Giant sinkhole suddenly swallows a five-lane street in Fukuoka, Japan
In the city of Fukuoka in Japan, a giant sinkhole suddenly opened. Residents of the city saw with their very own eyes the massive girth of the sinkhole, which covered a large part of a five-lane street near the busy JR Hakata Station.
Authorities had cleared up the area and had asked the people to evacuate from the nearby buildings. This has been their standard operating procedure for precautionary measures. The sinkhole is reportedly triggered by construction work being done to extend a subway line from JR Hakata Station, although this isn't confirmed as the proximate cause.
The sinkhole has been measured to have a width of 27 meters wide and its length is 30 meters long. It has been observed that there were broken, flooding pipelines of about 15 meters depth, AlJazeerah stated.
However, sinkholes were not as strange as one would think. On September, an enormous sinkhole just unfolded beneath a fertilizer plant in Florida. Whereas, on 2013 at east Tampa suburb of Seffner, Florida another sinkhole suddenly unfurled. As a result it swallowed a man while in a slumber on his bed.
It has been observed that in most cases, weather have triggered huge holes to unfurl to the ground. As it was investigated, the ground collapsed when a rock has given up beneath the surface soil.
This would happen as the sedimentary rock's solid substance that compacted together is made up of tiny pieces of rocks. This type of rock could be easily wreck as water gradually dissolved it. Consecutive rains would cause the water to filter down through the bedrock, thus it caused it to deliberately erode, according to CNN.
In addition, it would cause cracks to appear in the bedrock. Then, the cracks widened gradually, which would create an empty pit beneath the surface. Therefore, as the rainwater eventually washes the soil down into the pit, it dampens the surface.
Furthermore, the soil being dampened could no longer withhold itself, as a result the ground shattered.
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