The whole world is excited about the news of inexplicable soil collapses in different parts of the planet. Humanity is concerned that the earth literally began to slip from under their feet. Increasingly, there are reports from different countries in which sinkholes have been found. Of course, people are excited about this problem, but they try not to notice it and do not want to talk about it. However, it cannot remain unnoticed that playgrounds, houses, roads, cars, garages, etc. are going underground. In other words, the infrastructure created by man is collapsing, and often people die in the process. What threaten us with these natural disasters? And is there human involvement here?
Many adhere to the version that the Earth thus takes revenge on humanity. After all, people do a lot of harm to the world around them, polluting and destroying what is created by nature.
Causes of sinkholes
Soil collapse experts claim that soil failures occur for the following reasons:
- due to the collapse of natural voids in the ground;
- due to groundwater eroding the soil;
- due toerosion of soil by water when leaking from pipes;
- due to the fact that abandoned underground structures decay and deform over time;
- due to various construction works being carried out near the possible failure;
- due to many resonant phenomena when vibration is applied to the ground;
- due to the composition of the soil, if it includes rocks that dissolve in water.
Consequences of sinkholes
The most important result of soil collapse is the formation of depressions on the earth's surface. Often such a hole reaches a significant size and can cause emergency situations.
So, for example, sinkholes near buildings can lead to the destruction of buildings. If the collapse of the soil occurs on the roadway, then this can lead to car accidents, the departure of the road surface into the ground along with the transport that has ended up in this place. Railway tracks with trains passing through them during a sinkhole can also suffer. All this leads to colossal material damage and loss of life.
How to save our planet from destruction and survive on our own, if soil sinkholes occur more and more often in various places, which people are not able to predict and prevent?
Moscow goes underground
It's no secret that in Russia there are quite a lot of incidents related to subsidence of the soil. Take at least our capital. In 2013 alone, more than a dozen soil collapses were recorded in different parts of Moscow. There have been many casesand in the subway, when such a cataclysm disrupted the movement of underground trains, which led to mass panic among passengers.
Let's look at the most famous sinkholes in Moscow in 2014:
- A 15 cm deep pit was formed on Komsomolsky Prospekt at a pedestrian crossing.
- A depression appeared on the territory of the Temple on Nikoloyamskaya Street in the city center.
- The roadway and sidewalks collapsed on 2nd Yamskaya-Tverskaya near the Khayyam restaurant.
- In the Tagansky district, two sinkholes appeared at once in one place near the Klyuchevsky Library.
- A failure with a diameter of 1 by 1.5 meters has formed on the Rublevsky highway.
- A pit 10 cm deep appeared on the roadway near the sidewalk on Malaya Ordynka.
- In the center of Moscow on Balchug Street, a 1-meter deep sinkhole occurred.
Collapse of the soil in the capital in 2015
New Year 2015, before it even arrived, has already been added to the list of places where sinkholes have occurred.
So, in February of this year, in the north-west of Moscow, due to weather conditions, a well 50 by 30 cm in size was formed, into which a truck fell with a wheel. And in March 2015, subsidence occurred on the street of the 800th anniversary of Moscow, where asph alt fell under a garbage truck.
The last incident was recorded on March 10, 2015: pits 20-30 cm deep were found near the main entrance to the Botanical Garden.
Other subsidence cases in Russia
In our country, the most famous place where the sinkhole happened isBerezniki, Perm region. Over the course of 5 years, starting in 2006, when the potash mine was flooded, three huge sinkholes were formed, the diameter of which ranged from 70 to 400 meters. The largest of them appeared on the territory of the tekhsol factory. The second crater was found at the Berezniki railway station, and the third - near the building of the Berezniki mine construction department. Subsequently, two funnels merged into one.
In 2015, there were reports of the threat of the formation of a new sinkhole in Berezniki in a residential area. The inhabitants of eight houses were resettled from the danger zone. The area of the settled soil is 30 square meters and the depth is 5 meters.
In Russia, such cases occur regularly. So, sinkholes are known in Yakutia, Solikamsk (Perm Territory), the Nizhny Novgorod region, Kaliningrad, Ufa and in many other cities.
Similar incidents abroad
Other countries did not remain aloof from this inexplicable cataclysm. Many of the funnels formed are still mysteries for scientists and specialists who have not yet found an explanation for them. And many experts were simply afraid to approach huge pits, fearing for their lives.
The biggest sinkholes in the world:
- Ukraine, 1997. In Dnepropetrovsk, a nine-story house, a kindergarten, three Khrushchev houses and a school fell through the ground. In 2008, in Luhansk, the same fate befell an apartment located on the ground floor of a two-story building.
- The most global failures occur in China. Yes, in 2010in the course of half a year, several huge subsidences of the soil appeared in different places of the country.
- No less large-scale is the failure of the soil in South Africa, which occurred in 1962. Then a completely residential building and a factory went underground.
- In Florida in 2013, a young man fell to the bottom of a sinkhole that formed in the middle of a room in his house.
- In Guatemala in 2010, a sinkhole more than 100 meters deep formed, killing fifteen people by swallowing a three-story building.
USA, Mexico, India, Thailand, China, Ukraine, Russia - this is not the whole list of countries affected by the natural anomaly. We can only hope that all cataclysms will soon find their interpretation, and scientists will be able to learn how to prevent their further occurrence. In the meantime, we live in fear for ourselves and our children, who will have to eliminate the consequences of disasters that occur through our fault.
