A "hole" lot of possible trouble!

[Icey]

Eek! I'd be pretty worried living in the vicinity of these gaping holes which're appearing, wouldn't you?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... andom_1_na

[yogi]

I can't get too excited about permafrost melting in Siberia. The implications are horrendous, but it's too distant from me to be concerned by it. However, there is an increasing number of sink holes appearing here in America. They result from underground erosion as opposed to methane explosions, but sink holes are equally unpredictable. Several have occurred in urban areas that are populated and nobody knows how to predict or prevent them from occurring.

[Kellemora]

The ground is NOT solid under our feet.
We have hundreds of Caves in my home state, many with underground rivers.
Just because a cave or underground river is not yet discovered, don't mean it is not there.

FWIW: We live on an ever spreading floating crust. Its movement is what causes earthquakes, and too much pressure underneath breaks through in the form of a volcano.

Water tables go up and down continually, eroding away the support under our feet.
It appears there is an increase in sink holes. There may or may not be.
But the ability to report them is much greater than in the past, and with more and more land being developed and population densities increasing, what was once remote, became rural, and the rural became urban.
So, when a sink hole does occur, it affects more people and is noticed by more folks.

As an aside: Several caves were discovered in my home state due to urban sprawl and the construction of taller buildings in once rural areas. Driving pilings down to bedrock and having the pilings disappear, or suddenly meet with no resistance for several hundred feet usually means they hit a cave or pocket underground, either filled with lost topsoil or water.

Seems like I remember when a new section of cave was discovered at Onondaga Cave, the spelunkers found the pipe of a bored well which passed through the cave decades earlier. It was no longer in use, nor was the farm who had the well installed still there. But the remnants of their well was intact, but dry.

A small cave was found while excavating between two hills for a highway. It must have had an opening to gain access somewhere within the area they dug and blasted through, because they found evidence of pre-1930s artifacts in the small part which remained.

[pilvikki]

perhaps i'm seriously naïve, but pumping out billions of gallons of oil/gas and even replacing it with sea water, as I was told (in Arabia?) would create an unbalance on top of the movements of the mantel, caves, volcanic activity etc.

[Icey]

I don't think all the boring for oil, gas or whatever's, doing the earth any good. It's bound to make things unstable, even without natural erosion.

[yogi]

As the holes in Siberia show, you don't need human intervention for the earth to be unstable. It just happens.

[AJRC]

The Earth's crust is in constant motion, got to be a few holes and tears somewhere. Just not under my house please.

[Icey]

I think we're seeing more of them though. No idea why.

[pilvikki]

maybe not, icy... now we just all know about it.

and seriously; is all this knowing good for us? we can't do sod all about genocide in sudan, potholes in Siberia, volcanoes in Iceland, animals being wiped out, rainforest being stripped... in fact, there is so much happening that that even if we could, how'd one choose where to pitch in?

[Kellemora]

And even if we could, would it really change anything at all?
Or like our poly-TICK-ians trying to control things, only makes them go from bad to worse.

[pilvikki]

there you go...

what are leaving our kids for a world?

[Icey]

If these things caused by man-made greed and folly, then we should certainly be doing something about it. Certain people're trying, and they have my admiration.

Where things occur naturally, I don't suppose we can do much about it, but the sink holes which've started appearing over here don't seem to've been there before.