AllTop Viral!

Daniel Martins, a reporter at The Weather Network has all the info you need about sink holes and the photos of some of them make my stomach do flips. Seriously, you can’t see the bottom of some of them.

He writes:

If you’ve clicked through to this article, chances are it’s because you’re one of our many readers who, for whatever reason, are simply fascinated by stories that involve the ground opening up and swallowing something.

Sinkholes in particular are super popular on our website, including one in Florida earlier this month, and another in Montreal that nearly devoured a backhoe.

So we looked into it, and we came up with seven holes, natural or man-made, that stand out because they are super fascinating, stunningly beautiful, or plain terrifying.

These are the holes that made his list, to see the photos and even video, check out the site (link below):

1. The Bayou Corne, Louisiana
2. The Guatemala City sinkhole
3. The Great Blue Hole, Belize
4. The Sacred Cenote, Mexico
5. The Big Hole of Kimberley, South Africa
6. The Kola Borehole, Russia
7. The Money Pit, Oak Island, Nova Scotia

Just because it’s Canadian, here are the details about the Nova Scotia hole:

It all started when three boys unearthed what they thought to be evidence of a deep pit and, hungry for treasure, began to dig.

They made it 90 feet down – and when they came back the next morning to keep going, they found the hole filled with 60 feet of seawater, and no amount of bailing could bring the water levels down.

This was 1795, so all the digging was done with 18th Century technology, but what they found was interesting – if the accounts are to be believed, they found several wooden platforms spaced at 10 feet intervals, as well as coconut fibre mats.

They, and the many, many other hunters who came after them, found artifacts like chests, parchment, some concrete, even a slab that was written in a cryptic language that, when “translated,” promised 2 million pounds another 40 feet down.

There’ve been stop-and-start searches for more than two hundred years now, involving hundreds of people and six fatalities (yes, people actually died trying to find out what’s at the bottom).

The flooding is seriously believed by many to be caused by man-made underwater tunnels, while the actual treasure has been speculated to be pirate booty left by Blackbeard or Captain Kidd, the holy grail, Templar treasure, the lost secrets of Shakespeare, a Freemason conspiracy or Bigfoot’s secret summer getaway (We only made up the last one. The rest are all actual theories that have been proposed).

The bad news is, it’s probably just a sinkhole, with bits and pieces of native and colonial artifacts washed in by rains and floods (happens a lot, actually), and the treasure seekers are only seeing what they want to see based on sources more than a century old (also, the “translation” of the mysterious slab is probably bogus).

Even the so-called flood tunnels are probably naturally occurring features (if they even exist), and skeptics are pretty quick to debunk most of the myth (you can still totally go visit if you want).

We like to think it really was dug by Blackbeard or whoever – and at the bottom is a big pile of nothing, left behind by someone with a plausible claim to being the biggest troll in history.

All of Martins’ info about the holes is here: The Weather Network.

Love Earth and everything about it? More stories about geography.

Photo credit: Great Blue Hole, Belize – Wiki Commons