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What Causes Sinkholes

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Have you come home from a long day of work and realized your house was devoured by the earth. Ask yourself, ‘why is this?’. This is because a sinkhole has formed in the area due to unstable land because the rock below the land has been replaced by the water, which can no longer hold up the land. They are very rare, although unpredictable. However, there are many factors of why a sinkhole may have happened. To when they will happen. Therefore, sinkhole formation is impacted by the climate changes and many other factors. Sinkholes are holes that emerge from the ground in karst regions where layers of the ground collapsing into holes. Sinkholes form when regular water or acidic water (from runoff and acid rain) dissolves the sedimentary rocks. …show more content…

For example, surfaces with a high albedo absorb more energy, therefore, heating the Earth. The warm climate can cause many things to happen, such as, melting of the ice over time, which will increase the amount of water; the ground moistens forming into a karst region. More or less rain can also affect sinkholes. If there is more rain, areas around the hills are more likely to get sinkholes. This is because the rainwater travels down to the sedimentary rocks and dissolves them creating a karst region. Also, if rain can't replenish the water table, it can either increase or decrease. When it decreases, it causes drought, which leads to water becoming unstable. Therefore, climate change and other factors trigger sinkholes to …show more content…

However, this is only one data set and it is not reliable as it does not contain data from different areas and precipitation is not the only factor in the formation of sinkholes. Other factors include the type of land (strong or thin) and temperature that is sometimes warm temperature causes drought along with other temperatures affecting differently. Also, population plays a huge factor, because if more people use the water then it runs out faster and the water level falls, triggering karst regions to turn into sinkholes due to unstable ground. so, the data provided is not reliable, then we cannot assume precipitation has no effect on sinkholes even though it does along with many

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