Sinkholes
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Bizarro Earth

Sinkhole opens under swimming pool in Israel, swallowing a man and killing him

sinkhole pool israel man dead
© Fire and Rescue ServicesRescue teams search for a man believed to have been sucked into a sinkhole that opened up in an in-ground pool at a private home in central Israel, July 21, 2022.
Rescue operation in central Israel home went on for 4 hours, complicated by fears of secondary collapse; another man pulled in by receding water managed to exit with light injuries

A man was found dead Thursday afternoon, hours after a sinkhole opened up in an inground swimming pool at a private home in central Israel, with the receding water dragging him away along with another man who managed to climb his way out.

Search teams at the scene in the town of Karmei Yosef found the body following a complex rescue operation that took four hours and required the assistance of Go-Pro cameras hooked to the helmets of the staff workers as they were lowered deep underground

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Crews work to repair giant sinkhole that swallowed van in the Bronx, New York

sink
A sinkhole opened up and swallowed a van in the Bronx after a day of torrential rain and flooding across the area.

Crews were still working on Tuesday to repair the 58-foot long, 15-foot wide and 20-foot deep hole on Radcliff Avenue in Morris Park.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection responded to investigate the scene.

Crews say repair work will be extensive, and the block will remain closed for a week or so to rebuild subsurface infrastructure and restore the roadway.

Officials said everything will be considered as part of the investigation, including if weather played a role.


Bizarro Earth

Glacier collapses in Italian Alps, killing at least six

glacier collapse alps italy
© AGICollapsed glacier, Marmolada, Italy
The glacier collapsed on the mountain of Marmolada, the highest in the Italian Dolomites, near the hamlet of Punta Rocca, the route normally taken to reach its summit.

An avalanche sparked by the collapse of the largest glacier in the Italian Alps killed at least six people and injured eight others on Sunday, an emergency services spokeswoman said.

The glacier collapsed on the mountain of Marmolada, the highest in the Italian Dolomites, near the hamlet of Punta Rocca, the route normally taken to reach its summit.

The disaster struck one day after a record-high temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at the glacier's summit.

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Info

Serious issues with plate tectonics

Geological map of Alaska showing various exotic terranes.
© USGSGeological map of Alaska showing various exotic terranes.
David Pratt's publication in the year 2000 enumerates multiple problems affecting the theory of plate tectonics and seafloor spreading.

The above schematic of Alaska reveals regions of rock strata that appear to have "accreted" to an original craton. Southern Alaska is composed of fragments in all shapes and sizes, each one telling its own tale. They are all "exotic terranes", formed at different places and times. How they were transported to their present location, and why some are rotated with respect to adjoining terranes is a mystery.

Some exotic terranes arrived from regions on the other side of the world, while others are from nearby locations. They are each quite different from one another in their characteristics, representing strata from many so-called "geologic ages". There are deposits from the Quaternary period lying in proximity to those from the Cambrian and Mesozoic periods. Those epochs represent hundreds of millions of years. If the theory of continental movement is correct, then "collisions" between landmasses took place more than a dozen times in Alaska. However, each terrane is not arranged side-by-side with its neighbor, they are intermixed with each other, as the schematic reveals.

Another puzzling aspect to the terrane lithography is that some of it is oceanic crust, while some is continental. Some terranes appear to be from volcanic islands. Others appear to be the remains of continental shelves from South America. Less than one percent of Alaska is thought to be from the "original" North American continent.

In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 14, No. 3, pages 307-352, David Pratt took issue with the theory of tectonic displacement of continental and ocean floor structure. As he wrote: "The classical model of thin lithospheric plates moving over a global asthenosphere is shown to be implausible."

Blue Planet

Giant sinkhole with a forest inside found in China

Karst sinkhole china
© Song Wen/Xinhua/Alamy Live NewsThis giant karst sinkhole, also called a tiankeng, has plants growing at the bottom in Luoquanyan Village of Xuan'en County, central China's Hubei Province. This is not the sinkhole discovered in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
A team of Chinese scientists has discovered a giant new sinkhole with a forest at its bottom.

The sinkhole is 630 feet (192 meters) deep, according to the Xinhua news agency, deep enough to just swallow St. Louis' Gateway Arch. A team of speleologists and spelunkers rappelled into the sinkhole on Friday (May 6), discovering that there are three cave entrances in the chasm, as well as ancient trees 131 feet (40 m) tall, stretching their branches toward the sunlight that filters through the sinkhole entrance.

"This is cool news," said George Veni, the executive director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI) in the U.S., and an international expert on caves. Veni was not involved in the exploration of the cave, but the organization that was, the Institute of Karst Geology of the China Geological Survey, is NCKRI's sister institute.


Bizarro Earth

China continues to laugh at western 'green energy' foolishness

China Laughs
© Watts Up With That?
With an energy cost crisis now striking Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S., some cracks have begun to appear in the "net zero" utopian dreams being pursued almost universally by Western politicians. Nevertheless, at this writing, the rapid elimination of use of fossil fuels, supposedly to fight "climate change," remains official government policy throughout Europe, at the federal level in the U.S., in most blue American states, and as well in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Here in the U.S., although President Biden has ordered some temporary measures like release of some oil from the nation's strategic reserves, the full federal bureaucracy remains under orders from the top to force reduction in production and use of fossil fuels in every way it can devise. Meanwhile, states like New York and California have rapidly approaching legal deadlines for shuttering all fossil fuel power plants, prohibiting all automobiles other than electric ones, banning natural gas for heating and cooking, and otherwise quickly upending the last century of energy progress that has made our lives affordable and enjoyable.

We are supposed to believe that the official fossil fuel suppression policies will stop "climate change" and "save the planet" through the mechanism of rapid aggregate reductions of emissions of CO2 and other "greenhouse gases." The rescue of the planet's climate will make worthwhile our sacrifices in the form of higher energy prices, increased taxes to support subsidies to renewable energy, and restrictions on lifestyle.

But in fact, that narrative is all so much hogwash. In the West, twenty plus years and trillions of dollars of subsidies for "green energy" schemes have achieved only some marginal reductions in the share of final energy consumption derived from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, fossil fuel usage continues to soar. Leading the way is China, which has used the last two years of Covid distraction to have its emissions leapfrog to new records. In the overall picture, the Western obsession with decreasing emissions, despite enormous costs, does not have any impact that is even noticeable.

Two recently-issued reports paint the picture of a real world of ever-increasing fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions (although there was a minor Covid-induced downward blip in 2020). In March, the UN's International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its annual Global Energy Review: CO2 Emissions in 2021. Also, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has released its Briefing Paper 58 titled "China's Energy Dream," written by Patricia Adams. (Full disclosure: I am the President of the American Friends of the GWPF.). Both reports underscore the complete absurdity of the ongoing green energy foolishness of the West.

Attention

Giant sinkhole opens up in the Arctic seafloor

Melting permafrost is causing parts of the seafloor to collapse.
Giant Sinkhole
© Eve Lundsten © 2022 MBARIRepeated surveys with MBARI's mapping AUVs revealed dramatic changes to seafloor bathymetry from the Arctic shelf edge in the Canadian Beaufort Sea. This sinkhole developed in just nine years.
Giant "sinkholes" — one of which could devour an entire city block holding six-story buildings — are appearing along the Arctic seafloor, as submerged permafrost thaws and disturbs the area, scientists have discovered.

But even though human-caused climate change is increasing the average temperatures in the Arctic, the thawing permafrost that's creating these sinkholes seems to have a different culprit — heated, slowly moving groundwater systems.

The Arctic permafrost at the bottom of the Canadian Beaufort Sea has been submerged for about 12,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, when meltwater from glaciers blanketed the region. Until now, the frozen seafloor had been hidden from scientists' peering eyes. This remote part of the Arctic has only recently become accessible to researchers on ships as climate change causes the sea ice to retreat, the researchers said.

Bizarro Earth

Geologists unravel plate tectonic chain reaction

A plate tectonic chain reaction.
© Utrecht UniversityA plate tectonic chain reaction.
Geologists at Utrecht University are working hard to unravel the secrets of plate tectonics, the mechanism that continuously shapes Earth's crust and is causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This time, another mystery has been dissected. In the Earth's geological past, there were 'short' periods of a few million years during which many tectonic plates around the world suddenly changed their speed and direction. What caused these abrupt changes in plate movements? Earlier research showed that changes in movement between two plates can result from continental collisions or rising mantle plumes. But could such collisions or mantle plumes set off a global chain reaction? Now geologists have succeeded in finding evidence that supports this. "With this discovery, we are able to better understand the driving forces behind plate movements, and thus processes such as mountain formation or volcanism."

This paper, published in Nature Geoscience, was a collaboration between geoscientists from Utrecht University, Australian National University, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. To test their hypothesis, the researchers asked themselves the following question: did the formation of a new subduction zone north of Arabia that was triggered by a mantle plume that caused a super volcano near Madagascar ~100 million years ago set off a chain reaction? Utrecht professor of plate tectonics and paleogeography Douwe van Hinsbergen, geologist, former Utrecht PhD student and first author Derya Gürer, and geophysicist Roi Granot, analysed the consequences step by step. "If our hypothesis is correct, the new subduction zone that formed north of Arabia should have caused forces that accelerated, and rotated the African Plate in the 10 million years after subduction initiation. However, to analyse this, we had to solve a major problem," says Gürer.

Seismograph

Road in UK is ripped up and twisted by 'unexplained underground movements'

landslip road
A warped section of the B4069 near Lyneham in Wiltshire has left residents mystified as to exactly what underground processes could have caused the earthquake-like damage
A ripped up road could cost millions to repair after mysterious underground movements left it so warped it looks like it had been hit by an earthquake.

A section of the B4069 near Lyneham in Wiltshire has been so badly damaged the tarmac has completely snapped or is at a 45 degree angle.

Wiltshire Council say the road has been closed since February 17 - but some drivers are still trying to use it according to police.

The earthquake-like damage has been caused by unexplained underground movements which will now be investigated.


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Famous Kashmir trout stream vanishes into sinkhole

River goes underground in Kokernag Anantnag
River goes underground in Kokernag, Anantnag
A famous Kashmir trout stream has vanished into a sinkhole spreading fear in the south Kashmir Kokernag area. The famous Brengi stream in the Kokernag area of Anantnag district has been draining into a sinkhole leaving the rest of the stream dry during the last two days.

Brengi stream is one of the most famous trout angling streams which is sought after by anglers for its brown trout species. Two days back, a huge sinkhole developed in the stream which has been draining all the run of the stream water into it.

This has left the downstream portion dry killing trout fish in large numbers. District authorities said around 50 cusecs of water was draining into the sinkhole at the moment. It must be recalled that in winter all the streams and rivers in the Valley have minimum discharge. Authorities have imposed section 144 CrPc in the area to prevent people going closer to the sinkhole since scores of locals have been visiting the place to see the disturbing sight.


Source: IANS