Giant Guatemalan 'Sinkhole' Is Worse Than We Thought

reillymj writes "Despite hundreds of media reports to the contrary, Sam Bonis, a geologist whose life work has been studying Guatemalan geology, has plainly said that the dramatic 'sinkhole' in Guatemala City that opened over the weekend isn't a sinkhole at all. Instead, he called it a 'piping feature' and warned that because the country's capital city sits on a pile of loose volcanic ash, the over one million people living on top of the pile are in danger. 'I'd hate to have to be in the government right now,' Bonis, who worked for the Guatemalan government's Instituto Geografico Nacional for 16 years, said. 'There is an excellent potential for this to happen again. It could happen almost anywhere in the city.'"

Comments

Moving the country?

[MalHavoc]

Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick. There's a neat article about it in this month's National Geographic.

Re:Moving the country?

[timeOday]

While the occasional sinkhole is scary and dramatic, the human costs of staying put and paying closer attention to hydrology, and possibly dealing with the occasional sinkhole incident, are almost certainly lower than trying to move on that scale.

I agree relocating en masse is unlikely. There has to be some way to map this. If we can find oil deposits under a mile of water and another mile of rock, there must be a way to do this. Maybe ground penetrating radar. Perhaps total collapse is preceded by depressions that can be tracked over time with synthetic aperture radar. There must be a way.

Re:Moving the country?

[Dogtanian]

I remember learning about England during the Industrial Revolution. [..] Somebody asked "If it was so horrible for the factory workers why did they all go there" The teacher made the point that as bad as the factories were, it was still better than farming.

It's not quite as simple as that. In the case of England during the Industrial Revolution, the inclosures act(s) effectively made it more difficult for people to earn a living on the land as they had done previously, and increasingly forced them to move into cities to undertake industrial work. The Marxist interpretation is that the government was effectively legislating people off the land and into the capitalist system.

I'm not saying that working on the land was an easy option by any means- only that saying that people left it entirely of their own free will is misleading.

Some may argue the same thing happens nowadays when people leave farming to take up city-based factory work in third world countries- there is an active external force/agenda (e.g. those international bodies wishing to force through capitalist/free-market reforms by tying aid or loans to them) coercing people into the industrial option by making the old way of doing things unworkable.

Centralia

[adeft]

Here in PA we have a town called Centralia that is over an active burning coal fire. I believe it has been burning for over 50 years. The town was considered unfit to live in and everyone was encouraged to move. There are still some stragglers remaining, I believe the population is about 5 people. You can still walk/drive through it, but at your own risk as sink holes are a huge issue. If you can ignore the rediculous pop-ups pictures of what a zombie apocalypse might look like here

Re:Errr... yeah

[Tapewolf]

I've seen the picture before, but only by clicking on the one in the article to get a higher-res version do I finally think I understand what it is I'm seeing.

See, there was this darker bit at the bottom that you couldn't make out properly, I figured it was an artifact of the image, or a heap of black stuff at the bottom. When it first went around the office, people were saying 'Why can't you see the bits of the building at the bottom?'
Now that I can see it more clearly, it seems to me that the brown bit is the crust, and the black bit is a hole into a fuck-off big cavern, which could quite easily be as big as the rest of the picture, if not much of the town.

Re:Piping Feature? No...

[thijsh]

I think you are confusing it with this... look at the photo, if any feature on the earth ever looked like a gate to hell it's this fiery pit. :-)

Re:sinkhole

[AthanasiusKircher]

Oh, by the way, I realized some might not be familiar with the number convention of archaic spellings in the OED. Basically, a number "1" means before the year 1100, other numbers mean the succeeding centuries -- 2 = 12th century (1100-1200), 3 = 13th century, etc.

So, "sinked" in this case is listed as "7 (9 dial.)", which means that it was common in the 17th century (1600-1700) era, and apparently was a dialect form in some regions in the 19th century. Not exactly a popular historical form.