven by people's actions. Water that once flowed into the sea in a state of delicate equilibrium is now being diverted throughout Jordan and Syria, with the sea receiving only 10 percent of the water it needs to sustain it.
At one time, this sea was a very popular place for those who made religious pilgrimages or wanted to be healed in the mystical waters of the sea. Now you can more often see signs warning about the danger of spontaneously occurring sinkholes. But there is also bright side: If you get swallowed by a sinkhole, it will be named after you.
The deepest blue hole (as holes located underwater are called) is Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas. At 202 meters deep, this blue hole is almost twice as deep as other blue holes, making it a favorite spot for professional divers.
In 2010, William Trubridge set a record for diving 101 meters into the hole without external oxygen or other equipment. A Brooklyn diver died trying to break the record in 2013 after being underwater for more than three and a half minutes, surfacing and then losing consciousness. Every year, more than 30 divers meet at this blue hole to compete in various competitions as part of the Vertical Blue event.
Although the hole attracts adventurers from all over the world, those who live near Dean's Blue Hole try to stay away from it. According to legend, this hole was dug by the devil, and he is still there, snatching people who dare to dive.
Randomly appearing holes in Mount Baldy
In 2013, a six-year-old boy was exploring the sand dunes of Mount Baldy in national park Indiana Dunes and was swallowed by a sinkhole that suddenly appeared underneath him. The boy was rescued after a three-hour ordeal in which he was buried under three meters of sand. Since then, other sinkholes have appeared.
Geologists cannot explain the phenomena of Mount Baldy. Since the landscape is sand, which does not create air pockets, none of the conditions necessary for the formation of sinkholes are met. When a sinkhole appears, it fills with sand throughout the day. The use of underground radar did not reveal any evidence.
A year after the first sinkhole, they not only continued to appear, but began to appear with such frequency that the park was closed. In an attempt to stabilize the sand dunes, experts have planted grasses in the hope that their root systems will stop erosion and land shifting. Some scientists believe that the instability of sand dunes may have something to do with their legendary history, which, among others, includes the story of supplying huge quantities of sand to create Mason jars.
The Devil's Sinkhole is a massive underground chamber located in Edwards, Texas. The 15 meter wide hole leads to a 106 meter deep cavern, which now plays a unique ecological role, being home to one of the largest known colonies Mexican free-tailed bats. Visitors, who of course cannot enter the cave, can see over three million bats flying out of it every night during the summer months.
The Andros Black Hole, located on South Andros Island in the Bahamas, has a completely different color from other holes in the region. It is not completely black, but dark purple. The reason is that at a depth of 18 meters there is a thick, toxic layer of bacteria floating between the oxygenated top and the almost oxygen-free bottom of the funnel.
The island itself is inhospitable, mostly consisting of mud, so it is generally impossible to reach the black hole of Andros without a helicopter and special equipment. It was first explored by scientist and diver Steffi Schwabe. She was the first to cross the curdled ink layer of bacteria. At the bottom there was a layer of clear water and another purple layer that looked like jelly.
Strange layers of water have very high level toxic hydrogen sulfide. They also contain bacteria that not only thrive between water levels, but have maintained water conditions for the last 3.5 billion years.
Son Doong Cave
While technically a cave system, Shondong is also accessible through several large openings on the Earth's surface. It was first found in 2009 after one of the holes was discovered by a local farmer. The cave system was so thoroughly buried in the jungle that it was pure luck that anyone found it at all. When members of the British Caving Association entered the hole, they discovered something completely indescribable.
The cave was declared to be the largest in the world and was extremely difficult to explore. It appeared somewhere between two and five million years ago, carved into limestone by an underground river. In some places, erosion reached so close to the surface that parts of the cave roof collapsed, creating even more holes. These holes let through enough sunlight so that the jungle begins to grow in the cave. In addition, the cave has a 60-meter calcite wall, an underground river and waterfalls, as well as stalagmites and stalactites that have grown up to 80 meters in length.
This cave jungle is also home to an impressive array of wildlife, including poisonous centipedes and whitefish. Some large chambers can fit entire neighborhoods along with skyscrapers; Bamboo forests and giant pearls can be found there. The very fact that an entire lost world was discovered only in 2009 reminds us, the inhabitants of Earth, that the planet is far from being fully explored.
Based on materials from listverse.com
List of the largest holes on Earth created by nature or human hands.
Guatemala. Heavy rains and an underground river caused the soil to collapse. As a result, several houses were destroyed. The depth of the hole was 150 m, diameter - 20 m.
("Big Blue Hole"), Belize. A beautiful, perfectly round blue spot in the middle Caribbean Sea attracts tourists and those who want to get a thrill in fins and masks under the water. The Great Blue Hole became popular thanks to marine explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He included the Blue Hole in the list best places for diving in the world. Its width is 350 meters, and its depth reaches 120 m.
3. Kimberlite pipe "Big Hole". Located in South Africa. The hole reaches a depth of 1097 meters. During the excavation, 3 tons of diamonds were found, and 22 million tons of rocks were moved to the surface. Mining of kimberlite ore was completed in 1914. Interesting fact is that it was dug by man without the use of technology.
4. Diavik quarry, Canada. One of the youngest kimberlite ore quarries. The quarry began operating in 2003. According to experts, there will be enough diamond ore for about 20 years. The quarry is unique in that it is located on a small island.
5. Kimberlite pipe "Mir", Yakutia. One of the largest quarries in the world. Its depth is exactly 525 meters, and its diameter is 1.2 km. In June 2001, diamond mining was suspended because... extraction of the remaining reserves is not profitable.
Utah, USA. The quarry reaches a depth of 1 km and a width of 3.5 km. This is the largest active quarry in . Copper mining began in 1863 and continues today.
It so happens that from time to time our planet fails. If you're lucky, holes of various sizes and degrees of bottomlessness are formed in deserted seas, jungles, taiga and tundra, but it also happens that entire cities are in danger of going underground. In some cases, nature itself is responsible for such pranks, simply presenting a person with a fait accompli, but increasingly, the blame for such incidents remains with people. Onliner.by has selected the top most beautiful and terrible, large and deep failures, places where the center of the Earth becomes a little closer.
1. Dongguan, China.
It is in China that sinkholes occur especially often. Natural disasters in this huge country are combined with extremely intensive construction, which is often carried out in flagrant violation of all established norms and rules. Last summer the construction new station underground railway in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, it ended with almost an entire street going underground.
The funnel formed in several stages. First into the first hole with an area of 80 square meters a minibus fell, and a day later, into a hole that turned out to be four times larger, the minibus was followed by the structures of an almost completed metro station and part of a city street. In this case, one person died, several neighboring buildings were seriously damaged, and the process of formation of the failure was caught on video.
2. Meridian, Mississippi, USA.
Diners who wanted to dine at the IHOP fast-food pancake house located in the rural town of Meridian in the heart of Mississippi were definitely not prepared for the surprise that nature had in store for them. On November 9, 2015, at 7:15 p.m., a giant trench 180 meters long and 15 meters wide suddenly appeared in a restaurant parking lot. A dozen cars of the establishment's clients immediately fell into it.
Most likely, the cause of the incident was the prolonged rains, which had been falling in Meridian for two weeks by that time. Local media reported that a storm sewer ran directly under the parking lot, apparently unable to withstand the pressure of incoming water. According to another version, the failure could have occurred due to the construction work. The IHOP restaurant had only been open for a week at the time of the emergency, and construction of a hotel nearby continued. Fortunately, the vehicles were the only ones damaged during this incident.
3. Batagai, Yakutia, Russia.
Scientists first discovered the Batagai fault in the mid-1960s. At that time it was a relatively small ravine, but over the past five decades it has grown to cyclopean dimensions of a kilometer long, 800 meters wide and up to 100 meters deep. The hole, reminiscent of an overgrown tadpole, is located in a sparsely populated area, near the village of Batagai, where the forces of prisoners in camps even before the Great Patriotic War Tin mining began. The emergence of this curious object is connected with this circumstance.
For the needs of the created mine, forests were cut down in the vicinity of Batagai. Subsequently, active permafrost melting occurred in this area, as a result of which the top layer of soil fell into the resulting voids. From the point of view of the ecology of the region, the ongoing process is negative in nature, but so far the rare tourists here and especially scientists who have received a convenient testing ground for studying permafrost are happy with what happened. According to the Yakut tradition, the remains of a mammoth and ancient plants, whose age reaches 200 thousand years, have already been discovered here.
4. Guatemala, Guatemala.
On February 23, 2007, in the capital of Guatemala, Guatemala City, nothing foreshadowed trouble, until an almost perfectly round hole with sheer walls hundreds of meters deep appeared right in the middle of a densely populated residential area. In this case, there were no casualties: as a result of this tragedy, five people died at once. The worst thing is that these victims were not the last.
Just three years later, in May 2010, another similar failure (20 meters wide, 90 meters deep) appeared in Guatemala, completely destroying a three-story factory building. As a result of this incident, 15 people have already died. Both tragedies were caused by a combination of factors: leaking sewers and heavy rains that caused flooding simply eroded the volcanic and limestone rocks on which the city stands.
5. Ein Gedi, Israel.
If in Guatemala the matter was limited to only two failures, then in the Israeli oasis of Ein Gedi, located on the coast of the Dead Sea, they literally number in the thousands. The reason for their formation was the constant, ongoing decline in the level of the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet. At the same time, due to the ever-increasing withdrawal of water from the Jordan River that feeds it, the water level in the sea is falling at a rate of about a meter per year. The sea-saline rock begins to be actively eroded by fresh groundwater, which, in turn, leads to the formation of numerous and extensive voids, the obligatory precursors of failures. It is extremely difficult to predict their appearance, which seriously threatens the tourism potential of the region.
6. Tianken Xiaozhai, China.
This is the deepest natural sinkhole on Earth. An underground river flowing in the Difeng Cave in the Chinese municipality of Chongqing has, over time, eroded the limestone that forms the local mountains. The result was logical: the resulting karst sinkhole is 662 meters deep and more than half a kilometer wide.
Speleologists discovered it relatively recently, in 1994, after which the hole received the nickname “Sky Pit.” In addition to tourists, the pit was favored by numerous plants and animals, including the rare clouded leopard.
7. Solikamsk and Berezniki, Russia.
Over thirty years, starting in 1986, six large sinkholes appeared on the territory and in the immediate vicinity of the Ural cities of Solikamsk and Berezniki. Since the 1930s, active mining has been carried out here potassium salts, resulting in settlements found themselves surrounded by large mine workings. Moreover, the cities that grew over time eventually occupied the territory over them, and they were separated from the vast underground voids only by a relatively thin, 250-350-meter jumper.
The salt rock underground continues to be dissolved by groundwater. This process deforms the inter-mine bridges left in the workings, which ultimately leads to destabilization of their structure, flooding of mines, the formation of cracks, and man-made earthquakes. The sinkholes in Berezniki and Solikamsk continue to increase, which has already led to the resettlement of entire urban areas on the surface and the closure of a number of enterprises.
8. Sarisarinyama, Venezuela.
Tepuis are unique mesas in Venezuela, the remains of an ancient plateau isolated from the rest of the world at their base. On their flat tops special world with endemic species of plants and animals that have evolved along their own path for thousands of years. In addition to this circumstance, tepuis are also interesting for their numerous karst sinkholes, the largest of which are located on Mount Sarisarinyama in the Venezuelan state of Bolivar.
They were formed during the collapse of tunnel arches underground rivers, literally penetrating the mountain. The largest of the four failures on Sarisarinyam are Sima Humboldt and Sima Martel, located 700 meters from each other, going 300-350 meters deep into the tepui. At their bottom there is life of its own, including even large trees, and this life was isolated from both the top of the plateau and Big Earth- a unique microcosm within a microcosm, a thing in itself, discovered only in the 1960s.
Kimberlite pipe "Big Hole" (South Africa). The largest one dug by hand is 1097 meters deep. More than 22 million tons of rock were moved to the surface. and 3 tons of diamonds were mined. Development was completed in 1914.
Kennecott Quarry. Utah. The largest active open-pit mine in the world, copper mining began in 1863 and is still ongoing. Approximately a kilometer deep and 3.5 wide.
Diavik Quarry, Canada. Diamonds are mined. The quarry is located on the islands and has its own infrastructure with an airport capable of receiving passenger Boeings.
Great Blue Hole, Belize. Width 400 meters, depth 145 - 160 meters. A point of attraction for professional divers from all over the world.
Drain hole in the reservoir of the Monticello Dam. Serves to discharge excess water in the reservoir reservoir. A kind of safety valve.
Karst sinkhole in Guatemala. Called groundwater and rain. During the formation of the sinkhole, several people died and a dozen houses were destroyed.
A short overview of the largest “holes” on Earth, of natural and man-made origin.
(Total 13 photos)
1. Kimberlite pipe “Mir”
"Mir" is the largest diamond quarry in Yakutia. And according to some versions - the whole world. This pipe contains 25% of the world's diamond reserves. The diameter at the surface of the earth is 1200 meters, at the base – 50 meters. The depth of this cone is 50 m.
2. Giant Blue Hole, Belize
Once upon a time there was a system of limestone caves on the surface of the earth. But the ice melted, the ocean level rose, the caves sank into the depths of the sea.
As a result, a pointed underwater funnel was formed, similar to a shell with a diameter of 300 m and a depth of 120 m.
3. Bingham Canyon Copper Mine, USA
This copper mine is located in Utah near Salt Lake City. It is the largest of its kind on Earth. Copper is mined there by open-pit mining and a hole 1.2 km deep and 4 km wide has already been dug in the earth’s crust.
Now the surface area of the mine is 7.7 sq. km, and its size is increasing every year.
4. Diavik Diamond Mine, Canada
Located near the city of Yellowknife, the Diavik quarry is one of the largest open-pit diamond mines in the world. Its depth is 525 m and its diameter is about 1,200 km.
Every day, about 20,000 thousand carats of diamonds are mined at this mine, which is about 4 kilograms.
5. Monticello Dam, USA
There was once a town on Lake Berryessa. During the construction of the dam, the city was completely flooded and now it is at the very bottom of the new lake.
Another attraction of the Monticello Dam in California is its unique spillway. It is a huge concrete pipe into which water from the reservoir flows if the surface level rises.
6. Big Hole Kimberlite Pipe, South Africa
This mine was developed without the use of machinery, “by hand.” It is located in Kimberley and is no longer operational. During development, the depth of the mine reached 240 m.
