According to Live Science, the sinkhole formed at a mining site in Chile. It is outside the city of Tierra Amarilla, about 800 km north of Santiago, the country's capital.
The hole opened in the area of the underground Alcaparros copper mine, which is owned by the Canadian company Lundin Mining. No casualties were reported.
Geologists have now set up a 100-meter safety perimeter around the site. The area will be studied.
Such sinkholes form over areas where water collects underground without external drainage, causing it to carve underground caves. Pits regularly appear near old and active mines where large quantities of rock and ore have been mined.
Usually the emergence of sinkholes is a long process, but they can also open quite suddenly, like this hole in Chile.
Scientists and mine workers told of strange sounds on microphone recordings inside the well (it later became known that they were allegedly faked). But so far there are no factors.
It is fair to say that the hole in the Atacama Desert is not the only one of its kind. At the beginning of the article we already mentioned the "Gates of Hell" in Turkmenistan, which is about 20 meters deep. The Chilean landslide, if you compare it to the Turkmen crater, is a real abyss. There is no official data on it, but it is not excluded that at the bottom of the new hole in the Earth there are also sources of natural gases. The main thing is that no one sets it on fire, otherwise there may appear another place on our planet with "eternal fire".
Although huge holes in the ground are considered mysterious and scientists find it difficult to answer exactly what caused them, the cause seems obvious. In the cases of the Gates of Hell, the collapse in Guatemala, and the new hole in Chile, there is one thing in common: they all originated near the site of underground work. So it is very likely that people themselves are to blame for the earth collapse. But there is no proof of this, so no one dares to claim it for sure.
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