- It could rain, hard, and you could wake up to a surprise you may not like.
Have you ever been to a dairy farm? Maybe you grew up on one or had a neighbor who was a farmer, so you know what they’re like.
Lots of cows, usually some chickens and other animals live on the grounds. And lots of land. Usually acres upon acres of land.
The work of a farmer is never done and they start at dawn and finish at dusk, only because they have lost the light of the day. But, when this dairy farmer woke up, it turned out that he lost a lot more than the light from the day before.
He had lost land. A lot of it. And not lost as in auctioned off or sold, either.
Colin Tremain woke up one morning to see a part of his land, literally sunken into the ground and gone. It turns out the rain washed the land away, or at least allowed it to be washed away, as the earth opened up into a 60,000 year old sinkhole.
The sinkhole is HUGE. It’s so big you could fit two football fields in its length and 4 double-decker buses in its depth. Apparently, Tremain was lucky it was just his fields, and not his house!
This has been called the largest sinkhole ever seen by more than one volcanologist. “What I see in the bottom of this hole is the original 60,000-year-old volcanic deposit that came out of this crater,” Said Volcano Information Specialist Bradley Scott. “Then there’s a stack of about 10 to 12 metres of sediment sitting on top of it from lakes that have formed in this crater the top three metres is volcanic ash.”
This part of New Zealand is especially prone to geothermal activity. And because water dissolves limestone and other material below the earth’s surface, it’s easy to see why a heavy rain and flash flooding could easily do damage.
No one was hurt and there was no damage to private property, this could have been much worse.