Sinkholes
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Sinkhole swallows car in Citrus County, Florida

sinkhole
A water main break in Citrus County caused a huge hole to open up on the road Monday.

The hole swallowed an entire car, according to the Citrus County Sheriff's Office. Pictures show the rear wheel sticking out from the water-filled hole.

sinkhole
Truman Boulevard in Beverly Hills was shut down while crews with Citrus County Road Maintenance worked to clean the area.

The water main is owned by Rolling Oaks, a private utility company, deputies said.

The vehicle's occupants were able to safely exit the car before it fully submerged.

The car was removed from the hole as of 4 p.m. Monday, but officials were still asking drivers to avoid the area.


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Seven houses evacuated after huge sinkhole opens up in Ripon, UK

A huge sinkhole appeared behind a row of terrace houses in Yorkshire late yesterday evening
© Bendy PotterA huge sinkhole appeared behind a row of terrace houses in Yorkshire late yesterday evening
Seven houses have been evacuated after a sinkhole of unknown depth appeared in gardens in North Yorkshire.

Emergency crews were called to the 20-metre-wide (66ft) hole in Magdalen's Road, Ripon, on Tuesday night, fire and rescue service confirmed.

A spokesman said: "Two fire crews and an officer from Ripon attended a sinkhole that had appeared at the rear of two properties. There were no injuries but seven properties were evacuated.

"The hole measured approximately 20 metres by 10 metres, with an unknown depth.


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30-foot-wide sinkhole swallows intersection in Ephrata, Pennsylvania

30-foot-wide sinkhole swallows Ephrata intersection, forces evacuations
30-foot-wide sinkhole swallows Ephrata intersection, forces evacuations
A 30-foot-wide sinkhole more than 20 feet deep swallowed a street intersection in Ephrata and forced the evacuation of two apartment buildings on Tuesday.

At some point overnight Monday, a 12-inch water main pipe broke under the street at West Pine Street and Park Avenue, Ephrata police Sgt. Philip Snavely said. Water spewed out, eroding the surrounding soil.

A motorist around 5 a.m. blew out a tire when he struck a jagged dip in the roadway, Snavely said. He reported the sagging street and police closed the intersection to traffic.

Around 6 a.m., a large part of the intersection collapsed, taking part of the streets and sidewalks with it, he said.

"It took out the whole intersection,"
he said. No one was injured. The collapse also caused a natural gas line to sag, though it did not rupture. Firefighters were dispatched to help at the scene.


Sinkhole

Bizarro Earth

Massive sinkhole in Fukuoka disrupts traffic and causes blackout

Fukuoka Sinkhole
© Akira Koga/YouTube
A gaping sinkhole in the middle of a road appeared next to a busy subway station in Japan, disrupting traffic and causing a local blackout. Emergency services expect the hole, which is dangerously close to the surrounding buildings, to expand.

The hellish pit opened in the middle of the road in Fukuoka, the capital of Japan's Fukuoka Prefecture, on Tuesday morning. The affected area is in the close vicinity of a subway station.

Multiple videos have emerged showing how the hole expanded.


Comment: Sinkholes: The groundbreaking truth


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Two motorbikes fall into sinkhole in Hyderabad, India

Bystanders gather round to watch after two motorcycles fell into a sink hole after a road caved in at Safilguda, a suburb of Hyderabad.
© EPSBystanders gather round to watch after two motorcycles fell into a sink hole after a road caved in at Safilguda, a suburb of Hyderabad.
Hyderabad's notoriously capricious roads played up again on Saturday when a road caved in all of a sudden at Safilguda in the suburb of Malkajgiri and two motorcycles, one carrying a couple, fell right in.

The injured persons were helped up by passersby and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

This is the third such incident of a sink hole in Hyderabad during this year's monsoon.

In Saturday's incident, the subsidence occurred where a Water Board crew had dig a pit to carry out some repairs, and filled it with loose gravel after their work was done. The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) came by and built a road over it without checking the soundness of the earth.

Bizarro Earth

Cause of sinkhole in Victoria, Australia still a mystery

Sinkhole
© Shepparton NewsThe mystery sinkhole that appeared in Shepparton last week.
Even after extensive excavation on the site of the mystery sinkhole that appeared in Shepparton last week, the council is stumped as to just what caused it.

Council workers got a closer look at the sinkhole that opened up in Lightfoot St last week to see if recent heavy rain could have been the cause of the mystery hole.

Shire infrastructure director Steve Bowmaker said the excavation created more questions than answers as it was too dry to have been caused by the wet winter.

''I have to say that despite our best efforts, we don't know what the problem is,'' he said.

''It is possible there could have been that void in there for an extended period.''

He said residents in the street were not in any danger of cave-ins, despite the sinkhole extending to 4m deep and a few metres wide.

Stabilisation and resurfacing work will continue on the street next week, although much of the work was already scheduled before the sinkhole opened.

Just as to what caused the sinkhole, Mr Bowmaker said it was possible it was from a wash away many years ago.

''It is something that has developed over a period of years,'' he said.

However, he said residents should soon be driving on one of the best streets in the municipality when construction was finished.

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2 cars plunge into sinkhole of boiling hot water in Samara, Russia

The water was so hot, anybody inside the cars would have been boiled alive
© CEN/VK The water was so hot, anybody inside the cars would have been boiled alive
Hot steam gushed from a massive 15-metre sinkhole that opened up in a Russian road

This is the bizarre moment two cars got sucked into a giant sinkhole filled with boiling water.

The incident happened in the south-west Russian city of Samara when massive pipes containing hot water from a central heating system burst underneath a road, causing a massive 15 metre sinkhole to open up.

Hot steam could be seen rising out of the sinkhole as tarmac and the two cars fell inside.

Local media reported that had anybody been inside the cars they would have been boiled alive.


Two cars plunged into a sinkhole filled with boiling water in Russia
© CEN/VK Two cars plunged into a sinkhole filled with boiling water in Russia

Comment: Wow! That's a first!

However, this same city experienced a spate of giant sinkholes back in 2013:

Samara: The Russian city being 'eaten alive' as cars, buses and trucks disappear, swallowed by giant sinkholes


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3 vehicles fall into sinkhole in Bethpage, New York

The Nassau County police found these three vehicles tipped, or nearly so, into a sinkhole that opened up Friday, Oct. 28, 2016, near Hicksville Road and Harrison Avenue in Bethpage.
© NBC 4 NYThe Nassau County police found these three vehicles tipped, or nearly so, into a sinkhole that opened up Friday, Oct. 28, 2016, near Hicksville Road and Harrison Avenue in Bethpage.
Three vehicles became mired in a sinkhole that opened up in Bethpage on Friday afternoon, police said.

Nassau County police got an emergency call about 2:30 p.m. reporting the hole in a parking area at Hicksville Road and Harrison Avenue.

Three cars — two sport utility vehicles and a pickup truck — were at least partially trapped by the hole, photographs taken at the scene show.


Igloo

Why ice ages occur every 100,000 years

From CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

Why does our planet experience an ice age every 100,000 years?

Deep storage of carbon dioxide in the oceans may have triggered this unexplained phenomena, new research shows.
Ice Ages
© Lisieki and RaymoLR04 δ18O from Lisieki and Raymo (2005) correlated to the temperature anomaly inferred from the deuterium concentration in ice cores from EPICA Dome C, Antarctica (Jouzel et al., 2007). The main orbital (purple), tectonic (brown) and oceanic (blue) events are indicated (see the text for the references of each event). The orange box represents the start of the onset of the Northern Hemisphere glaciations. 100 kyrs and 40 kyrs correspond to the orbitally-driven glacial/interglacial cycles period. This period changed from 41 kyrs to 100 kyrs during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition toward 1 Ma (MPT). click to enlarge
Experts from Cardiff University have offered up an explanation as to why our planet began to move in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years.

This mysterious phenomena, dubbed the '100,000 year problem', has been occurring for the past million years or so and leads to vast ice sheets covering North America, Europe and Asia. Up until now, scientists have been unable to explain why this happens.

Our planet's ice ages used to occur at intervals of every 40,000 years, which made sense to scientists as the Earth's seasons vary in a predictable way, with colder summers occurring at these intervals.

However there was a point, about a million years ago, called the 'Mid-Pleistocene Transition', in which the ice age intervals changed from every 40,000 years to every 100,000 years.

New research published today in the journal Geology has suggested the oceans may be responsible for this change, specifically in the way that they suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere.

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Earthquake causes large sinkhole outside Ioannina, Greece

Sinkhole
An investigator from the fire department takes photographs of a large sinkhole that swallowed up part of a dirt track and an olive grove in Kalpaki, a rural area outside Ioannina in northwestern Greece, on Saturday.

The sinkhole is estimated to have a depth of 20-30 meters at least, and an overall surface area of around 200 square meters, and is believed to have been caused by a series of earthquakes that struck the region a week ago.

On October 14, Ioannina was hit by a strong tremor measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale and followed by hundreds of aftershocks, some of them quite powerful.