Giant Guatemalan 'Sinkhole' Is Worse Than We Thought 357
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.'"
Look on the bright side (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like the city nearly doubled its surface area!
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
No Silver Surfer references yet?
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
The city could have a hole lot of problems.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nah... it's probably all downhill from here.
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:4, Funny)
The city could have a hole lot of problems.
...unless they take a holistic approach to them!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Won't ever complain about the pot holes in my street again.
Re: (Score:2)
And all that money they invested in the clothing factory went down the drain.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
[It] isn't a sinkhole at all. Instead, he called it a 'piping feature'
it's not a hole it's a feature
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
From orbit? It's the only way to be sure.
Moving the country? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Guatemala != Guatemala City
Thirteen and two million resindents, respectively...either way, your idea is awful.
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Thirteen and two million resindents, respectively...either way, your idea is awful. "
It isn't "awful" if it's necessary, then it's just "unfortunate".
The intelligent thing to do is (gradually) either relocate (much work to replicate systems) or DISPERSE the city elsewhere. Efficient dispersal of population is likely the lowest-impact way to deal with the disaster.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Insightful)
He said the intelligent thing to do, not realistic.
It would be the 'best' thing, but as it concerns humans, which are emotional and irrational beings, it's highly unlikely.
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Insightful)
This may not be true. I remember learning about England during the Industrial Revolution. Hordes of people flocking into the cities to work endless hours for low wages in dirty, dangerous mills. 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. Farmers worked as many hours or more than the factory workers, and the conditions were often just as dangerous. On top of that weather, disease and pests could wipe out your crops and leave you with nothing and you would starve. In the mills, as long as you worked you could feed your family; on the farms you could work hard and still starve.
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Interesting)
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) [wikipedia.org] 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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Funny)
And a bunch of confused tourists wondering why their GPSes are off so badly - the map is right, but it says the town is somewhere else.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it's not the first town we've moved! Malmberget and Grängesberg are a few others. And Falun (one of the world's largest copper mines from the 7th century until it closed in 1992) collapsed in 1687 resulting in a hole 1.5 km in diameter [wikipedia.org] right next to the town. (Miraculously, nobody was injured because it occured during one of their few holidays).
Here's a pic [tinypic.com] I
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Sweden? Trouble? I think this guy was responsible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_i_L%C3%B6nneberga [wikipedia.org]
I have only seen him as this guy though: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_aus_L%C3%B6nneberga [wikipedia.org]
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Insightful)
The tricky thing is, though, that moving large numbers of people is actually pretty difficult, and has a history of not working out very well, especially in areas where resources are slim, or governance isn't brilliant.. Moving slightly under 20K people, as part of a formal program, in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$36,000, is a pain in the ass, and won't be cheap; but is doable.
Moving 2 million(or even a substantial fraction thereof), in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$2,700 could get ugly. Like "squalid children with big eyes huddled under sodden tarps in disease-infested refugee camps" ugly.
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.
Re:Moving the country? (Score:5, Informative)
Having just gotten back from Guatemala, you already see a fair amount of the "squalid children with big eyes huddled under sodden tarps" even if not in the urban centers.
The country has some pretty significant poverty/living condition issues and the city is one of the BETTER parts of the country. Any sort of relocation project is entirely impossible given the finances and state of the nation.
The issue really is that any sort of infrastructure project might be equally crippled. This in many ways reminds of the situation in Haiti prior to the earthquake. They know they are in a hazardus environment, but the lack of ability to implement anything in terms of building code or infrastructure programs means that prayer and luck are the only options.
Re:Moving the country? (Score:4, Interesting)
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. [wikipedia.org] Perhaps total collapse is preceded by depressions that can be tracked over time with synthetic aperture radar [thepanamanews.com]. There must be a way.
Re:Moving the country? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, all that makes no difference if there isn't some relatively cheap way; but I have to imagine that detecting the difference between solid rock and unstable loose fill in the top hundred meters or so is probably about the easiest Reflection Seismology problem that you'll run into in the real world. Might have to bum some supercomputer time; but you'll be way behind the difficultly curve compared to the reflection seismology problems that the oil guys are doing all the time.
The second question, of course, is whether these unstable patches are fixable in some cheap way. Knowing which half of the capital you have to evacuate is only incrementally more helpful than knowing that you have to evacuate half the capital. If, on the other hand, it turns out that you can just drill a well(ie. basic water-well drilling tech, cheap and widely available) and then pump in some cement, that might actually be economically practical, compared to the alternatives.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
That sounds like an aweful lot of bork.
Errr... yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
The article's title (Don't call it a sinkhole) is certainly on the money. I was shocked. If you haven't read/looked at the article, do. I was expecting, you know, a little crater thing or something. This is far, far beyond that. It is literally a massive cylindrical hole. It's amazing.
Re: (Score:2)
I know I'd move away if given the chance. That thing is HUGE.
Re:Errr... yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
The worst part is it's depth, so the land looks safe to build on; while in reality it is far more dangerous.
Re:Errr... yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree the article suxors, and the image is insanely awesome. At first glance, by brain was saying "this is a photoshop'ed image, no such thing exists in nature". It is just too perfect a cylinder, which makes it all the more disturbing. My question is: where the hell is the material that is missing? Has no one dropped a camera down the hole yet? I don't think they are going to understand what is going on until they see the bottom of the hole. Is it a large chasm? Does the hole stay perfectly cylindr
Re: (Score:2)
It's that damned particle accelorator. They created a mini-black hole, and it escaped to Guatemala City. THAT's where all the material went!
Re: (Score:2)
I would vote for this [starwars.com]
Re:Errr... yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Errr... yeah (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The picture looked to me as if the Mole Man attacked, and the FF were out of town. The walls looked practically vertical.
Re: (Score:2)
Emergence Day (Score:3, Funny)
Division by Zero (Score:5, Funny)
Flikr (Score:5, Informative)
The full size version of that photo thats always on the front page of this story is on flikr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gobiernodeguatemala/4657053554/sizes/l/
Amazing, it looks like something out of a scifi movie. Did the death star missfire?
I have a solution (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Better: have everyone wear stunt harnesses at all times. If the ground below you collapses, you are left there dangling where the sidewalk used to be.
Centralia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not the game but it was for the movie.
Re: (Score:2)
When I was about 5 (almost 50 years ago) we were visiting relatives, and they took us to see where a coal mine had been buring underground for years. The ground was warm and slightly smelly, but that's about as far as I remember. Most of my memories of that are seeing family slides and hearing stories. The relatives were in the Altoona area, though.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While we are talking about unusual man-made geological features, Hell's Gate [gosmiley.com] should not be omitted.
It is essentially a big crater in Uzbekistan where natural gas has been burning for decades. Back when it formed they ignited the gas. From a current perspective that still makes sense, as burning it in this case converts methane which has a several times larger warming potential than CO2. Underground coal of course is just the opposite and given they have been burning so long I assume it is beyond current tec
Call in the Fantastic Four (Score:2, Funny)
It's the Rise of the Silver Surfer!!!
Re: (Score:2)
yea.. finally a reference!
Also Fringe would work.
I thought this sinkhole looked more structured than normal. I had thought there was an underground parking facility which sunk along with the building on top. That could explain the smooth, sheer and cylindrical walls, but I guess there's a more ominous explanation.
Interestingly the article says there's hope if they manage their water/sewers properly.
It's not a sinkhole (Score:5, Funny)
Goatse recently moved to Guatemala City.
Re:It's not a sinkhole (Score:4, Funny)
Goatse recently moved to Guatemala City.
Guatamala Opened Arse To Sink Everyone?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The first part of that sentence is superfluous, since if you do know what goatse is, you still don't want to know.
Any Stranger on a surfboard in the area? (Score:2)
Hey wait, idea! (Score:4, Funny)
Any chance a large amount of oil would fix things?
Re:Hey wait, idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Any chance a large amount of oil would fix things?
No, but I'm unfamiliar with Guatemalan politics. Which party do we blame for this?
I think this guy used to be a software dev manager (Score:4, Funny)
That huge gaping hole that swallowed your neighbor? That's not a geological bug, it's a 'feature'.
Re:I think this guy used to be a software dev mana (Score:2)
That huge gaping hole that swallowed your neighbor? That's not a geological bug, it's a 'feature'.
Yeah, I figured there was a way to get a Microsoft joke out of this thing if we worked on it hard enough.
The entrance... (Score:3, Funny)
I think we have just found the entrance to middle earth. Does anyone see any dinosaurs or dragons down there?
Anyone remember the Prisoner miniseries remake? (Score:2)
Well this is unusual (Score:5, Funny)
My ex made a /. headline!
Sinkhole (Score:2)
My mother-in-law is in Guatemala?
do I grok this? (Score:2)
It sounds like he's saying that the city is on top of a layer of volcanic material, which is on top of plain-old dirt. And the dirt is washing away underneath... which sounds like a massive freaking problem...
Some good pictures (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Some good pictures (Score:5, Funny)
It's getting pretty close to 2012.
Just sayin
I have an environment friendly solution! (Score:2, Funny)
Tourists love crazy shit like this (Score:2)
This is Guatemala City! (Score:5, Funny)
Volcanic ash piping disaster missing from SimCity (Score:3, Interesting)
When I started here all there was was ash! (Score:5, Funny)
.
Picture of the bottom (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/Guatemala-sinkhole/(photo)/2 [csmonitor.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a couple of pictures of the "sinkhole" there, and especially one of the bottom, it seems there is a big cave
http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/Guatemala-sinkhole/(photo)/2 [csmonitor.com]
THANK YOU, thank you, thank you!
I've been looking for a better view, and wondering where that big slice of earth went.
From Guatemalan point of view (Score:5, Informative)
what is 200mts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you mean 200m?
We're Talkin' Biblical Proportions (Score:3, Interesting)
#DIV/0! error (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you are confusing it with this [travelpod.com].
Re:Piping Feature? No... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, THAT'S the one I was looking for. Thank you :-)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So must the CIA [cia.gov], the BBC [bbc.co.uk], and even their own embassy [turkmenistanembassy.org] and government [turkmenistan.gov.tm]. They've got their own TLD [wikipedia.org] for crying out loud.
Seriously, listen to the news or something. Read a book. It's an actual country.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Turkmenistan? Wikipedia is making up country names now?
Wikipedia may have made up Uzbekistan [wikipedia.org], but not Turkmenistan. That was made up by Burat or somebody.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
He was getting too much spam on the Balrog account, it's a feature, not a bug.
Re:Piping Feature? No... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Piping Feature? No... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That is both very funny, well related, and yet more disgusting that I really want to process.
Re:Why the wait? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA?
In 2007, a similar hole opened after a sewage pipe broke pipe just a few blocks from this weekend's disaster. Bonis was part of a team of geologists and engineers brought in to investigate and advise officials on what went wrong.
"Our recommendation was that this could happen again," he recalled. "When you have water flowing from storm water runoff, a sewage pipe, or any kind of strong flow, it eats away at the loose material. We don't know how long it has to go on before it collapses. But once it starts collapsing, God help us."
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps it is just news to you?
Re:sinkhole (Score:4, Funny)
Re:sinkhole (Score:5, Informative)
Actually 'sinked' is more proper/correct, though I no it sounds weird.
You "no" it sounds weird?
Somehow I don't think I'll be taking advice on what's more proper/correct from you.
For what it's worth, a quick glance at Dictionary.com shows no results at all for sinked (and Firefox's spell checker just red-lined it when I typed it), while it clearly identifies sunk as the proper past tense of sink.
Re:sinkhole (Score:5, Informative)
First of all...whoosh.
I don't get the joke here either. Are you claiming "sinked" is correct or not? Did you intend to say "no" instead of "know" or not? I think you need [sarcasm] tags.
Secondly, I would recommend a real (e.g. physical), unabridged dictionary. However if you want you want to use an online dictionary I would recommend thefreedictionary.com as it is far more expansive on pronunciation.
Actually, the best unabridged dictionary in the world is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is available online (for a subscription fee, though). It's better than the paper form of the OED, which isn't updated as frequently.
The -ed in past tense verbs becomes more common in ares that have been speaking English for a longer period of time. For example, in the Southern US (where they have been speaking English for a long time), and in England (where English was invented) many verbs are in the -ed format: swimmed, runned, stinged, waked, sinked, etc.
I'm going to have to call BS on this part. The OED is the standard authority of English in England. Under "sink" it lists:
Pa. tense sank, sunk. pa. pple. sunk, sunken.
The OED is notorious for being a bit permissive in such matters, being a fairly descriptive dictionary. If "sinked" were a common form, it would be listed as such. Furthermore, even in the historical list of forms, "sinked" comes up short:
pa. tense. {alpha}. sing. 1, 3-4 sanc, 5 sanck; 4-5 sanke, 4-5, 8- sank. pl. 5-7 sanke, 6 sancke, 9- sank. {beta}. sing. 1 sonc, 4 sonk. pl. 3-5 sonken, 5-6 sonke, 6 soncke, 6-7 soonke. {gamma}. pl. 1 suncon, 3 sunken, sunke, 5 sunkyn; also sing. 6 suncke, 6-7 sunke, sunck, 7- sunk. {delta}. 5 synked, 7 (9 dial.) sinked. pa. pple. {alpha}. 1 suncen, 3 i-sunken (Orm. sunnkenn), 3- sunken, 4 sunkin, -yn, 6 suncken; 4-7 sunke, 6-7 sunck(e, 7- sunk. {beta}. 4-5 sonken, 5 sonkyn; Sc. 5 sonkine, -yne, 6 sonkin; 4 i-sonke, 6 son(c)ke, soonke, 7 soonk. {gamma}. 9 sank, dial. sinken.
Here "sinked" is only listed as a relatively minor historical dialect form, hardly what is "proper/correct" as you claim. Moreover, it doesn't appear to be that historically important, and certainly not the most common "old" form.
Re:sinkhole (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also (I wish I'd thought of this before posting), the common-ness of a spelling is orthogonal to its proper-ness. Hundreds of thousands of teens spell "wait" as "w8" and "your" as "ur" (while also abusing the same letters to mean "you are" and "you're"), but I doubt anyone would consider that a proper spelling of the word.
Now, if you want to say that some particular mangling of a word (like "runned" or "sinked") is used in some dialect, that's OK. The rest of the English-speaking world, though, tends to b
Re:sinkhole (Score:5, Informative)
Hey now, you can't "whoosh" and argue at the same time. You either agree to pretend that your original post was a joke (whoosh) or you can continue to futilely argue.
Luckily I happen to work at an institution with a subscription to the OED. Let's look shall we?
c1250 Gen. & Ex. 3775 Alle he sunken e ere wi-in, Wi wifes, and childre, and hines-kin.
Yeah, that 1250 is the year the quote was written. This usage is also specifically referring to sunk into the earth.
All told, their examples for the word "sink" have 55 uses of the work sunk and 0 of the word sinked. Sinked is listed as an obscure, colloquial use though.
The argument for centuries has been between sank and sunk, sinked is right out.
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blogger-blog/2010/01/honey-i-sunk-boat.html [grammarphobia.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> "In England" : swimmed, runned, stinged, waked, sinked, etc.
Not the England where I'm from...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The sun isn't man-made and it's circular...
circular != man-made
man-made usually equals circular, however.
I do agree though, when I saw the picture the first time I instantly thought, "PHOTOSHOPPED!" because it looked so out of place and video-game'ish.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> In all the photos, probably taken at least 12 hours later, if not days, not
> even an orange cone.
Look at the first picture. The street is barricaded a block away.