Monday, August 1, 2016

A REALLY BIG SINKHOLE IN MAGNOLIA SOMEDAY ?

The  subject  of  "sinkholes"  --  sometimes,  really,  really  big  sinkholes  --   is  everywhere  in  the  web  these  days.  They  suddenly  seem  to  be  swallowing  cars,  homes  and  people,  worldwide.



Self-proclaimed  sinkhole  skeptics  claim  that  the  coming  of  cell  phone  cameras  and  The  Web  is  the  reason   for  the  increase  in  news  about  sinkholes.  In  other  words,  it's  not  that  there  are  more  sinkholes,  but  rather  that  there  are  new  ways  of  easily  taking  photos  of  sinkholes  and  publishing  them  everywhere   in  an  easily-accessed  "Google-able"  format,  resulting  in  more  news  of  sinkholes  instead  of  more  sinkholes.

But  is  this  really  true?

Some  areas  --  for  example,  in  Florida,   where  there  are  more  sinkholes  than  anywhere  else  in  the  continental  United  States  --  are  experiencing  a  doubling  of  insurance  claims  for   sink  holes  in  just  a  few  years  --  not  just  more  news  of  sink  holes.


Skeptics  would  blow  off  statistics  like  this  by  attributing  them  to  a  greater  awareness  of  the  right  to  make  such  claims,  also  resulting  from  more  news  of  sinkholes,  not  more  sinkholes,   or  to  an  increasingly  litigious  culture.  

But  if  those  rationalizations  --  which  come  down  to  "nothing  at  all  special  is  happening"  --  how  does  one  explain  something  like  the  following? ...

Harrisburg,  the  capital  city  of  the  Commonwealth  of  Pennsylvania,  has  been  suffering  from  an  astonishing  rash  of  40  new  sinkholes  in  the  last  several  years,  in  a  rectangular  area  roughly  bordered   by  Route  81  on  the  north,  Route  83  on  the  east,  Route  83  on  the  south,  and  the  Susquehanna  River  on  the  west.  There  are  now  so  many  of  them,  so  suddenly,  in  one  time  period,  that  Harrisburg  can't  afford  to  fix  them.   In  looking  at  the  map,  one  gets  the  feeling  that  we  aren't  just  looking  at  a  "pesky  new  problem,"   but  rather  a  prelude  to  crustal  collapse  --  a  collapse  of  the  section  of  the  Earth's  crust  which  Harrisburg  itself  is  sitting  on.


Something  like  that  happened  in  China  many  centuries  ago,    where  what  used  to  be  level  ground  as  high  as  the  surrounding  peaks  was  punctuated  with  so  many  sinkholes  over  the  centuries  that  the  whole  area  collapsed  and  the  debris  became  the  valley  floor  between  peaks  which  you  see  here ...


The  difference  between  Harrisburg  and  the  China  example  is  that  the  Harrisburg  phenomenon  is  occurring  in  only  a  few  years  --  since  2010.

Skeptics  say,   "It  rained  in  Harrisburg  a  lot  in  2011  and  2013."     Or,  they  say,    "There  must  be  mines  down  there!"   Yes,  it  did  rain  a  lot,  as  claimed.     But  --  come  on  --  it's  next  to  a  river!   And,  no,  there  are  no  reports  of  mines  under  Harrisburg.     The  skeptics'  claims  motivate  one  to  ask,  "Why  should   heavy  rains  during  2  of  the  last  6  years   suddenly  succeed  in  opening  up  so  many  sinkholes  over   so  huge  an  area  in  so  short  a  time  --  about  36  square  miles  --  when  a  river,  and  heavy rains  over  the  last  thousand  centuries   have  not  been  able  to  produce  such  a  frightening  result?"

And  Harrisburg  is  only  about  320  feet  above  sea  level.   I.e.,  there  are  no   deeply-located  underground  torrents  between  Harrisburg  and  the  ambient  water  table.  Further,   the  map  of  south-central  Pennsylvania  karst  regions  --  areas  where  the  quarternary  soils  of  the  surface  lie  upon  a  deeper  limestone  base  subject  to  erosion  by  water --  shows  that  Harrisburg  is  situated  upon  non-karst  --  non-limestone  --  rock.   I.e.,   Harrisburg's  founders  chose  a  good  locale  to  lay  down  their  city's  foundations.   It  should  not  be  looking  like  a  giant  piece  of  Swiss  cheese  right  now.  Hit-up  Map  68,  here ...



... to  verify  for  yourself  that  Harrisburg's  foundations  were  situated  upon  non-karst  rock.

Two  giant  sinkholes  recently  swallowed  up  parts  of  Guatemala  City  in  Guatemala.   One  of  them  is  the  first  sinkhole  pictured  above  at  the  top  of  this  blog  piece.  There  are  enormous  new  sinkholes  all  over  the  world.   Multiple  sinkholes  have  have  suddenly  begun  plaguing  Washington,  D.C.,  including  near  the  White  House  and  Congress.  ("Praise  the  Lord"?)









One  very  interesting  form  of  sinkhole is  the  underwater  variety.  Though  such  sinkholes  are  always  hidden  by  the  water  itself,  visually,  you  can  sometimes  use  your  computer  to  successfully  "google"  places  on  Earth  where  the  crustal  plate  beneath  water  --  in  one  case  a  river   has  broken  through,  and  and  begun  flooding  down  into  a  sinkhole  so  that  incredible  quantities  of  water,  hundreds  of  cubic  miles  of  water,  are  simply  going  someplace  "down  there"!



What  in  Heaven's  holy  name  is  happening  "down  there"?  And,  could  this  ever  happen  in  Magnolia,  New  Jersey?

Eight  (8)  years  ago,   two  of  the  men  working  upon  the  completion  of  the  Large  Hadron  Collider  in  Switzerland   suddenly  "freaked-out"  and  filed  a  lawsuit  in  the  United  States  District  Court   in  Hawaii   to  stop  the  other  scientists  at  the  Large  Hadron  Collider  from  turning  it  on.

They  had  two  arguments.   The  more  comprehensible  of  the  two  arguments  is  this ...

The  Large  Hadron  Collider  fires  two  streams  of  protons  toward  each  other  at  fantastically  high  speeds,   and  then  photographs  the  "junk"  emerging  from  the  collisions.

These  streams  are  so  powerful  that  if  you  were  to  walk  through  the  Collider  beam  as  it  is  accelerating  the  beams,  it  would  cut  you  in  half.

The  Collider  scientists  admit  that  their  own  figures  showed  that  there  is  a  certain  ongoing  risk  that  two  colliding  protons  could  form  what they  call  a  "mini  black  hole."  They  said  that,  possibly,    the  black  hole  could  smash  into  the  cave  walls  surrounding  the  Collider,  and  immediately  gather  enough  mass  from  molecules  in  the  cave  wall  to  commence  a  net  downward  trajectory  toward  the  center  of  the  Earth,  where   the  Earth's  own  gravity  would  force  feed   the  Earth  itself  to  the  black  hole.

In  college,    I  had  a  brief  love  affair  with  relativistic  physics  and  quantum  mechanics.

So  when  one  of  the  Collider  scientists   pooh-poohed   the  lawsuit  to  keep  the  thing  from  turning  on  by  arguing  that  "mini  black  holes"  would  "evaporate"  from  Hawking  radiation  emissions  "in  a  billionth  of  a  billionth  of  a  billionth  of  a  second,"   I  knew  that  he  did  not  have  even  the  most  elementary  understanding  of  Einstein's  Theory  of  Relativity.  I  called  him  up  on  the  telephone   and  I  told  him,    "First,  technically  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  black  hole,  because  each  forming  black  hole's  own  forming  event  horizon  keeps  the  object  from  completing  its  formation  into  a  black  hole,  forever,  relative  to  us.  That  same  slowed  formation  process  prevents  mini  black  holes  from  finishing  their  formation,  also,    relative  to  us.  If  they're  not  fully  formed,  and  if  time  is  effectively  permanently  stalled  for  them,    relative  to  us,  then  they  can  never  'evaporate.'  Voila  --  mini  black  holes  last  forever."

"But  if  you're  right,"   he  objected,  "then  mini  black  holes  forming   in  the  upper  atmosphere  due  to  the  collision  of  a  proton-variety   cosmic  ray  and  an  atom  of  hydrogen  or  helium  in  the  upper  atmosphere   should  occasionally  strike  the  Earth."

"Maybe,"  I  said,  "Maybe  not.  If  they  retain  the  electron  of  the  atmospheric   atom  after  the  collision,  they  would  probably  retain  their   Brownian  Motion  potential,  and  float  up,  into  space.  Let's  say  they  can  occasionally  strike  the  Earth."

"Yeah!"  he  answered,  "When  did  that  ever  happen?"

"Tunguska,"  I  responded.

"Okay,"  he  said,  "Let's  assume  that  Tunguska  was  one.     Where  did  it  come  out  the  other  side  of  the  Earth?"

I  thought,  "Huh!    How  could  this  guy  be  a  spokesman  for  the  Collider?   He  has  a  kid's  understanding  this  stuff!"

I  asked,  "Why  would  it  'come  out  the  other  side'?   Every  time  the  object  slams  into   another  atom  or  molecule  in  the  Earth,  it  loses  more  of  its  forward  momentum.  Pretty  soon,  the  only  thing  pulling  it  into  the  Earth  is  gravity  --  not  momentum.  It's  gradually  going  to  work  its  way  into  the  center,  and  stop!"

He  hung  up.

In  any  event  --  the  judge  decided  in  favor  of  letting  the  Collider  be  turned  on.

And  so  here's  my  question ...

Is  the  Large  Hadron  Collider   manufacturing  vast  quantities  of  mini-collapsars   --  "mini-almost-black-holes"  --  and  dumping  them  into  the  Earth,  where  they  become  super-heavy  and  eat-up  the  inside  of  the  Earth?

Is  that  the  reason  for   sink-holes  everywhere?

In  any  event,  regardless  of  the  fundamental  reason  for  what  appears  to  be  an  increase  in  sinkholes  everywhere,  it  can't  be  denied  that  most  occur  in  water-soluble  karst  rock.  Perhaps  the  process  of  penetration  of  and  erosion  of  karst  rock  is  greatly  accelerated  when  a  mile-wide  tunnel  cut  by  a  Collider-generated  collapsar  travelling  sideways  through  the  crust  appears  beneath  it.

Could  such  ever  happen  in  our  little  town,  Magnolia,  New  Jersey?

The  answer  appears  to  be  "maybe,"   under  a  small  corner  of  the  town  which  happens  to  lie  over  a  narrow  karst  rock  line,  running  northeast-to-southwest,    in  the  ground  near  Davis  Road  and  Shreve  Avenue  in  Magnolia.

Let's  say  that  someday,  a  mile-wide  tunnel  being  drilled  sideways  through  the  bedrock  by  a  collapsar  from  the  collider  in  Switzerland  happens  to  pass  beneath  Magnolia  under  the  karst  rock  under  FedEx.  Suddenly,  water  in  the  karst  rock  has  a  place  to  go,  and  it  begins  to  flow  and  to  dissolve-away  the  karst  rock.  Finally,  boom,  the  surface  gives  way  to  gravity,  and  Magnolia  has  its  own  giant  sink  hole.









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