Guatemala City sinkhole

Guatemala City sinkhole

Imagine you are an ordinary person, living your ordinary life in Guatemala City. You've heard of a 30 story deep sinkhole appearing in 2007 due to ruptured sewage pipes, but thought that the idea of it happening again was ridiculous. After all, sinkholes only happen when the ground underneath the surface becomes too saturated to hold the weight of the buildings and soil above it, or sometimes when cracks in the limestone bed occur naturally, causing soil to collapse into the crack and eventually fall through altogether. Surely it couldn't happen twice in such a short period of time!

And yet it did. This 2010 sinkhole is pretty much the equivalent of one day waking up and finding a 100-foot deep, 60-foot wide hole on your street intersection. In the process of forming, it swallowed your neighbor's house. To make matters worse, it could get bigger and swallow your house too.

The photos are linked.

(via National Geographic and just about every other news site online)